Day Two Continued

More photos from Glendalough...

 All photos in this blog were taken by me (unless stated otherwise) and are copyrighted. Please do not use my photos without permission. Thanks!

Day Two: Emerald Isle

 After eating a hearty Irish breakfast, we checked out of the fabulous Trinity Capital Hotel in Dublin to began our two week journey around Ireland. First up was driving to County Wicklow to see Glendalough and the Wicklow Mountain National Park. I was still the driver/navigator/chauffer so I got us there in a little over an hour without getting lost or hitting anything with the car. Hurray! Our luck was improving...we thought.

Glendalough was absolutely picturesque. 

 

The grass and trees were so green that our eyes could barely register the color of it all. It was just so vibrant. And cold. The wind was blowing and the rain was coming down...all for about ten minutes. Then the sun came out, the wind died down a little, and the air warmed up considerably. Glendalough is in a valley that was carved by glaciers during the ice age. The two lakes that are in the valley were formed when the ice melted. Just up the road from the lake is a monastery and graveyard that dates back to the 6th century, when it was founded by St.Kevin. 

We had a picnic by the lake and took a walk up to a waterfall. There are also sites by the lake that are some of the oldest things in Ireland. We spent most of the day walking around and taking pictures here before attempting to find our Bed & Breakfast for the night. There are too many amazing photos to put them all up on here...We stayed at the Lough Dan House that night.

The drive to the B&B turned into a three hour game of "find a needle in a haystack" and the directions the owners gave us were mostly along the lines of, "Turn left at the big tree about 4km down. Go over a bridge and turn right then turn left again at a white house. Then when the road splits into four, go on the nicest looking one, though they all look pretty bad I know. Keep driving till you see the house with a funny roof." Their town wasn't even on the GPS. Other guests were amazed that we (by we, I mean me) had found it by ourselves, since they had come on a tour bus.

After getting there we realized it wasn't really that hard to go back into town (about 20 minutes away) for dinner now that we knew where we were going. I had a delicious Guinness and Beef Stew for dinner. I liked that the rooms in the restaurant had quotes painted on the walls. This one for instance is from Oscar Wilde, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." One thing I have learned is that no one here uses full addresses to find places. They just explain it to you by landmarks or trees, or rocks, or sheep, or whatever. Once I accepted that fact and stopped trying to make sense of the roads or signs, things were much easier to find.

 Back at the house, we were getting ready for bed and I was lucky enough to have my own room downstairs. Everything was fine until I saw them. Spiders. Huge brown ugly ones. Everywhere. I guess they had come out from wherever they were to go to the warmest place downstairs...my room. I don't mind spiders really, I actually like daddy long legs', I just don't want to sleep with them. Especially not ones that look like brown recluses. After informing the owner of the house that my room was infested with what could possibly be venomous spiders, she flatly said "Welcome to the country. What do you want me to do about it?" Finally, after explaining how uncomfortable I was sleeping in the room, she got a dirt devil, handed it to me along with a newspaper for swatting, and went to bed. Ugh. I'm sorry, I know I'm in the country but I've lived in the country before and my house was not infested with huge spiders. At least not in my room. Mind you, they had an entire group of people from Germany there that they had just gone to the pub with, so they were all a little 'lit' from the no doubt copious amounts of whatever they had just finished drinking. 

We seemed to be the only ones not amused. Oh well. 

We just kept telling ourselves "it's just one night, it's just one night."

I'll upload more photos of Glendalough and the Wicklow National Park later...it's 12pm and my eyes are closing after driving around for 12 hours today. Goodnight all!

(I'm taking my friend, Buck's suggestion and using a map to track our travels around the country. Keep in mind that the red line is simply the route that was taken to get from place to place. We traveled all around the areas surrounding the line and many of the roads we took are not shown on this map...or even on GPS, hah!)

Day One: Dublin

First and foremost, I'm sorry I haven't been able to post anything yet. I haven't had internet at any of the hotels/B&B's we've stayed at until this one. In fact, when I asked if there was internet or wifi at the B&B we stayed at last night, I just got a sarcastic, "Sure it's wireless...we don't have any at all. Welcome to the countryside..." but that's another blog post. This post was also longer, but my computer died in the middle of me typing it and I was so mad that I called it a night. Anyways, onto more pressing matters: Dublin.



We departed Orlando, Florida on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 7pm en route to Dublin, Ireland. After a long, eight hour non-stop flight, we arrived in Dublin, the city that I will forever think of as completely maddening (second only to Athens, Greece).



True to our family's style, everything started to go wrong as soon as the plane touched the ground, and it wasn't even Friday the 13th yet...

Dublin itself is a maze. Or at least seems like it. It's almost like a game of Frogger, trying to cross the road and not get squished by the oncoming cars, motorcycles, buses, and taxis. As I said earlier, the only other city I've seen that is as horrible to drive in is Athens. All of the brochures, books, websites, and testimonials we've read and heard about told us not to drive a car in Dublin. We should have listened.

We quickly learned that we had over-packed and that our 8+ bags would not fit in the economy-sized car we had reserved. There was no choice but to upgrade...to a brand new 2011 Audi A6 TDI. Now, in the U.S., Audi's are generally expensive luxury cars, so naturally, I was ecstatic to think that we'd be traveling around the country in style. I was also terrified. The fact that we had such a nice car meant that if we got a scratch on it, we were totally screwed. So to make a long story short, not five minutes after getting in the car, we had run over several curbs and almost had a head-on collision trying to turn right. You have to remember, they drive on the left side of the road here and the steering wheel is on the opposite side as well, so everything is backwards. Well actually, YOU don't have to remember, WE do. It was a nightmare. After finally reaching the hotel (which was a treasure hunt in itself) and finding the parking garage, we realized that we didn't pick up our cell phone that was supposed to have been at the rental car place. We had to go back. After nearly destroying the car in the parking garage on every single curb/wall/post/etc, and nearly side-swiping a parked car on our left because we were sandwiched between them and a double decker bus, we (well, more like my mom and I) decided that my dad was being demoted from driving and that I would be a much better driver of the car. I only hit one curb.

At this point in time we'd all been up for about two days now without any sleep and there is a 5 hour difference between here and the states. My dad decided to take a nap and my mom and I ventured out in Dublin. We checked out the famous Temple Bar area and had our first pints of Guinness while listening to an irishman sing and play the guitar. After such a hectic day, and I'm really understating the craziness of it all, we decided to go back to the hotel for dinner.

The hotel was amazing. It was the Trinity Capital Hotel and I highly recommend it. Its decor was fabulous, complete with bright magenta and purple walls and Alice in Wonderland type chairs that were so huge you felt tiny sitting in them. There were gargoyles and statues at every corner and peacock feathered tables.

It was there that I had my first "Irish Breakfast", poached eggs, ham, sausage, something similar to baked beans, tomatoes, soda bread, yogurt with fruit, and black and white "pudding", which is more like sausage. The white "pudding" is really similar to spam or deviled ham. The black "pudding" consists of coagulated blood and I'm not sure what else...didn't really taste like anything though. We also had lamb shank with potatoes which was amazing. I'm not sure why people say that Irish food is terrible because everything I've had so far has been wonderful (aside from the black pudding and that wasn't even that bad).
I can say that most everything you've read or seen about Ireland is true. Dublin is horrible to drive in, the people are friendly, you truly do experience every kind of weather in a single day, and it is very, very green. The weather is very unpredictable. It was sunny, it rained, it hailed, and was sunny again, all in the span of about twenty minutes. When it's raining, it's not really raining, it's more like a heavy mist that seems like it will hang around all day but goes away quickly with the cloud and before you know it there are bright blue skies again. No rainbows yet, though.

Though we didn't get to see much in that first day, I can't say that I'm not happy to be out of Dublin. We'll be returning to the city for a day before we leave, armed with a much better knowledge of how to drive in it. I'll be visiting the Trinity College, the Guinness Brewery, the Book of Kells, and hopefully much more (time allowing). It stays light out until nearly 10:00 pm, which is nice because it allows us to stay out later and see more things. I'm hoping to do some night photos soon.

Till next wifi, Sláinte!

5 Things To Do Instead of Packing

1. Decide to create a travel blog
2. Spend hours trying to come up with a name for said blog
3. Spend even more hours perusing the internet (stumbleupon.com is my new favorite thing)
4. Eat lunch
5. Take a nap
Rinse and repeat.

Welcome to my travel blog. If you were looking for my professional photography blog you can view that at http://www.margeauxphoto.com/. That isn't to say that this one isn't professional, I'm simply doing it more for my own personal recollection rather than to showcase my photography business. I wish I had done this several years ago for my travels to Greece but alas, I didn't, and now I've forgotten about half of it. Ah such is life. Guess I'll just have to do it all over again...oh the horror. :)

In less than three days I will be embarking on my second (and definitely not last) trip abroad.

My parents, who have faithfully taken me with them on many cross-country trips throughout the U.S., deserved a vacation. I decided that I would repay them for all of the times we've gone on vacation and they've paid for me (insert "spoiled child" here). I decided that I would give them the vacation of a lifetime (it would have to be, considering that I can't afford more than one). I also decided that there would only be one answer to where we would go -- Ireland.

It had always been my dad's dream to go to Ireland. The movie "The Quiet Man" with John Wayne had him hooked from the beginning. So that was it. It was decided. I bought the plane tickets for us (Thanks, BP!), and put them in their Christmas card. I also wrapped up a few travel books on Ireland. I wrote "You'd better get your passports ready, cause we're going to Ireland!", on the inside of the card containing the print out of the itinerary. When they opened the card, their reaction was not exactly what I had been hoping for. I had hoped for jumping, screaming, smiling, crying, shouts of "horray!", and lots of thank yous. I even videotaped it because I thought it would be momentous. Instead, their reaction was of quiet confusion, followed by curious looks between one another, and asking if I was serious. Yes. I was quite serious. We're going to Ireland...yay?

It took a few hours --or days-- for it to really sink in. But once it did they couldn't stop talking about it. They poured over their travel books I had bought them and discussed where we would go and what we would see. My dad was packed for the trip three months before our departure date. Suffice it to say that I think he's excited in his own quiet way. And that's all I ever wanted.

I am, however, a completely different story. It's two days before I drive to my parents house and I'm still not packed. I haven't even done the laundry yet. Procrastination at its finest. I am most definitely excited about the trip, however I'm not all that geared up for the flight...ugh. Eight hours in the sky is unnatural. I slept through my entire flight to Greece, thanks to an anxiety pill or two, and I intend to do the same en route to Ireland.

So this is going to be my journal for our trip to Ireland, as well as wherever else I decide to go . I am planning on a road trip this summer with my mom to a cousin's wedding in North Carolina as well as a rather extravagant trip by myself to New York City to see my favorite band, A Perfect Circle (VIP tickets, baby!). Maybe I'll even go back in time and put up some of my stuff from Greece. So stay tuned...Who knows, you might even be inspired to take your own trip to somewhere amazing!

And thank you, Mike, for coming up with my brand-spankin' new blog name! It's perfect! Check out his road-trip blog at http://www.alfinmotion.blogspot.com/