The honeymoon

The day after the wedding, my family, tony's parents, and my best dolls stopped over for food and to open gifts ( i love that part). we also watched the video once more family dropped by- mostly because tony and i did not remember much of it.. we were laughing so hard. i told him to drink the wine of our loving cup ceremony and it wasn't time yet..then i couldn't stop laughing, and therefore was not focused on anything other than not bursting out into inappropriate laughter.... we didn't stay up too late because monday was when we left for the honeymoon...

I thought that i would be all ready to go on the honeymoon, like packed and everything days before, but that was just a dream... we got packed and raced out the door to the airport. Our flights went smoothly...and wouldn't you friggin know it, i fell asleep during the first movie- the lake house, the one i wanted to see!! i woke up just in time to see garfield 2 starting...yech..
anyway we got to Dublin super early in the morning ( 8:30 is really early considering we left at 5pm the night before.) luckily the hotel let us check in early. so we took an afternoon nap.
Woke up just in time to get some dinner and drinks...you are not supposed to hang out on the streets of dublin after it gets too dark, there are a lot of random acts of violence in that city... not like mugging and stuff, but drunk people picking fights with anyone... so we went back to our room after drinks and got ready for the next day...
we got up early had an irish breakfast, which is enough food for a million people...well not if you are a vegetarian...then you get toast and porriage, maybe yogurt and fruit...
but man, tony had like 4 different kinds of meat, it was weird...
we left the hotel and picked up our rental car...
we booked it on line in the states and it was like 268 bucks, once the mandatory irish driving tax ( it has the second highest rate of road fatalities-yikes) and all the other taxes, it was like 480 euro....that's a lot more than we bargained for, but whatev's it was out honeymoon and what choice did we have...
it took a bit to get used to driving on the wrong side of the car, and the wrong side of the road...tony had to remind me every so often that i was on the wrong side.

So headed out for Galway, thanks to our cab driver's suggestion... we were going to head down the coast and then to Galway, but he said that there was more to see the way he suggested. so we did it...
and he was right... it was amazing, we drove across the whole country in 3 hours...
stopped when we got to Galway and had dinner. Then we found a little bed and breakfast, dropped our stuff off and headed into town. we walked to a few pubs and had a few drinks and then back to the b and b.... these things are not meant for night people....breakfast is usually from 8-10. so we got up early and got breakfast. went back to the room got ready and headed to connemara. it is on the east coast and it is beautiful... we went to a few castles that we couldn't afford to stay at, so we had tea there instead.

the first one we went to was really cool, but snooty mc stuck up, so we just used the bathroom and left. The next one was one that we actually considered staying at before we got to ireland. it was kinda hard to find, but once we did it was really cool. we weren't dressed scrubby, but we asked what time dinner was, and the hostess said " umm we don't have an openings tonight for dinner, you might want to go to the next town." hmmm, so we had tea there instead and headed to roundstone for dinner. it was a quiet little town, a little creepy- quiet.

after dinner we went back to galway. i have to say that driving home from the grand canyon to flagstaff in elk season in the dark is scary, but this was probably the scariest drive i ever took.

The roads are, if you are lucky, about 15 feet across, no street lights, very curvy, random sheep in the raod, along with horses, goats and donkeys and an awful lot of people are hammered by 5 pm... here are a few examples of the streets-

Once we got back to galway we were going to go out to more pubs, but i was starting to feel sick...so we walked to an "off license" which pretty much means a liquor store and got some libations to have in our room... here is what happens when you feel like crap on your honeymoon in ireland, you drink whiskey to feel better....and guess what it worked!!! i really felt like a million bucks the next day..

so we headed out to the cliffs of moher..on the way there, we stopped off at a few castles and ruins, but people own them. Like when they bought the land that their 'real' house is on, they got the castle as a bonus. so a lot of them were closed!
we got to the city a little late, so we drove to lahinch and got another b and b and then went to dinner...and an intersting dinner it was... there was a very drunk man at the bar, cursing and taking his clothes off and trying to smoke in the pub ( all work places are non smoking in ireland! NICE!!!) turns out he owned the place...it was sad, but a little bit funny. we stayed there and were going to wait for music, but the kids never showed up so we went to another pub and there was no music there either! NUTS!!
the next day we went to the cliff- they are beautiful...and it is where the chase scene was filmed for the princess bride!!! one of my favorites!!!

after that we headed to the dingle pennisula... meanwhile, all this driving was only about 2-3 hours a day and we were almost to the bottom of the coutry!!! it is smaller than michigan!

it was beautiful.. we pretty much did the same thing every day... drove to a bed and breakfast, got dinner and then got drinks.. in the morning we did what ever the locals, or our book said would be cool.. in this case we drove around slea head. it is a 'highway' if you can call it that that goes around the dingle pennisula... on it there are amazing ruins from as far back as 1000 bc...it was so cool to be able to stand inside of a house like structure that housed people that long ago...

The next day we drove to kerry, and drove the ring of kerry, which is pretty much every landscape from rolling green mountains, to palm trees ( yes there are palm trees in ireland!! and lots of sheep) to ocean views like you have never seen before.

Not to mention sheep that live on the front porch of someone's house.. tony and i were laughing so hard that we had to turn around take another picture of this..
After the ring of kerry we wanted to head into cork and then make our way back to dublin...we drove to tipperary town in tipperary county for a few reasons 1. there is a song about tipperary 2. i used to drink at the pub when i was under age and then again when i was legal 3. there were a lot of ruins there...

the town itself was really dodgy.. infact we were nervous just to stop and go pee there.. there were teens hanging in the street throwin the stink eye.. it also didn't help that we had just heard a news report that the legal age for being able to prosicute children as adults was raised from 8 to 12!!! some of those kids are so badly behaved that they have already been to jail by the time they are 12....so needless to say, we drove to another town. cashel.. which proved to be a great place to be... there was a castle there that was around right at the time of chirstianity...it was a castle for a king, then later given to the monks ( after the plague when there was no one around to appreciate it)

after that we went to a stonehenge like place. a circle of 15 stones that has been around since bc times... soooo coool...

we had to get back to dublin to return our car and get home, so that was the next step...

we got to the airport on time, got on the place on time, but did not leave on time, we sat on the tarmack for 45 minutes, thus making us late for our connecting flight. we got trapped in chicago for nearly 5 hours and finally got home.
thankfully my mom and dad love the crap out of us and stayed up to pick us up, even though they both had to work in the am ( thanks guys)

the next day we had folks over to watch our honeymoon pics on dvd, kind like the slide show, only with booze....i am sure that very soon i will be sending them out via imagestation. until then...enjoy