Ireland

  Our trip starts at the airport with a mission to taste a Guinness in America and then immediately upon landing taste a Guinness in Ireland.   As we walked throughout terminal 4 in United's many gates and restaurants looking for Guinness, to no avail they had zero Guinness in ANY of the restaurants.  We were slightly nervous as we landed in Chicago, but after our trek to the international terminal we lucked out at the "Bar" -

  The Guinness tastes as I remember and imagine a Guinness tastes.  I wonder what its like in the heart of Ireland!  The flight over was great and honestly the best staff on a plane I've ever had.  They were all Irish and the entire time were joking around, smiling, laughing.  At one point I challenged one flight attendant to a Karate Kid form competition and he ended up having a better form as was voted.  From selling free tea for no reason, to just cracking jokes, and being jolly it was a hilarious flight.  We departed at 7pm our time and landed in Ireland at 8:15am.
  Everything Irie in IRIEland as Candace called it as we stepped into line at the tourism entrance to the country.  "YAY More stamps on the passports!"  Candace says.  Off to The Mercantile Inn & Pub for a pint of Guinness.  Relief at last as the fabled taste all of my friends have been bragging about who have been to Ireland hits my tastebuds.  It DOES taste better, but not amazing or anything, just pretty darn good and less bitter in the finish and aftertaste.  Sawyer would love it.

  As we checked into our room, we couldn't help but compare the place to Hotel Congress in Tucson.  SO similar, with just the same old school feel & lighting with all the various bars and rooms, and good food (Yummy Local Ireland Meat and potatoes, Carrot soup, etc).  One difference was the fact that the POWER in the room didn't work... until you drop your keycard into a special Power-Initiation-Slot located right at the entrance of the room.
  Of course at this point we've taken a "nap" on the plane and have been going therefore all night so we felt like getting some sleep.  BUT - How are you going to acclimate the jetlag doing that!?!  So we checked our guides and some of the pictures that I took with my cell phone off of a Travel Book Guide of Europe.  It turned out to be handy stuff as we found some cool Restaurants, Pubs, etc that we wanted to check out.  Off we went to walk around the city.  1st stop - Trinity University.  Cool spot with some nice architecture -

  We then headed to the Stag to grab a couple drinks in another attempt to keep awake.  It did actually help! We headed to the Dublin Castle and Library next.  The Castle was Huge and the Library had a special Japanese Scroll on file that was unrolled out with a story written on it which you followed from Right to Left.  Pretty interesting looking at all the ancient stuff we were seeing.   Again, to stay awake, we headed to the Globe, another Irish pub, for more Guinness and Irish Wiskey.  From there we ate at Cornucopia, a super-awesome vegetarian restaurant that we later hit up again because it was so good, and then went to tour the Temple District, a sweet shopping & pub area.  Didn't drink much more though, because we were already pretty spaced out from being up for a couple days at this point, and instead headed back to Mercantile to our room.  We ended up watching an Irish Cooking Show for about 30 minutes, but it was so interesting that we had to turn it off to get to sleep. 8pm ZzzzzZZzz.

  MORNING time. Up and at the tour guide location @ 6:50am.  Boom - A whole-day tour extravaganza of Ireland, which visited 3 out of the 4 provinces of Ireland.  All the way west we headed towards the coast and the Cliffs of Moher, a 702 foot cliff range at its height, stretching 8 kilometers long in total.  (for scale - notice the people at the top of the cliff)

Along the way our Tour guide rocked it out with tons of Irish songs and narration!  From the history of Rugby and Irelands 60-year conquest to have a Grand Slam in rugby, to the wars with English&Viking oppression, to magical Irish fairy tales, to the difference between Irish and Scottish whiskey and the general proper drinking of whiskey (or whisky as the Scottish spell it) and certainly never drinking it with coke which RUINS it as they say :),  To also showing us the field that Braveheart was filmed at and talking for 10 minutes about the movie and a couple other Irish movies as he called them, to making kissing sounds every time he saw the word Guinness and describing the voices in his head that whisper Guinness to him all the time.  I've gathered that the Irish are extremely proud of anything that they can lay claim to which I think its great.  They are very passionate people, and life seems simpler and less about $, and more about having a grand old time as well as being competitive and proud of your work, heritage, artistry and skill.  In-between talking about all of these various things, our tour-guide was constantly singing to us.  Irish songs of course, but for some reason when he started singing it would Knock Candace right out!  Every 20 minutes Candace got a little nap in, and it hit me a couple of times too.  We actually recorded one of the lullabies too for our potential future use!  At one point on the 2.5 ride back from the whole day, while reading our books during about a 40 minute lull of silence Candace was reading the whole time and wide awake, but then our guide started talking again and literally 1 minute later when I looked over, Candace was already asleep!
  We also, on the tour, got a chance to see the Castle from Robin Hood, from which King John ruled with his cruelty.  I just imagined myself being there in that time period, since you could stand on the bridge and look at the castle with the bridge, neither of which have changed, along the river and just imagine:

  We saw tons of sheep and cows in sectioned off green plots of land.  I decided that if I were to be a cow, I would like it to be in Ireland =).   We also stopped off at one of the rockiest places in all Ireland and got a shot on the water too:

 I was boulder-rock-climbing castles and cliffs and such all day, and almost climbed to the top of a Monastery at the end of the tour.

  Back at the Mercantile, we got changed and decided to see Ireland nightlife!  What a blast we had ending at around 4am!

  Today we checked out St Patrick's Cathedral, which was built in 1208.  Pretty amazing architecture, and even cooler if you've read the book Pillars of The Earth, which has a lot of Cathedral building in it and is set around that time period.

Chair used by King Williams III when he came to Saint Patrick's to give thanks to God for his victory over King James at the Battle of the Byrne, 1690:

We then went to the Guinness Factory, which was massive.  7 Floors, and they produce some 3 million pints of Guinness a day.  It had an amazing 360 view of the city once you go through the tour and get to the top.  Descriptive writing on the glass all the way around the circular bar tells you what you are looking at.  Very cool,

This post was done yesterday but with the net connection being funny, it wouldn't post.
  Today we fly out to England... Excited to see James who I met in Kindergarten when he moved over to America and haven't seen since 5 years ago when he moved back. We'll meet up in London where he is staying at and you'll hear from me again a bit after that!

~J&C