The first thing you might notice on a trip from Ireland to the West Coast of America is that the West Coast of America is really quite far away from Ireland. It’s certainly one of the things I observed in the 24 hours it took to get from Donegal to San Diego. Luckily for us all, time passes much quicker when your travel partner turns up at the bus station half-cut and insists on poking you every time you close your eyes for a sleep. Stuart Deane. Surely a King among men.

The traveling itself wasn’t really that bad. I was rather expecting to sit awkwardly on a transatlantic Ryanair flight, my rage and hunger levels growing exponentially as a morbidly obese man and a crying baby argue loudly about the absence of any in flight entertainment. Instead I was lucky enough to get a window seat in the very back corner of the aircraft, with an empty seat to my right and a touch screen filled with movies I meant to watch but never actually got round to. Still, nice to have the option. Also, the empty seat meant I got an extra bag of crisps. They tasted shocking and I really didn’t want them but you know, free. Also got a cheese sandwich on the airplane, which with hindsight was less cheese and more a warning shot of what to expect in America.

They’ve stuff in the shops over here you wouldn’t let a starving man eat. There’s a cereal here called ‘Froot Loops’ which is “fruit flavored” and has a little frog mascot on the box. What the hell does a frog have to do with fruit production? In America, apparently, lots. Nobody seems to mind the spelling of the word ‘froot’ either, while the seeming acceptance of the alleged fruit flavoring probably speaks to the fruit intake of the average American.

The milk is, as forewarned, pretty shocking.

Flying into America was a bit surreal. Everything is different, yet you’ve seen it all before. It’s much like sitting really close to the TV except everybody’s really badly dressed. From the sky the building’s look like model houses, arranged neatly and cleanly in perfect straight lines and you recognize the road signs and business names from every film you’ve ever seen. There are an absurd number of cars on the road, though I’ve since come to realize that for a country so dependent on its road network, the actual roads themselves are very badly maintained.

I’d say I was lucky to fly into and out of Newark airport (near New York but definitely not the same place), allowing me a couple of hours to wander around the airport encountering more accents and ethnicities than I’d known existed, and a couple of fascinating minutes in which I got to watch the entire island of Manhattan from the air, getting a good long look at the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler building, and the Empire State. The scale of the place was mind boggling, though to be fair it was no Donegal.

I didn’t eat at the airport such was my unfamiliarity and fear of tipping. The practice of tipping takes a wee while to sink in. For the first couple of days I just kept holding out extra money to see if anyone would take it. I got into the habit of squinting my eyes, tilting my head, and mouthing sorry while I paid for things.

The lads (comprising in alphabetical order, Adam, Brendan, James, Keith, Niall, & Ronan) had already found a pretty impressive house before we (Sinéad, Stuart, and myself) got to San Diego, so we were able to wander straight into a nice round of flip-cup. A 32-hour Thursday rounded off pretty nicely with a hefty dose of American beer, while the temporary superpowers granted by jet lag allowed me to bop out of bed at 7 the next morning.

Could’ve been worse.