Ireland

It has been a week since we went to Ireland. I still don't think I am caught up on sleep or back on Texas time, but that is okay. Ireland was a beautiful country. We spent four days in Dublin and then as the Irish say, "We hired a car to tour the country."

If you have time here is the link to our photos. I cut them down to about 350. A word of caution: I labeled the photos so they are not in order, but I will give you a quick rundown here and that may help with looking at the photos.
http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=hhuz2tp.4ixt43x1&x=0&y=f12b4m&localeid=en_US&cm_mmc=site_email-_-site_share-_-core-_-view_photos_album

If you see a letter in front of the description of the photo, that is for the day so I can remember which days we did what - M, T, W, TH, F, S. We arrived in Dublin Monday around lunchtime. Our luggage didn't make it with us so we wore the same clothes to the Guiness Brewery and Storehouse ADP in Dublin that night. It was so nice of the hotel to provide us with tolietries and some clean underwear!

On Tuesday we toured the Wicklow Mountains and Powerscourt Estate. You will see these photos at the end of the slideshow. It shows an old monestary where the vikings roamed and St. Patrick and St. Kevin converted the people to Christianity in the early 12th century. They began using a Celtic Cross - the circle around the cross because the vikings worshiped the moon and sun.

On Wednesday, we took a quick tour of Dublin mostly in the bus of Dublin Castle, Trinity College, Christ Church where they were filming the HBO show, The Tudors. We also went to St. Patrick's Cathedral.

On Thursday, we went took the train north to Howth. This little town on the sea sits just above Dublin on the East coast. It was cute and had a long trail around the cliffs just outside of Howth.

Surprisingly, Dublin is pretty modern and Americanized. We heard lots of American music, and they had lots of different restaurants, including tons of Italian. We had Italian a couple of nights to get away from all of the beef and beef stew. Frankie's Italian Restaurant in Dublin has great food.

The pubs in Dublin are a dime a dozen and all very Irish and very ecclectic. We went with three other couples from the ADP Dallas office and one of them brought their five month old baby.

On Friday, we got a rental car and began the drive through the country. We did rent a GPS. It helped us a lot; however, we were confused by it a lot because the maps of Ireland are not totally up to date and it showed us driving off of the roads a lot. Brandon got the hang of driving on the other side of the road and how narrow the roads were. Everyone was very relaxed and it was okay to drive slow, but most people drove fast it seemed like.

We went to Cashel, which is an old Cathedral and Abbey sitting on top of a hill. You will see most of these castles and ruins have towers. They kept a lot of valuables in it - up top and a lot of people would try to hide in the top if the town was attacked. In Cashel, the townspeople all came to this Cathedral when the town was attacked and about 800 people ended up dying here. It had beautiful views and our tour guide there was so Irish. His name was Seamus.

We then drove through Cork, the second largest city after Dublin, and to our bed and Breakfast. This is where you see the sheep pics and garden pics. It was a nice bed and breakfast owned by a really nice family. They had a pub and restaurant down the road, very Irish country and so nice. We also went to the Blarney Castle and I kissed the Blarney stone. That was a little scary laying on your back upside down holding onto bars, but Brandon wasn't going to do it and one of us had to!

Then Saturday we were up early and drove around the Ring of Kerry down in the south, most of our scenic pictures are from here. The Ring of Kerry is just a scenic route through a penninsula with tons of history and scenic stops in towns.

We then made our was to Shannon and to our next bed and breafast. I didn't have any pics here because there really wasn't anything to see. We then went to the Cliffs of Moher and those were really pretty. The wind was strong and has been known to blow people off of the cliffs. We then wrapped up Saturday at the Durty Nelly pub next to the Bunratty Castle.

We left Sunday morning early and our plane was delayed five hours. We made it home after almost 18 hours of travel at 9:30 pm. We were so happy to be home.

The kids were with both grandparents while we were gone and did pretty well. This week has been tough getting back into a routine and Jackson and Kaitlyn do not want me to leave them for long. He did cry this weekend when he saw all the family as I think he thought we were going to leave. But overall, the reports were great and they were very busy with playing!