Allison's Wonderland

My first post on Ireland...What can I say? Me, Micah and Shaun spent seven wonderful short days on the Emerald Isle and it has to be one of my favorite vacations yet. I wrote in my journal the whole time there since I was without internet for most of the time. And I'm not going to lie, it was kind of nice being unreachable, and unattainable from the world of communication. Some of us had a harder time than others...ahem...Micah. :) I couldn't have traveled with a better group of people. Like seriously if you ever need travel buddies Micah and Shaun are it. But enough of all that let's talk about Ireland!

I have discovered that the best way to stay in Ireland is Bed & Breakfasts. Let me just get to that . . . Our first night in Ireland we spent in Dublin. Now if anyone has seen the movie Leap Year, Deckland describes Dublin as a town of whores and thieves, but we ran into neither. I kinda liked it there. Deckland, you were wrong. We got off our Aer Lingus plane (yes it is called Aer Lingus) in Dublin International Airport and went straight into the city. Which is where I state that we rented a car, a lil baby standard Ford Fiat. I was dubbed the driver, and let me tell you...it was freakin scary at first. I was driving on the right side of the car on the left hand side of the road. I was almost peeing my pants at first. Ireland has so many ridiculous roundabouts too. We don't really have those in the States. Ugh Scary. Needless to say throughout the whole trip I did not get us killed, did not go in the wrong lane, and did not hit anyone else. It was a good trip.

In Dublin, we stayed at the Croke Park Hotel which is next to the huge soccer arena or as they would say, football. Their title makes way more sense than American Football, because in their football game they actually use their feet for 99.9% of the game. Who knew? Anyway, our hotel was beautiful and we were able to catch some internet there. We headed to Trinity College where we saw the Book of Kells and the library in the Long Room. All three of us loved it in the library the most because it had over 200,000 books all leather bound and beautiful, and Shaun, Micah and I love to read. We just sat on the benches in there for awhile taking it all in. We were a little bummed because they did not allow pictures and the three of us put together are probably some of the most picture taking people you'd ever meet.

After Trinity we went to the Temple Bar area which is way cool and we ate at a little restaurant called The Quay. In Ireland every place is a pub. The restaurant is like kind of the side attraction whereas the pub or bar part is always right in front.
Dublin was a great walkable city and we all were very impressed. Shaun had the brilliant idea of bringing a chalkboard and we put it to good use. Everywhere we went we wrote on our little chalkboard and of course took pictures. :) That night we went back to the hotel and crashed at 7:30. We're lame. Like seriously, but we were so dang blasted tired! I'll tell you more later for sure, but that's all for now!