Back from Ireland!
It was a good trip, and I'll give the brief run-down here...
We flew from JFK to Shannon (near Limerick) on the red-eye, arriving Thursday morning. The rental car was small, dirty, electric blue and had a huge dent above the left rear wheel. S didn’t like it, so I went back in to the rental place (Hertz) and they gave us a BMW! Well, it was the tiny little BMW Sports Hatch of the new BMW 1 Series, so it didn’t really feel like a BMW, more like a tiny European car. I had to shoe-horn myself into the thing, but was perfectly comfortable once I was in the seat.
Driving on the left is weird! It was pretty nerve-wracking for S, too, because cars approached the road from the left. In the U.S., when something is coming from the right, you subconsciously know it is going to stop. Things coming from the left usually are going to hit you, unless you give way. Well, cars pull up to the road from the left all the time in Ireland, naturally, and if you don’t force yourself to remember they have to stop, you get scared they’re going to hit you…
We drove from Shannon down to Tralee, in County Kerry, where S’s father is from. S’s mother, father and sister had flown over a week earlier and had spent time in County Cavan, where S’s mother is from. We were to meet S’s family at the Tralee Marina, where we were staying. Unfortunately, the Tralee Marina isn’t a hotel – it’s more of a long-term stay place and has no front desk on the premises. We went into the city (well, it has about 20,000 people, so ‘city’ is a relative term) center and got something to eat. Then, we went to the store where S’s aunt works, got her phone number, bought a phone card, called the aunt, and found out what apartment S’s family was in. Finally, we could relax – I was pretty tired after the red-eye flight, 2 hours of driving on the left on tiny roads, and then running around Tralee trying to figure out how to find S’s family.
The place was nice, a 2-level, 3-bedroom affair with a big living room and nice kitchen. We actually wound up staying there for about a week.
The rest of the trip I’ll have to flesh out in later postings, but here’s the summary: the wedding was on Saturday. We did family things until Tuesday, when we drove the Ring of Kerry. Along the way, we went to the greyhound races in Tralee, and intended to go to the Listowel (NOT pronounced "Liss-towel" I have learned...) horse races, but never made it. We drove up to Galway for the Oyster Festival, spending 2 nights in the middle of downtown Galway (very nice city!). Then, we drove to County Cavan, staying in the town of Kingscourt and doing things in the town of Bailieborough. Finally, we gunned down to Dublin, in time for the All-Ireland Gaelic Football championships, where the underdogs Tyrone beat Kerry in front of a crowd of over 80,000, ourselves included...
I breathed a big sigh of relief when we returned the car unharmed, as I apparently had a deductible of over 1000 Euro in the case of an accident, something I didn't know about until I picked up the car....
We flew back Monday night and slept all day Tuesday.
The Guinness was good!
I'll give more details later!

Good to be back! I missed you guys - last time I was in Ireland, we were all together!

C
- posted by Christoph Roggenkamp @ 9/30/2005 01:12:00 PM