I. LOVE. IRELAND. Part 1

I've been thinking for the last 2 days how to describe how Ireland affected me. I can't do it, but I can tell you I loved it and that I want to go back. It grabbed at my mind and heart and I ended up leaving a piece of myself back there. Could be because I have a great-grandmother that immigrated to the US from Belfast. She has a very interesting story but what I love now is the statement she made upon arriving in Utah, which is often termed Zion to members of the LDS church. She said, "If this is Zion, I wonder where Ireland ranks"? I totally get this now, you hear it called the Emerald Isle but people, this place is GREENY GREEN baby.

Things we had to adjust to right out of the gate: driving on the wrong side of the car and road. I had to put my hand on my mouth to keep from telling Mark, "your on the wrong side of the road".

Irish call their shopping carts, shopping trolley's, I think I'll forever use that term. They have amazing bread. They have good Diet Coke (it is not different, just the same, the same is comforting). Animals are not fenced in or gated, they just hang out with you. You get to experience every type of landscape within an hours drive: beach and cliff coastline, farm land (and yes the farm land is sectioned off by rock walls), and mountain ranges with lakes in the valley's. A-mazing. Their houses are so cute I could just pick them up and put them in my pocket. AND they have the coolest front doors EVER. They are every color you can imagine. We started counting the red ones, (why the red ones? do you even know who I am??) and I'll tell you later what we found.

I think European's in general REALLY believe this!

Mark and I made it a point to try to talk to the locals as much as possible. We loved that we could understand them, well almost all of them. They are so friendly, genuinely interested in you, not just your euro. They tell you, "mind yourself" as you say goodbye. Ireland is a country with a volatile past, this has not changed. There continues to be physical violence in the big cities, political unrest and that is combined with the weak economy that is now causing the young generation to leave Ireland to find work elsewhere (mainly Australia right now). College graduates do not have jobs. This means the family owned farms do not have a next generation to take over, they are failing even with government subsidies, which is why most of the B&B's (and there are ALOT of them) are farms/B&B's, restaurants, dairy grocer's and everything else to keep them afloat. If you stay in a B&B in Kerry, you are moving into the house with the family and they make you feel like your are their family. I love that!

Our first day we found a castle ruin and a stone ring fort. We had a blast climbing and exploring these artifacts. Look closely at the ring fort, there is no mortar holding all those stones in place! This picture of the outside of the fort is the backside to the next picture. The fort is dug deep into the mountain. Most of the ring forts date back to around 400 AD . . . seriously.



Walking up to the ring fort:
Mark thinking, "Hurry up woman and stop day-dreaming, we got's to get climbing"

The next day we went to Valentia Island and hiked to the top of the mountain and this was our reward:


After conquering the mountain, we went to a little ice cream shack (I'm not kidding, it was the size of a shed), had a little treat, then met the members of the dairy: a pig, chickens, bunnies, guinea pigs and a goat. McKenna will tell you THIS was her favorite part of Ireland, holding the bunny.
More to come . . .