Still recovering!

It's been a week since we returned from Ireland and we are still recovering.  It took us between three and four days on each end of the trip to get to feeling normal again.  That's longer than when we were younger but acceptable I guess. 

We got home to some nice cool weather; about the same as in Ireland as a matter of fact!  Then twice last week it actually rained.  Yep, we get rain here once in a while.  The rain was much harder than any we experienced in Ireland!  There we had light misty rain; this was a regular thunderstorm complete with lightning.  Happily it didn't cause any mud slides. 

I've been going through some of the approximately 600 photos we took during our three week trip.  That's not as bad as the number we took when visiting China last year but it's still daunting.  Our trip started and ended in Dublin.  We wanted to see as much coastline as we could so we traveled in a clockwise direction around to Galway where we drove across the country to return to Dublin.  Originally we wanted to continue up to Northern Ireland but we just ran out of time.  Here is a map roughly showing our route in blue with towns where we stayed underlined in yellow.  A couple of the towns were way too small to be on the map so I just left a yellow line there to indicate the approximate position of the town.

I'm going to add photos is pretty much a random order; there are just so many!  After landing at Dublin airport north of town we took the ring road around town and headed south for Wicklow.  Why there?  No reason; it was just the first largish town in the direction we wanted to go.  We needed to find a place for the night before falling asleep in the car.  Then next day was when we first saw the coastline we'd been looking for.  It was kind of cool and rainy but not bad.

There are a few photos that I'll toss in that typify Ireland for us.  Here is one showing the lovely green countryside and the nearness of the sea.

I don't often think of the ties that bind our two countries but they are certainly there.  We stopped at a hotel/pub/restaurant in the town of Kinsale ssouth of Cork on the seacoast.  As we were leaving I noticed this memorial they created for firefighters lost on 9-11.  There must be some local tie but I found it rather touching to find this in just an ordinary hotel.

I'll end with something traditional:  kissing the Blarney Stone.  We both had to do it.  It was way up in this old tower.  I didn't like those steps and they didn't like me but I got up them anyway.  So now I'm an official silver-tongued devil.

The guy is there to be sure no fat Americans get stuck in the hole!  As my wife says it sure would have been easier to do this when I was 45 rather than 65.  I'll be sharing more photos as I get them resized.  Take care.