We flew into Dublin and collected our rental car and headed westbound towards county Kerry. Marc arranged the rental car (or car hire, as they say over here) and we got a Mercedes Benz! It was awesome! The boys did all the driving, which was interesting to say the least, with the whole driving on the other side of the road thing and curvy passages up and down hills! They did a great job but there were a few scary moments along the way! Anyway, here are the happy kids outside the Merc (as Marc constantly referred to it the whole trip! Either that or the E class). It took us about 5-6 hours each way. It was a long drive but well worth it.
Here are the troops outside of the car!
Friday and Saturday night we stayed in a town called Dingle in southwestern Ireland. The Dingle Peninsula is the western most point in Europe. We stayed at a beautiful B&B called the Castlewood House in Dingle. The owners are a young couple, Helen and Brian, who live in the house with their 2 year old son, Craig. It was such a nice home with amazing breakfasts and lovely rooms. I would highly reccomend it to anyone, so if you are planning an Ireland trip, try to spend a night or two in Dingle at the Castlewood House! I have to admit that Dingle is a little out of the way from Dublin, but you can get flights into Shannon or Cork, which are much closer.
Here are a few photos of the house - it was so cute!!
On Saturday, we spent the day driving around the peninsula and stopped to see all of the amazing views. We ended up taking over 100 pictures of which I've included several of the best ones below.
This is Blackhead Beach (I think that is what it was called) - it was very pretty but too cold to take a dip!
The next photos are of Dunbeg (or Dun Beag in Gaelic, which is still spoken on this part of the island). Dunbeg is a fort from the iron age and it's located on a cliff overlooking Dingle Bay. You can see Marc reenacting a battle scene as he tries to scale the wall. However, we're not sure why he'd be trying to get out of the fort.
The next stop was at the Beehive Huts, which we located a short distance up the road from Dunbeg. These huts were little houses built from stone and were built in the form of a circle. The door with the Clover is not part of the huts, but it was located at the entrace to the site and I thought it was pretty cool looking!
These photos are from Dunquin. It is supposed to be the best view in all of Ireland. The pictures may not do it juctice - it was amaizing. We were so lucky with clear weather - it was a little windy, but there wasn't any rain!
This is a photo of Chad in the town of Dingle. It's a small little fishing village, which is very popular with tourists. There were a bunch of cute shops and restaurants - and of course lots of pubs!
Here is Chad and I at dinner at the Old Smokehouse restaurant. Chad had a shank of lamb for dinner, which is very popular because there are sheep and lambs everywhere you turn in the country!
On Sunday, on our way back to Dublin, we drove to another area, called Conner Pass. It was so windy, you can see in the pictures, we were just trying to maintain our balance! My hair was flying all over the place, but we got a pretty good shot.
The last few we took on our drive back to Dublin.
Once back to Dublin, we make a quick stop at the Guinness factory, which is really the only thing to see in Dublin and has been around for over 200 years! Here is Lindsay with a horse outside the factory! We all went out to dinner again that night (once again, we did too much eating!) and headed back to London on Monday morning.
Our next scheduled trip is actually back to the US in late April for a whirlwind tour including stops in Miami, FL (Adri's wedding), Asheville, Columbus and Mt. Vernon. We hope to do one more quick trip somewhere between now and then. We'll keep you posted!
