So, I got married in May, and we booked a trip to Ireland for our honeymoon. We got back about 10 hours ago..here’s the first day’s pictures! 
We flew out from DFW to New York. The weather was nice and the clouds were big and fluffy.
Here we are, landing in New York. New York was a big disappointment, and not a good start to the honeymoon, let me tell you. We exited the aircraft directly onto the tarmac (rather than taking a concourse to the gates). Some of us have been forced to check our carry-on baggage because the plane was full, and we were supposed to collect it here, on the tarmac, before entering the airport. Delta calls this “valet baggage check” or some such. We were waiting for our bags with about a dozen other people for about 5 seconds tops when some chick from Delta starts screaming at us: “You can’t stand here! You need to move! Come on! Come on! Move move move!” She was totally rude. We ignored her, waited for our bags, got them, and entered the airport.
We entered Terminal 2, which was hot and crowded. We decided to stop at an airport restaurant and grab a bite to eat. We waited over an hour for service. We got some nachos, a hot dog, a hamburger, and a couple of beers.
Now, granted the hot dog was listed as a “kobe beef hot dog”, the burger did have a grilled pepper speared on top, and the fries had fried rosemary and parmasean cheese, but we really were a bit shocked by the bill.
Not counting souvenir purchases, this is about what we spent in Ireland every day, for a couple of meals each, appetizers, and a couple rounds of beer at each meal. We should have saved the money in New York and eaten at Wendy’s
Notice the time the check was printed: 4:05pm. We landed at 1:08pm and almost immediately ate since we got up at 6am and skipped breakfast on the way out to the airport. Yeah, we weren’t that impressed with JFK. After our terrible experience here, we decide to just nap/rest in the airport lounges and not venture out into the city itself.
Yay, we’re back on the plane, this time heading over the Atlantic to Shannon, Ireland. Happy to have JFK behind us The flight was like 6 hours long, and we tried to sleep during most of it.
Sunrise occurred over Shannon as we neared our arrival.
Landing at Shannon Airport. Even on the approach, the countryside was simply awe-inspiring. This really helped set the mood for our week in Ireland! Pictures really don’t do justice to how beautiful it was to fly over this gorgeous country.
This is the drive to our rental cottage. We didn’t get many pictures, because it was my first day driving on the left side of the road and it was absolutely terrifying. In Ireland, evidently the center divider lane (when you have one!) is merely a suggestion, and we were almost run off the road several times by tour buses and other large vehicles that just didn’t fit in one lane. These pictures were during the more sedate parts of the drive where we weren’t screaming in terror.
Ireland’s major highways have a roundabout system rather than the exit ramp system I’m used to. I’ve heard horror stories about driving the roundabouts, but I really loved them. They made switching between highways really simple, and if you missed your exit, you just go around again and catch it the next time. The highways were nice and big, and easy to drive, but it was once we got on N67 that the terror began. It didn’t help that we got lost by taking a wrong turn at Ennistimon. We went through Lahinch, Miltown Malbay, and Cregg before realizing that we were going the wrong way.
Our landlady called N67 the “corkscrew road up the coast” which is a really good description of it. We went for nearly an hour on it in the wrong direction, and it was where most of our terror occurred. At one point we got behind a tractor moving about 5 mph, and my wife absolutely refused to let me pass it so that we could calm down and start again. It probably didn’t help that I was hugging the left side of the road the entire time because I wasn’t used to the steering wheel being in what would be the passenger seat in the USA. Shifting with the wrong hand wasn’t that big of a deal, surprisingly.
Eventually, we got turned around, went back up the road and went around the Cliffs of Moher looking for Lisdoonvarna. We somehow went in a big circle and so we stopped at the Stonecutter’s Kitchen restaurant to call our landlady since we had seen it twice already in our travels. The Luck of the Irish was with us, as the restaurant was directly next to the Clare Jam Shop Road, which led to our cottage–so named because it was the road that had the jam shop on it, naturally.
So we made it to the cottage! The yard was full of cows. Our landlords didn’t own these cows. They rented them, in order to keep the grass down. We thought that it was kind of strange you could even rent cows for that purpose!
The last picture is a shot from our kitchen out the window. Past the cow, a few hundred yards away, is the ocean! And beyond that is Inis Oirr, the smallest of the Aran Islands. This is basically the same view we had from the master bedroom. Nice! I’ve lived in Houston, and spent a lot of time in Galveston. I was expecting that, being so close to the ocean, that it would smell like salt, seaweed, and slightly fishy. The air here smelled nothing like that! It was clean, crisp and lovely.
While the cottage was ‘modern’, many of the buildings around it weren’t. Behind our cottage were some sheds for laundry, rubbish, etc, and most of these were built out of stone, which was really neat. In the yard next door was the remains of a stone house, and all that was left was the corner of the building, completely built out of stone. We found this kind of thing all over Ireland: Ruins and other remains of buildings from times long gone.
After gathering up our courage, we went further down the Jam Shop Road and into Doolin. We had a couple of pints at O’Connor’s pub, along with fish and chips and fried brie. Yum! This picture is taken from across the street at a picnic table. At every pub we ate at, there was outdoor seating off the premises where you could take your food and beer. This was nifty because in the US, naturally, all alcohol has to stay on premises. From where we were standing, if you did a 180 degree turn, all you saw was raw Irish countryside:
These are two pictures of the stream you could see from the picnic table across the street from the pub. After eating, we decided that after traveling all day, we were ready to call it a day.
About 3/4 of a mile from our cottage was Doonagore Castle, between our cottage and Doolin. This castle is now a private residence, so we couldn’t get up close to take pictures or go inside. But we stopped on the road to take a couple of pictures.
From the back yard, you can also see Crab Island, which is a very small bit of land just off of the Irish coast near the Aran Islands. The sun was just beginning to set as we took these pictures. It was around 10:00pm local time.
Happy to be here!
Our first Irish sunset
