Tuesday, November 4, 2008

please sell me popular rum drink

as you can see, heather and i are back from ireland. the trip was good. cold but good.

day one started off sunday when we left. we started our journey at around 11 am from chesterton and ended up in ireland around 8am the next morning where we immediately rented our car and headed out of dublin. i quickly mastered the art of driving on the left side of the road, though it did take me a few min just to figure out how to turn on the car.....

day 1:
left dublin in the rent-a-yaris and headed towards the gardens of powerscourt. after wandering around there for a while, we headed through the wicklow mountains on a road about as wide as our couch (and our couch isn't that wide). it was terrifying and fun at the same time. Here we are weaving back and forth on this little curvy road and just around the curve was another car coming the other way going twice as fast as us. Thank god those little roads have lots of little spots to pull off into the dirt a little to let other cars past.

After we made it through the mountains, we ended up in glendalough then onto kilkenny and our bed and breakfast. We made it to our bed and breakfast around 5pm. The b&b owners were pretty awesome and unbelievably helpful. They told us where to eat and where not to eat and all kinds of useful info on the town. We headed to dinner then to bed. By the time we hit the sac it was about 8pm and we had been up for about 33 hours….

Throughout the week we went to the Waterford crystal factory in waterford (and managed to not spend all of our money), toured kilkenny castle, went to the rock of cashel and the castle at cahir and then it was on to the dingle peninsula.

Our trip to dingle gave us a decision. We could take the low road which was a little curvy but not much more than all of the regular roads. Or we could take the Connor Pass which went through the mountains. Both roads would take about the same amount of time. I missed the turn to the regular road so we headed up the pass instead. We passed a sign that essentially told trucks that the road is impassible with such a large vehicle and to turn back now.

Now it was dark, rainy, we only had 1 headlight (the right one that aimed to the center of the road not the edge, and one of my contacts was freaking out in my eye. Up the pass we go.

All was well until we got to the top and the road became almost less than 1 lane wide….even though it’s a 2 lane road. And there weren’t many areas to pull off to let oncoming cars past. You had 3 choices, drive left into the mountain which still leaves your car in the road, drive right off the cliff which leaves you in flames 1000 ft down, or go in reverse until you hit a wide enough area for both cars to pass. We chose the left into the mountain approach. Good thing those little foreign cars have collapsible mirrors and insurance. Needless to say, we scraped the mountain a little, made it down the pass and to our b&B in dingle town.

Dingle …what’s to say about dingle….if it wasn’t for the blasting wind, dingle would have nothing to offer except breathless landscapes, cute little towns, history stacked on top of history stacked on top of history, and sheep. 500,000 to be exact. The wind was pretty much the only bad part of dingle but even the wind had its moments as you will see when I post the pictures.

Galway was crazy on Halloween and Dublin was cool but city-ish. Overall the trip was pretty awesome.

The pictures will be posted later this week. I have to sift through them and get a good system for posting them seeing as I took about 740 pictures (actual estimate, not an exaggeration.

There are obviously more details but I haven’t the time or patience to type them here. You’ll just have to ask us in person.

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