Ireland – April 16th

After our trip to Stockholm we kept in touch with Deborah and Shaun – emailing back in forth with pictures from the trip, etc. They reiterated their offer to show us around if we ever ended up in their part of Ireland, so we decided to try to make it happen. We knew we wanted to utilize a long weekend (ideally during the summer for a better chance of nice weather) so Morgan wouldn’t have to take any days off of work and by the time we took out weekends when we’re back in the states or that they had things going on.. we were left with just one weekend – Easter weekend- and that was only a month away. But, thankfully we were able to get plane tickets and we were all set for our trip to southern Ireland!  They both live in Cork (though Shaun would be quick to point out he is from Kerry!), so we spent the first two nights in Cork before doing a driving trip around the coastline of County Cork, the Ring of Kerry, Dingle and Killarney. Rental cars in Ireland are really expensive, plus they drive on the wrong side of the road, plus the roads we were on were super narrow and winding- so this trip literally wouldn’t have happened without Deborah and Shaun’s generosity. We were able to see so many more cities and viewpoints with them than if we had been on a big tour bus- it was an amazing trip!  Hopefully we’ve talked them into a visit to Germany in the near future!

We had a late flight from Amsterdam to Cork, so when we got there it was already 9:30. We kicked off the weekend with a quick drink at Sin é (meaning “That’s it” in Irish – referencing the funeral home next door). Deborah and I had a shandy (a beer mixed with a soft drink/juice/etc) – in this case we had a Kilkenney and raspberry and Morgan had a regular Kilkenny. The Sin é had a really nice atmosphere and had live music so it was pretty packed. It was a great start to our long weekend in Ireland!