Ireland Day 1 - Dublin

With marriage comes change and one of those early changes is moving my former photography blog over to one dedicated to sharing my adventures with Annmarie with our friends and family. Obviously we currently have a lot to share as we are in the midst of our honeymoon in the absolutely breathtaking Ireland. In one day increments I plan to share a brief recap of our amazing trip (and share some pictures).

We actually left the USA on Monday, September 12th with a flight out of Richmond at 4:00 PM. We routed through Charlotte and then were off to Dublin. All in all, a very easy and quick trip getting us into Dublin at 7:00 AM Tuesday (2:00 AM EST). Here is a pic of us at the airport in Richmond before heading out for our flight and a picture of an amazing sunset we were able to witness from the plane.  Actually, we also got to see the sunrise from the plane as well even though we were only on the plane 6.5 hours, an advantage to flying east!

Our first fun story comes when we were passing through customs in Dublin. We get up to the counter and the Customs Agent asks why we are in Ireland. We both proclaim in unison "honeymoon!". The agent, as serious as can be, says "ma'am, please step back from the counter." Am steps back and he proceeds to look her up and down. He then exclaims, "hmm, she doesn't look pregnant to me." Classic!

We picked up our rental car (a really cool little Hyundai i10) and hit the road. Turns out Am is an ambidextrous driver. She picked up on driving on the left hand side from the moment we pulled out of the rental car parking lot. She has done an amazing job...even says it is a ton of fun. Driving from the airport to Ariel House gave us our first glimpse of an Ireland city. Am tells me it looks a lot like the part of Philadelphia that she grew up in.  Here is Am driving our cool little car:

We pulled into Ariel House, our first bed & breakfast (and the only one we booked in advance) around 9:00 which was obviously WAY before check-in time. I was hoping we would get lucky (the whole Luck of the Irish thing) and they would have a room available that we could crash in. We didn't sleep on the plane so we were exhausted. I received good news and bad news. The bad news was that our room wasn't available. The good news was that the reason they couldn't give us a room was that we had been upgraded for free to their nicest room since it was our honeymoon! We could have checked into a lesser room at this point but decided we wanted the nice room!  Here is Am at Ariel House:

The hotel manager let us eat some breakfast and then gave us some advice on what we could do to kill some time while we waited for our room to be available. Here is a picture of us eating breakfast at Ariel House:

We headed out of Ariel and walked a couple blocks to catch The Dart to Trinity College. At Trinity, we were able to view the exhibit for The Book of Kells which is an early copy of the four gospels. This was pretty cool but, as previously mentioned, we were exhausted and being in a dark room reading stuff off walls had us both ready to fall asleep standing up. As we exited the exhibit, we walked into a massive room holding over 300,000 of Trinity Library's oldest books. It was AWESOME! My first thought was that my brother, Dave, would be in heaven. Every volume was super old and they stretched from floor up a good 40 feet. It was really unbelievable. We could have caught The Dart back to Ariel House but decided instead to walk the 25 minutes back. It was very enjoyable but we missed a turn and I really thought we might have to just take a nap in a park or something on the way. Here are pictures of us on The Dart and Am in front of the library:

When we got back to Ariel, we found that our room truly was fantastic:

We crashed for a solid 3 1/2 hours and then got around to go to Bellamy's for dinner. This was our first Irish Pub and we both chowed down on some fish and chips. My favorite part was mushed peas! Yep, mushed peas! They were delicious! From there it was a short walk back to the hotel and off to sleep.  Overall, day one was a fantastic start to our trip!