We were about to leave the Chicago
airport at 3:50pm on our way to Ireland. We were very excited as we sat
in the terminal listening to many Irish accents chatting away. After
filing through the line to board the plane, we found our seats, and hunkered
down for the long flight. The guy sitting behind us was a bit annoying, but we ate some melatonin gummies (supposed to help you sleep on the plane as well as help with jetlag) and dozed.
We arrived in Dublin at 4:50am, just
in time for basically nothing to be open. We found the Hertz car rental
desk, and dropped the serious cash to pay for the hefty insurance
required. The guy handed me the keys and said, "have fun in Ireland."
I asked if I should do any practice driving around the airport and he said,
"just drive on the left." ...Um, ok. So I drove out of
the car park and hopped on the interstate. On the left.
We drove south of Dublin to Great
Sugar Loaf, a small mountain near the city.
Our GPS wouldn’t turn on, and the cell phone signal was spotty, so our
mobile-wifi thing wouldn’t work very well either. We eventually found the car park for the
mountain and pulled in. We walked for
about 10 minutes before we saw the only other two people there, and their
dog. The next 30 minutes to the top were
a rocky scramble, but at least we didn’t have to make fools of ourselves in
front of anyone. We reached the summit
of Great Sugar Loaf in what I will describe as gale-force winds and bitter cold
(it probably was about 45 degrees and 30mph wind). We couldn’t stay to celebrate too much as we
could not stand up for fear of blowing off the mountain, so we snapped a few
pictures and made the descent.
We drove from there to Powerscourt
Waterfall, but it was still only 8am, and it was still closed until 9:30 or so,
and we moved on. We headed to
Glendalough (pronounced Glen-da-lock) where we saw the monastic settlement founded
by St. Kevin. We walked on some of the
trails there, took a bunch of pictures, and realized we were very tired still.
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