Botanical Gardens (Click to view)

We finally made the trip to Ireland, where my sister has been living for, oh, the last 8 or 9 years. We stayed for three weeks, and travelled around Donegal, Northern Ireland, Galway and the Cliffs of Moher, as well as spending substantial time in Dublin and surrounds, where my sister lives.



Below is a Google Map of our trip to Ireland; I didn't have the GPS on all the time, so I will be adding some map points (Tory Island, I'm looking at you!), but this is pretty much it. I'll also be adding some way points with picture links to the photo sets in the future, so you can click on the map to see our photos from there (like I finally did for our US trip).

[Someday, really, I'll do this...]



We had a great time in Ireland; the weather was just like the clichéd jokes about waiting twenty minutes if you don't like it -- every day the forcast was the same: scattered sunshine with showers, chance of precipitation 30% (meaning it would rain for 30% of the day at different points). Bring an umbrella.



By Brasilian standards, the Latin name "Hibernia" is well deserved, as the temperature was only in the mid teens (Celsius), even at the height of summer when we were there. One day there was a heat wave when it got up to 21°C!



But the rain makes everything very green, and it doesn't last long. And the daylight went on forever -- in Donegal we watched (or tried to watch) the sunset at 22:30.



Highlights of our trip include the Giant's Causway up in Northern Ireland sort of near Port Stewart (the green blob on the map over the "r" in "Stewart" -- zoom in on it), even in the rain, Donegal (Zoom in on the map around Bunbeg to see where all we hiked (and hitch-hiked back)), the Cliffs of Moher, bicycling in Galway, and our final day in which my brother-in-law John took us through a fantastic tour of the Boyne Valley, including Newgrange (which I always thought was a bit over-hyped till I actually went inside it) and its sisters Knowth and Dowth, and the Hill of Tara, Monasterboyce, old Melifont Abbey, and more towers on hills where St. Patrick did something significant than you can shake a stick at (zoom in around Drogheda). And even though we spent over a week just in Dublin, we barely scratched the surface, as we discovered on our last day as we zipped through a whole bunch of areas we hadn't even been to.



We'll be back...