I’M IN IRELAND!!!!

Yeah, that’s right. I’m not in the United States and you probably are. It’s awesome. It’s my first time out of the country. It’s mostly surreal. Like, I know I’m not in the USA, but I have to stop and think about that every so often. I guess the kicker is that is doesn’t seem TOO different from home. I mean, it’s a totally different lifestyle, but driving down most roads, you feel like you are driving through the backroads of Kentucky or something.

It’s mostly farmland, and you pass through a city every so often that isn’t but about a quarter mile strech of connected buildings, and then it’s right back to farmlands. It’s weird because their houses are about 20 feet at best from the roadways, and in America, any house right along a major roadway would be set back at least a hundred feet or something. Their roadways are very narrow, but so are the cars. The only SUVs on the road are ambulances. Their drivers are much better, too. They are so much more courteous and attentive to their driving. You can go to nearly any town and be told that there are only a few dozen traffic incidents with fatalities in the past few years or so. It shows, too. I don’t think I’ve seen a single car with any more than an occasional door ding or something. I haven’t seen one traffic accident, whereas on your normal American vacation, you’d hit at least one traffic jam on the part of a wreck just driving there. Instead of traffic lights, they have a lot of roundabouts. They are confusing the first couple of times, but really, once you get used to them, they seem so much more convienient than your average traffic light. For one, you don’t have to sit there staring off into the distance for 30 seconds if there is no oncoming traffic, and two, the people already in the roundabout have the right of way, so you never have to worry about that… which also eliminates people being asses and running redlights and such.

So I guess my goal here is to tell a bit about trip so far so that by the time I get home or to a place where I can type it all up at once, I haven’t forgotten the details. Then when I find internet access I can just post big chunks of it until I’m home and can post the final piece. Let’s start from the beginning. We got the airport super early, and security was about what I would have imagined. I guess because we were there at 11am in the middle of the week, the lines didn’t take so long. We were through in about 30 minutes, so we had to wait about 2 hours before we even thought about our flight being boarded. There was a Max & Erma’s in the airport so we grabbed lunch there then looked in some of the shops before going to our gate. The flight was fine. I guess I don’t have much to compare it to. For the first experience that I can remember, it wasn’t bad. I guess now I really see what people mean when they say that flights are cramped, though. I thought I’d have enough room to screw around on my latop, but I didn’t even have enough room to open the lid all the way! The I dozed off for about 10 minutes of the flight from Cincinnati (CVG) to Atlanta (ATL). Once we got to Atlanta, we had to move what seems like from one end of the airport to the other, and we really only had to wait about half an hour before they boarded our flight… but that also accounts for the fact that we had to taxi to an open gate, turn back and find a new one… twice, while coming in from CVG. I’m pretty sure we left the gate well before the time we were supposed to leave. I guess everyone was onboard and accounted for. It took us about 30 minutes to an hour of waiting on the runway before our flight could leave though, but I expected that after it took a while once we landed at Atlanta to get a gate to stop at.

The flight from the States over was alright. It felt a lot longer than the 7 hours or so it took. Quite possibly because again, it was very tight, and we left when it was light outside, and flew through the night and landed when it was light out… because of the time change it just seemed longer, I suppose. Oh, and the lady in front of me was a bitch. I managed to sleep what I think was an hour or so on this flight, although I wasn’t paying attention to a clock at all.

We arrived in Shannon, and stopped outside the airport at a McDonald’s to figure out where we wanted to go first and to get a quick snack and something to drink. It seems, so far, that McDonald’s is the only place in Ireland with free wireless internet. My observations have taught me that Ireland is somewhat behind the times when it comes to electrical innovation, but I guess you can chalk that up to it being very rural. In America, you can go to any minor city and find at least one place that has free wireless, and I imagine that in a few years, it will practically be a standard. I’m not really bummed out that I can’t get on the internet or something, I just wish that during downtime, or something I could pop on and say “hey” to people or read the news. We were all sort of jammed into a small European Chevy something-or-other… it was strikingly similar to a Ford Focus. Dad was sort of pissed because he had reserved a minvan and didn’t get it. I can see why, because getting our luggage in was a chore, and usually entailed some of it being on our laps.

So, from McDonald’s, we decided it would be best to tackle going to Blarney Castle. We couldn’t think of anything else in that area that we wanted to do, so being only a few miles away we thought we should go there and then call that part of the Island complete. It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, and was actually quite fairweathered. (When we first got off the plane, it was pretty cold.) It took probably an hour or two to get from Shannon airport to Blarney. Even though it wasn’t me doing it, driving was an experience in itself, for the afformentioned reasons and many more. We made it to Blarney, paid the entrance fee to see the castle, and walked a beautiful trail to get to it. I snapped plenty of pictures even before we started ascending the castle. There were enough people in line to kiss the blarney stone that it took about an hour to get up the line to the top. The trip up was incredible. The castle, while many of the original portions don’t exist anymore, was an engineering marvel. Everything from a spirial staircase made entirely out of stone to the rain gutters up top that even had a spout to move the falling rainwash away from the castle to prevent erosion. Blarney castle in itself was actually quite small, and didn’t seem like it had the care given to it that other castles got. It mostly seemed like a tourist spot rather than a history lesson. Once you get up top, you are only a few minutes from kissing the Blarney Stone. Kissing it is kinda crazy. Most people know that you have to kiss is upside down, but most people DON’T know that you have to kiss it upside down because it’s akward location only allows for that. You actually have to hang over the edge of the castle where, thankfully, a couple of bars have been places to keep you from falling, bend backwards while laying on your back about a foot down, and learn towards it to kiss it. If they hadn’t also installed handrails to hold on to to help you bend backwards, then I think I would end up wedged in the safety bars. The actual term for this type of hole in a castle floor is called a “murder hole”. They are usually positioned directly above the front gate so that when intruders would come to break in, the residents of the castle could dump a number of things on them, usually hot oil, burning animal fat, or just plain ole’ rocks.

After descending the castle, we walked through the trails in blarney for a bit before we made our way to the exit. It was beautiful enough that I could have walked there all day, but we just didn’t have that kind of time. We were going to make our next stop at Cork to just meander around, but once we got there, we realized we didn’t know where anything was, so we kinda just kept going. In America, cities are planned in the way that you can say “go to this area for shopping and food” or such… but in Ireland, it seems like everything is just kinda wherever they can put it. Best I can tell, their streets really don’t have names, at least not well planned ones. All the places tourists go are marked at occasional intersections simply telling you in what direction to head. I guess it’s no wonder that you can really only find city maps for Dublin. So, after our short drive through Cork, we decided to go check into our lodging and figure out what we could do from there. We got about halfway through, got stuck in a traffic jam in one town, made the decision to go around and find another way after waiting 30 minutes, and once we got out we realized there was a traffic jam because that was the only bridge across a river in at least a dozen miles in either direction. So we turned around again, and started the line to make it across this bridge again… and an hour and half later, we got though it. The second we got on the other side of the river, traffic was clear as day, and there was a line of cars stuck in the opposite direction. From the jam, it took us about 45 more minutes to get to our lodging, in a place called the Glen of Aherlow, just outside the town on Tipperary. This put us at about 4:30 local time.

I fell asleep after watching TV for a little bit. Mom and Dad snuck out at some point and made their way to a grocery store to get some food for breakfast and some snacks… for snacking. Mom woke me up around 7:30 to go out to grab some dinner, but it took us until about 8:30 to find a place that served food that late. Most of the pubs will stop serving food around 3pm. Doesn’t work out too well for tourists, but whatever. I guess the average Irish family just expects a home cooked meal every night. We managed to find a small pub that was still serving food, and enjoyed a couple of beers and some hurling (field hockey) during our meal. Once again, we went back to our lodging and crashed.