Cheryl Diegel: 2010

I just recently got back from a trip to Ireland where my mom, and my friend, Kristina, and her mom traveled all throughout the lower half of the country. Not only was the country beautiful and green, but we also completely lucked out with the weather, and had sunshine pretty much every day!

We started our journey in Dublin where we were running on no sleep because we had left Boston at 7:00pm and landed in Dublin at 7:00am the next morning (and I can't sleep on airplanes for some reason). So needless to say, we were a little jet legged and probably didn't get to enjoy the city as much as we could have. We did a lot of walking that day and we got to see Trinity College, Dublin Castle, Christ Church, a tour of the Guinness Brewery, and more. After we toured the city, we went to Dan Dooley's (the rental car place) to pick up our Ford Focus and try out driving in Ireland. My mom had to take the first driving shift since I could barely keep my eyes open at this point. It was pretty scary starting out since they drive on the left side of the road and we also had a manual so you had to use your left hand to switch gears. We finally made it to our resort though and all in one piece thankfully. The resort was in Killenard which is just outside of Port Laoise and about 45 mins from Dublin, so pretty much in the middle of nowhere (our GPS couldn't even find the city). The Heritage Golf Resort & Spa was absolutely gorgeous and so much more than we had expected! We even had a washing machine that turned into a dryer in one of the kitchen cupboards! Haha!

After some much needed sleep, we woke up the next morning refreshed and ready for our next adventure. We were headed to Kilkenny... Our GPS came in very handy, but it didn't always get us to the exact point we wanted to be in. Kristina found the street name of the castle that we wanted to visit so she typed it in and we followed it to this little road where all the cars we just parked right on the road. We parked, thinking we were close to the castle, but it turned out we were actually in a carpool line for some random school. Oops! We found out that we were actually in Ballyragget which was still about 10 miles from where we were supposed to be. After enjoying a traditional Irish breakfast (ok, I don't know if I would actually say we enjoyed it) we finally made it to Kilkenny. In Kilkenny we got to see the Kilkenny Castle, the castle stables (which are now little shops), and some beautiful cathedrals and churches. This was also the first day that I drove and I don't think I have ever experienced something so stressful in my life! Irish people are crazy when it comes to driving. They have a very laid back attitude when it comes to time, but not when they are driving! Their speed limits are soooo high. Just driving in the countryside where there's no line in the center of the road and the streets are curving every which way, they still have an 80-100km/h limit. I however refused to drive that fast on the 1st day and maintained about a 40-50km/h speed. So pretty much everyone was annoyed with me and at times I had about a 20 car pile up.

Our third day we headed to the Slieve Bloom Mountains for a hike to the Kinnitty Castle. It was only supposed to be 1 km until we reached to castle, but apparently they didn't think it was necessary to put a sign that lead people to the castle, even though that was the point of the hike! So after we walked for about 3 km we finally ran into some people who told us we were supposed to go down some dirt road to find it. The Kinnitty Castle has been turned into a hotel and people can stay there or rent it out for events too. It's actually for sale if anyone is interested After our hike, it was still pretty early, so we decided to drive across the country to Galway. Galway is one of Ireland's major cities and has a very cute shopping area where we found lots of things to take home with us:)

The next day we headed out on our two night road trip. We had no idea where we would be sleeping each night, but we knew the cities we wanted to visit, and we were just hoping that since tourist season was over, we would be able to find some B&B's with vacancy. On our way to Kinsale we drove to Cashel where we visited the Rock of Cashel. It's a castle on top of a hill that dates back to the 4th century. The castle itself was actually rebuilt in the 12th century so we got to walk around the 12th century ruins. It was bright and sunny for us but the wind made it pretty freezing, which is why the castle was eventually vacated in the 17th century...they got too cold up there. From the Rock of Cashel there was an amazing view of the countryside and Hore Abbey. After Cashel we headed for Kinsale. Once in Kinsale, we found a B&B to stay at for the night, we took a trolley ride through the town, and went on a pretty hilarious ghost tour. That night we decided to see what the night life was like in Ireland and we found a couple pubs with live music and lots of pints of Murphy's!

The next morning we woke up and headed for the Dingle Peninsula. We made a quick stop in Killarney for some lunch and to visit the Muckross House. We then made it to Dingle just in time for the sunset. In Dingle we had our first traditional Irish meal of Sheppard’s Pie and Guinness Beef Stew, pretty delicious! We also got to enjoy some live traditional Irish music in the pubs. I even bought one of their CD's so we could listen to some Irish music in the car instead of their annoying DJ's they have on the radio. They also have some of the weirdest music that they play on the radio. Some of my favorites were "Barbra Streisand" (it was a techno song and the only words in the entire some were “Barbra Streisand”) and "Whaa Whaa Whaa" (the chorus of this some was just some girl whining).

Our last full day in Ireland we spent touring the Dingle Peninsula where we got to see some spectacular views of the ocean, some stone huts from 2000BC, and an abundance of sheep (there are 10,000 people that live on the Dingle Peninsula and over 500,000 sheep!). The entire trip Kristina and I talked about how we wanted to be stopped by sheep crossing the road. In every movie you see that's set in Ireland, they are always stopped by sheep crossing. Well apparently it's not as easy to come across as we thought…I guess everyone uses fences now. But when we were in Dingle, one of the locals told us to head for the mountains if we wanted to see sheep in the road. On our way back to the resort we had to go over Conner Pass and sure enough...there were sheep everywhere! Apparently they don’t' believe in fencing their sheep in up there. We were so excited to see the sheep that we had to pull over and snap some pictures! Driving over this pass was quite an adventure in itself because not only were there sheep everywhere, but they also thought that it was only necessary to have one lane on the pass. So we literally had to dive on a one lane road, over the winding turns honking our horn, hopping that no cars were coming the other way! I don't really know what we would have done if there was another car coming because there was no way I would have been able to back up over the pass. Our drive back to the resort was pretty much the only day we got rain and it was perfect timing since we were in the car the whole time. We finally made it back to our resort in Killenard, very tired, with about 1500km on the odometer, and ready to head back home. And Kristina was pretty excited to curl up with our new found pet cat too!

That pretty much sums up our adventure in Ireland! Now, onto the next one...