Where to start?

Ben and I just got back from a 3week trip to Europe and came back with over 1400 pictures. Since no one in their right mind wants to look at that many pictures we've been trying to cut them down, but it takes so long to go through that many pictures.

So I've been trying to figure out how to present the pictures and our trip on my blog; first I thought I'll do a day by day blog for the next 21 days representing each day of the trip and showing pictures from each day. Then I realized there was no way I wanted to commit to 21 consecutive days blogging. Then I thought I could do a blog post per city we visited. But then I realized that was 15+ cities and again I didn't want to do that much. So then I decided I would do 3 blog posts -1 for each country we visited. However, that means I have to cut a lot of pictures out in a mild attempt to make the posts not too long.

With all that said, the first country we visited was Ireland. We flew into Dublin, stayed there for 3 nights and then spent the next several days traveling and staying in Cork, Galway, and Blarney.

We stayed in hostels while we were in Ireland which means we were staying in a room with anywhere from 4-10 people per room. This is our hostel in Dublin.

Here Ben and I are in front of Dublin Castle.

Right next to the castle were these buildings painted cool colors. I have no idea what the buildings are used for but I liked the way they looked. This is St Patrick's Cathedral. Since we were still on West Coast time we woke up really early the first day which allowed this picture without people in it since normal people were still sleeping at that time.

My sister Brittany also came on the trip with us. We saw a postcard in Dublin that had doors on it, because there are a lot of cool doors in Dublin so Brittany and I started taking pictures of the cool doors we saw with the intent to scrapbook a page of just doors from our trip. Here we got 3 cool doors in 1 picture.

And of course a trip to Dublin isn't complete without a tour of the Guinness Storehouse. Here we are in the tasting room. Don't tell but I thought the beer was gross. It was cool to take the tour because at the end of the tour you go into a bar that is about 10 stories high with windows that provide a 360 degree view of the city.

Another church in Dublin with beautiful landscaping.

After a few days in Dublin we took a bus to Cork. This is the church we found there.

A cool door we found in Cork.

From Cork we took a bus to Blarney to see the Blarney Castle and LOOK at the Blarney stone. I know you're supposed to kiss it but after being warned by a friend of all the germs on the stone I figured I'm already chatty enough and didn't need to be endowed with the gift of gab from the stone as legend states.
The view from the top of the castle.

Ireland reminded me a lot of Oregon with its hilly green view. This is a view from within the castle.

Our next stop was Galway where Ben found this cool hat in one of the souvenir shops. As you may have guessed by our coats and beanies it was quite cold in Ireland but mostly dry.

In Galway we took a bus tour through the Burren and onto the Cliffs of Moher. These rocks mark the grave of 30+ people who, according to our bus driver, were determined to have died from arthritis (I think that's what he said -given his Irish accent he was a little difficult to understand). However, that same bus driver also told us we would never meet a bus driver who wasn't crazy. The roads are so narrow and we commented on how impressed we were with his driving skills. He bragged that he hadn't lost a side view mirror yet -but he'd only been on the job for 2 months!

The Cliffs of Moher:

From Galway we took a bus ride back to Dublin and flew out of Dublin to Scotland. Our adventure (we stopped calling our trip a vacation about 3 days into the trip when we realized how much walking we were doing and how exhausted we were at the end of the day. We figure by the end of the trip we likely walked over 60 miles!) through Scotland blog post will be coming soon...