Reflections on the Emerald Isle, part 2

Ireland is, too, green.

As the plane prepared for a landing in Dublin, I looked out the window and all I saw was white.  I'm not talking about clouds, I'm talking about snow.  SNOW!  Five to six inches of snow.  Here we'd been talking for two months about seeing green in the midst of our winter and I look out the window to see five to six inches of snow covering as far as the eye could see.  Well.  Dismay quickly turned to joy anyway because I thought, "People and pubs.  We are really here for the people and pubs." I wasn't going to let the snow diminish our trip in anyway.  Turns out, I didn't have to.  On our first afternoon, the rain came and washed the snow away.  We never saw snow again.  While it wasn't as green as it would have been at a different time of year, it was still green and it was still lovely.

At Glendalough (glen-dah-lock)

At the Rock of Cashel

Looking upon the town of Cashel

 They aren't kidding when they say the roads in Ireland are narrow.

The pick-up.

We picked up our rental car with relative ease and headed to Kilkenny for our first night.  Jim drove.  Yikes, Jim drove.  Jim drove on the wrong side of the road while sitting on the wrong side of the car.  And drove a stick shift.  Jim drove a stick shift with his left hand.  Oy, what an adventure.  Jeff was fine.  Jim was fine.

Don't let the picture fool you, he's just as nervous as the rest of us.

Tami and I were not fine and emitted many "eeks" and "ooooo-eeeeeee-aaaaayyyyyeeee!!!!!" along the way.  I may have also, um, calmly told Jim to slow down.  There are stone walls and fences that line the roads and I think we smoothed the edges of many of them.  I don't know how there weren't scratch marks all along the side of our car.  Reach out and touch someone?  Heck, I could have reached out and touched a sheep.

Don't let the smiles fool you.  They She's a wreck.

For the next three days, Jim ignored my nagging about his driving.  Yup, he just blew me off.  I thought we were going to slide off the road many a time.  He didn't care and just said, "We're fine, we're fine."  If we weren't traveling with people we didn't know (initially) very well, he would NOT have been fine.  I probably would have hit him with something a time or two.

They say they were exhausted from no sleep for 24+ hours.  I say this was a great way to deal with Jim driving on the wrong side of the road.