So, here are the first few photos. My family (my dh's mom "Nana", dh's dad "Papa", dh's sister and her husband and their little boy) flew into Houston where we all met up. Then we flew to Newark for a 4 hour layover and then on to Ireland. (Above is a photo of Alex & her cousin playing in the Newark airport. He absolutely adores her!)
Our first view over Ireland was clouds and more clouds. But, it was beautiful! Over the highlands, the clouds almost looked like waterfalls. My camera was packed away but I finally knew I HAD to get some photos from the plane so I dug it out. Here is the River Shannon along with some houses and some of the beautiful Emerald Isle.
Most of our view (when there were breaks in the clouds) were of scenes like this.... lots of different patches of different colors of green. We had left Houston at about 9 am and it was now about 7 am in Ireland, though we felt like it was 1 am. Alex & I had only slept about 2.5 hours on the plane rides, but we knew we needed to try to adjust our bodies. (We took about 4 hour naps later on in the morning.)
We had about a 30 minute ride from Shannon to Limerick, which was our home base. Alex, Nana & I took a cab while the others took the rental car. Our cab driver was very friendly (as are most people in Ireland!) and informative. We even drove past our first 2 castles!!! And, what a strange feeling to be riding down the "wrong" side of the road.
We were also surprised at how different grocery shopping was. We didn't know you needed to bring your own bag. There might have been a place in that first store to buy reusable bags, but we didn't see any. Later, we did buy some of those bags. Anyway, we had a bunch of groceries and we had to just put them back in the cart and carry them in the house without sacks.
Later that day, we went out to explore Limerick. I need to finish some laundry and pack now, but I plan on blogging a lot in the next few days!
Can't wait to see more and hear more about Ireland.
ReplyDeleteI never flew with a plane and I don't know what it's like, so the pictures from above seem much beautiful to me, thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear that y'all are back. Those photos from the plane are just beautiful. I can't wait to see more! I want to see some of those castles. :0)
ReplyDeleteHa! I guess my last comment is redundant. I should have read these in order. I've gotten to the point where I always bring my own bags to stores now. I found some really cute ones on Amazon called Envirosax. They're great because they fit in my purse.
ReplyDeleteAhh, the Emerald Isle. Oh, it looks so beautiful, just as I knew it would. I'm so glad you got those shots from the plane.
Alex looks like she was having a lot more fun than she thought she would. It's so cute to see her playing the big sis to her cousin.