Katie and I decided to fly out of Dusseldorf's "auxillary" airport. This is an airport that used to service only WWII aircrafts and is now used mainly for Ryanair airlines. We didn't realize how far away it was from actual Dusseldorf. This is an airport that is advertised at a Dusseldorf airport. I thought I would put up a map to show you just how close this airport actually is.
The circle on the lower right hand side is Dusseldorf, while the one to the upper left hand side is the airport. I made dots on some neighboring towns. The line I drew is to show you the country line. The airport is in the Netherlands, not even in the same country. Katie and I couldn't believe how far away this airport that said it was in Dusseldorf was. It took us about 3 hours on a bus to get to the aiport. Longer than it took us to get to Ireland.
Lucky for us the bus ride wasn't so bad. We were able to sleep on the bus which was nice because we got on the bus at 2:30 in the morning to make out 6:30 flight.
We arrived in Dublin at about 7:30. Eugenia wasn't going to get there until about 2:00 because she was flying out of Milan. We also couldn't get into our hostel until about that time anyway. We had alot of time to kill. Lucky for Katie and I though our good friend Trevor from Maclaughlin's was in Dublin at the time visiting his parents. He had told us that he would show us around Dublin when we got there. After letting him know that we had arrived he told us that he would be out to meet us as soon as he finished breakfast. He met up with us at about 1:30. Apparently the Irish prefer to enjoy and extend their breakfasts...
Trevor finally met up with us at the Temple Bar which is one of the most famous bars in Dublin and is conveniently located right next to our hostel!
This is a picture of us there. Katie and I were both exhausted from our early bus ride, followed by a plane ride, followed by wandering around Dublin for hours before finally meeting up here. Lucky for us Eugenia arrived as soon as we could get into our hostel. We decided to go there, drop off our stuff, and freshen up before meeting up with Trevor again.
After we had gotten our stuff settled and were ready to start out again we found a nice black Mercedes taxi and a personal chauffeur who happened to be a good friend of Trevors and a man we had met a few times back at MacLaughlins. This was a great surprise that none of us girls had expected.
The first place we went was like a sports bar. There were a lot of families there enjoying the football games that were on tv. We also got to meet up with Trevor's family. We had met his parents right before Christmas so it was nice to see them again. Trevor's mom had also just had heart surgery so it was really nice to see her and to see that she was doing well. This was one of the nicest families that I have met. They were very welcoming and warm. After we left this pub we went to Trevor's parents' house where the gave us shots of Bailey's and cupcakes made by his little niece.
At the end of the night Trevor took us to one last pub called the Autobahn. Yes that's right a German pub in Ireland. Which is really funny because we know Trevor from Maclaughlin's, an Irish pub in Germany. The night had been really fun. We got to go to some places that were not touristy at all. It was nice because there is no way we would have gotten to see those other places if it hadn't been for Trevor. Katie and I were also so grateful for his families hospitality. It was good to see that families in Europe aren't all like the German families we have been living with.
The next morning, after some much needed sleeping in we decided to go on a "hop on hop off" tour bus. This was great because we didn't have to walk much or use our brains much in order to see some of the great sights that Dublin has to offer. We got to see St. Patrick's Church (which costs 5 EUros to go inside, ridiculous), "the oldest pub in Dublin" called the Brazen Head, and where Embassy is. We also got to see the Guinness Brewery and storehouse which I personally thought was great. The one downside to the tour bus was that it seemed to play the song "Molly Malone" on repeat. In case you are unaware of this quaint little Irish ditty I have included a video of the Dubliners preforming it live. Hope you enjoy:
After we were finished with the tour bus we decided to call it an early night. We were going to be catching a bus to Galway the next day which was about a 3-4 hour bus ride. We left Dublin Tuesday morning. It seemed like such a shame to be leaving Dublin because the weather was so nice when we left. It only seemed to be getting worse and worse the closer we got the Galway. Luckily it was raining too hard once we got to our hostel in Galway. The hostel we were staying in was really nice. I mean it was a hostel so we were sharing rooms amd bathrooms with other girls, but everything was much cleaner. There was also multiple showers which was fabulous. Our hostel in Dublin had one shower for our 6 person room. Not fabulous.
After dropping our stuff off in our rooms we got directions to a restuarant that would be having live Irish music and dancing later on in the night. Once we started on our way it seemed like a hurricane had hit Galway. It was just our luck that as soon as we were out the door the weather decided to be awful. We had about 3/4 of a mile walk to the restaurant and man was this an awful walk. The wind was blowing harder then I have ever experienced it before. It was also pouring, monsoon style rain. I had bought a new (nice, supposed to hold up to most storms) umbrella right before leaving. This new wonderful umbrella last all of 10 minutes in the torrential downpour that was Galway.
This is a picture of us at the restuarant. We all had straight pretty hair before the picture. This was taken after we all had gone to the bathroom to dry our soaking wet hair off with the hand air dryers.
This was a nice restaurant. I think it was called Monroes. We stayed here for what seemed like hours. None of us wanted to go back out in the rain. We stayed until about 10pm. We were exhausted and were planning on getting up early to take a tour bus to a local town called Conemarra. Just as we were leaving though the Irish music and dancing started up. It was a little late for us.
The first town that we stopped in was named Cong. You may remember this town from seeing it in a little film entitled "The Quiet Man". This was a John Wayne film made in the early 1950's. There is a famous bridge from this movie which we also got a chance to see.
Here are a few pictures of the trip to Connemarra. The top left picture os of me outside of the Kylemore Abby. The top middle one is of the three of us in front of a burial mound on the burren. Tope right is the Kylemore Abby which used to be an old palace and got passed down from person to person and is now an Abby. The bottom left is in an old Friary and the one right next to it is Katie and I at the Friary.
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