The weekend before last, we took a short road trip to Wisconsin to visit Brad's grandparents for his grandfather's 88th birthday. The family was all very excited to see us and to talk about the upcoming baby, but what surprised me the most were all the questions about our Ireland photos. "Why haven't we seen any Ireland photos yet" was the question of the day.

My standard answer to that question is, "yeah, I know. I really need to get those sorted through. I just took so many photos, I'm overwhelmed."

But that weekend the family brought up a really good point. If I don't do something about those photos before the baby's born, nobody will ever see them.

So I give you photos from our April trip to Ireland.

Day 1. I already posted these photos to Flickr (and there's a little bit more commentary about each photo in Flickr), but I don't think I'd linked to them in the blog:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Day 1 we flew into Dublin. We arrived early in the morning (7:30am) after an all-night flight (after a layover in New York). I slept a tiny bit on the plane, but we were tired. Due to our scheduling snafoo, we'd paid for our room for the night before (darn time zones), but it worked out to our advantage. Our hostess insisted we eat the breakfast we'd paid for as soon as we arrived and, stomachs full, we collapsed into the bed we'd paid for and slept off a bit of the jet lag.

After our midmorning nap, we took a stroll through Dublin. We were staying within walking distance of all these places we photographed. Our B&B was near the spire and we very quickly began to think of the neighborhood as our home in Dublin.

We visited Trinity College and looked at the Book of Kells and the beautiful library there (unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures of either of those places). There was a rousing game of cricket going on at Trinity College. I had no idea what they were doing, but it all looked terribly civilized. We also walked to St. Stephen's Green and appreciated the fantastic tulips and daffodils that were in full bloom. A few trees were blooming as well, but spring had just barely begun and we didn't get to experience the quintessential green of Ireland.

After wandering around some of the shops near Trinity College, we began to get tired and cold (we hadn't yet learned about Irish weather) and headed back to our neighborhood, where we stopped at the bus depot and bought our ticket to Galway for the next day.

Day 2 of our Ireland trip...

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

On the second day of our trip, Brad and I took a bus across the country from Dublin on the east coast to Galway on the west coast. Galway is a lovely city on the sea, a city with a very different feel to it than Dublin. The bus ride took a few hours, but I didn't mind since I was still taking in the newness of the landscape and the novelty of being on a different continent. I noticed the little differences between Ireland and home: slate roofs, piles of ancient stones making walls criscrossing the landscape, more sheep than people. As we approached the west coast, the landscape became more rocky and rugged.

Our B&B was on the outskirts of the city, near the resort town of Salthill, but within decent walking distance of Galway city. About an hour's walk along the beautiful promenade. We walked that way more times than my legs could quite deal with during our few days in Galway, and ended up taking cabs a few times towards the end of our stay. The day we arrived was alternately beautiful and sunny, then hailing, then beautiful and sunny again, then rainy. Typical Ireland weather, from what we heard. We walked into town and took lots of pictures of the famous Galway swans. My dad is always trying to photograph elusive swans in Minnesota, so I found it pretty surprising that these ones acted more like the ducks of the lakes back home.

We walked through Shop Street and High Street, buzzing with activity and pubgoers and street musicians and stopped at a pub called the King's Head for our first real Irish Guinness. I tried mushy peas, which tasted better than they sound. We didn't do anything very exciting on our first day in Galway, just enjoyed being in a new city in a new country on a new continent.

That's all the photos I have for now. I'll try to get to day 3 pretty soon...

[11/21/08: Sorry, I had to disable comments on this entry because there was too much comment spamming going on.]