Photos of Our Ireland Trip

We've made it back home to San Diego and have been recovering from the jet lag.  We both go back to work on Monday, boo!  We had almost 1500 photos to sort through and I'm finally ready to post them.  Ireland was my second favorite trip that we've taken, I loved it.  We had fun driving all over the country seeing cool things, meeting people, listening to great music and drinking lots of Guinness.  I'm surprised I haven't had withdrawal yet, wait, maybe I am as I write this post.  We were really lucky with the weather, who says it always rains in Ireland?  We had dry weather for most of our trip.  It really only rained one evening and sprinkled on us a couple of times during the day.

We bought 2 CD's in Dublin for our 2 weeks of driving, so we know almost all the words to the songs.  And, we both admitted to waking up with songs in our head this morning from one of the CD's.  You can check out the music we were listening to on Myspace:  Dublin City Workingman's Band and James Riley.

I broke up the pictures into 8 albums.  You'll get the idea real quick that there are lots of forts, castles, churches and sheep everywhere.  It's like in the movie, National Lampoon's European Vacation, when Clark gets stuck in the roundabout and he keeps saying "hey look kids, there's Big Ben and there's Parliament."  I kept saying, "look honey, another fort in someone's backyard."  They were super cool though!  (Click on each picture to go to the album).

Dublin, Ireland Mar 2011

Kilkenny, Ireland Mar 2011

Ring of Kerry, Ireland Mar 2011

Dingle, Ireland Mar 2011

Doolin & Galway, Ireland Mar 2011

Westport & Derry, Ireland Mar 2011

Antrim Coast, Ireland Mar 2011

Belfast & Trim, Ireland Mar 2011

Happy Birthday to Mike!

Since my last post, we have been managing to get ourselves around driving the roads of Ireland.  We made our way from Dublin to outside of Kilkenny and stayed at a nice farm B&B, Lawcus Farm B&B.  The hosts were super nice and took us in as if we were part of the family.  If anyone plans a trip to Ireland, you should try to stay there.  They are building a brand new stone home on their land by themselves, just the husband and a friend.  

The roads here are really narrow, but we are navigating them successfully.  It's really easy to get turned around as the roads aren't marked the greatest, but it's part of the experience.  Locals have told us that they even get lost sometimes.  We left the farm this morning and have made our way to Kenmare.  It's Mike's birthday and we are staying on top of a pub for good reason.  We plan on having a fun evening celebrating.  Our usual evening consists of a late dinner and listening to traditional Irish music. 

We will be driving the Ring of Kerry tomorrow and making our way to Dingle for a couple of nights.  We are still keeping up with the tournament and our brackets, although mine is blown with Kstate's loss.  We hope everyone is doing well!

Happy St. Paddy's Day from Ireland!

We have arrived in Dublin safely.  We had a short flight from Newark to Dublin and only got about 2-3 hours of sleep then had a full day of sight seeing yesterday.  We got to tour the Jameson Distillery and have a free pint of Guinness while enjoying spectacular views of Dublin.  It was really crowded at the Guinness store on St. Paddy's Day eve! 

We were able to get some extra sleep last night and are off to catch the St. Paddy's Day parade.  Hope everyone has a fun and safe celebration!

Ireland Itinerary

We leave for Ireland next week and will be there for 2 weeks.  Our itinerary is something like what Rick Steve's has outlined below, although his is a 3 week itinerary and ours is cut to 2 weeks.  We will be flying in and out of Dublin and renting car to drive around the country.  We hope to enjoy lots of lush, green, dramatic scenery during the day and taste lots of Guinness and Irish whiskey in the pubs at night.

We will have wi-fi at most of our hotels and will be traveling with a mini laptop, so I may post a few updates during our trip.