TIM'S TRIP TO IRELAND!!

Well, I have listened to my wife tell me ALL day today thatI needed to post the few pictures that I took from my trip to Ireland. Here is what I have. Sorry that I did not take more, but when you are all alone; a) you are forced to drive on the wrong/left side of the road (if you are from the UK/Europe, I guess that it is the correct side), b) you find that there are no street signs in the cities/towns & nobody knows where anything in the towns are (I stopped to ask for directions and nobody knew where anything was), c) it gets dark about the same time you get off of work. So here are a few of the pictures that I did take. If you want to know anything else about my trip, give me a call and ask, otherwise, take the trip yourself!!

Here is the hotel (the Slieve Donard for those that want to GOOGLE it and see more of it) that I spent 8 nights of my stay in Ireland. For those of you that enjoy spending time among the SNOOTY, then this is the place for you. I have never stayed in a hotel that, a) there was a dress code while in the hotel and b) you had to make reservations in the hotel restaurant. I did not particularly enjoy dining among those type of people, so I ordered room service about 50% of the time during my stay there. Even though the people and staff were a bit snooty, the place was amazingly beautiful. The grounds are spectacular and are right on the coast of the Irish Sea. I can only imagine what it looks like in the warmer months. I do not say summer months, because from what the locals told me while I was there, the summer is not much more than 4-6 weeks, and it is NEVER what we would consider summer months temperatures. WOW, that would really stink!!

The next three pictures are looking out of my hotel room window.


These next four pictures are from along the roadway driving from Newcastle (where the hotel was) to Kilkeel (where the facility was). I thought that it was really neat seeing the countryside from one side of the Irish Sea (it actually was a little inlet, or as they say in Ireland, a "wee" inlet). That is one huge house if you can see it from the distance I was. I was probably at least 10 miles from where that house sat on the hill. I talked to some of the people that I worked with, and from what they said, you people in CA would think that your houses are cheap compared to what they pay for a house in Northern Ireland. They said that a 2000 sq ft house, on 1/4 acre lot would cost upwards of £400,000 (as of 2/15, the conversion of £ to US $ was - £1 = $1.96131). So a house that cost £400,000, would be the equivalent of $784,512. Wow, now that is a chunk of change ($392.25/sq ft) to pay for a house.

This was the remains of some type of castle. I don't have any details, maybe the next time I am in the area, I will look into it.
I just thought that this was a cool old boat anchor. Again, I don't have any details, it was just on the waterfront, along the roadway on the road that I drove everyday to and from work.
Here is a church, one of many in the area. I don't realy need to tell you what religion it belonged to, I am sure that there are not many Baptist churches in Ireland. I do know one thing, there are not any LDS units in Northern Ireland. I looked and the closest one that I could find was about 50 miles away (that translated to about 1.5 hours of driving) and getting lost along the way. Refer back to my comments in the beginning about asking people for directions, this applied specifically to my experience trying to (with no luck) find a ward/branch to join for the day.
I thought that it was really interesting to find a building old enough to have a swastica on it, I am not sure if this was a remnant from wartime periods, or if it was fresh, but I would have thought that maybe someone would have painted over it. Again, I thought that it was interesting and we had a discussion about it within our family. Oh, and by the way, this was in an area where the people were selling JUNK!

This is the area equivalent of a strip mall. I thought that the picture setting was really neat with the Mourne mountains (I laugh at the term mountain here, I think that Alta Loma/Rancho/Upland are at higher elevations than these "mountains").

This is a shot from my seat on the airplane leaving out of Newark airport. You can see New York City off in the distance. I saw the Statue of Liberty and I reached in my bag for my camera to take a picture, just then the pilot banked the plane hard left and this is what I ended up with. It is still a neat picture of the city from an airplane perspective, but not the Statue of Liberty.

Here is a little bit of what I brought back from Ireland. NO, not the silly little girls, the rugby jersey's that they are all wearing. They wanted to pose and show that they had writing on the back of them. I bought all of them the same shirt so there would be NO fighting over who liked what color better. I did not do a very good job of sizing as Maya was the only one that I got pretty close on being right. I guess that they have different sizing in the UK.

Casey said that this picture makes McKenna look like a little boy! What do ya'll think?

Any more questions?