Naomi and I had a great time in Ireland. The areas we saw were beautiful and each area had something unique to offer. We saw the coast, the city (Dublin), as well as various areas inland. We loved the food, particularly the butter. I know that sounds weird, but their butter was out of this world. When I came home, I checked to see if anyone here carries it, and I see that Wegmans carries it - Wahoo!!!! The ice cream was also terrific, so rich and creamy. The people were very friendly, although we probably saw more tourists then locals, even though we tried to limit ourselves on tourism areas, it's almost impossible to avoid when you are a tourist. We saw a mix of Americans, Germans, Australians, and French.
Traveling on the roads in Ireland was an adventure, however once you've done "The road to Hana" in Maui, every road after that is a piece of cake. Luckily we had a really nice car, a Saab Aero 93 Turbo Diesel. It really held the road well, had a lot of power, climbed mountains without any hesitation, and gave us pretty good gas mileage at about 40mpg. Gas prices were high, as we expected, about 1.30 Euros a liter ~$5.00/gal. Diesel was only a few cents more then petrol.
We did our best to find pubs that played some traditional Irish Music. We were fortunate to see a few, while drinking several pints of Guinness of course. We even did a Musical Pub Crawl one night in Dublin.
It was definitely a fun trip, we only had light rain on one night. A couple of days it was overcast for part of the day, but most of the time it was warm and sunny. We only needed a light jacket, or many times didn't even need a jacket. Previously they had about 60 straight days of rain, so they were happy to have the nice weather.
It was nice to go to another country that spoke English, but they talk pretty darn fast so you do have to pay attention. Their TV was interesting, they had a mix of American, Irish, German and French stations. They carry some of our major shows like "Desparate Housewives", and we even saw a current show of The Weakest Link (done in England still - I believe).
Hope you poke around the Blog some more, and don't forget to check out the Photos!
Thanks for reading!!!
Sláinte!
~~Kevin & Naomi ~~
