Meeting the Group

The picture on the side is the front view of The Old Ground Hotel in Ennis. For explanation on the name, see my previous post, about 3/4 of the way down. This picture was taken from this website. The hotel is absolutely beautiful and the staff was extremely nice and helpful even though I wasn't truly a paying guest. For more information on The Old Ground, please visit their website.

When eleven in the morning finally came around, I strolled back to the hotel for the fourth or fifth time. I walked in, looked around, and with great relief, I saw a bag with the same type of bright yellow tag on it as my own bags. VBT had given us these luggage tags so it would be easy to distinguish our bags from other guests at the hotels and B&Bs. There were two women sitting on the couch so I decided to introduce myself and have a seat. They were really friendly and half of a group of four friends from Seattle. One of them, Cheryl had done a VBT tour before so I was excited to hear that it was good enough to dish out the money and vacation time to come on another one with the company. I met the other two women from the group and then slowly other people traveling with VBT started to trickle down the stairs of the hotel. If you flew with VBT's program, you arrived the day before and had a nice time to adjust to the time change in the warm sheets of the Old Ground's beds.

I began to meet everyone and quickly forget their names, as I am very, very good at doing. There were more from the Seattle area, a couple from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Colorado, Houston...pretty much all around. As I continued to meet all the people from our group, 17 in total including myself, I noticed I was the only person traveling alone. That didnt really bother me but with each handshake and smile and brief note on who they were and what they did, the though came to mind, "What in the world am I going to have in common with these people?". I wasn't sure and was a little worried about that one but conceded that it was my trip and I had the opportunity to make it whatever way I wanted.

...And off we went, this crew of VBTers, on our first adventure to the Cliffs of Moher.