Ireland Day 1: Bunratty Castle

The night of July 4th we flew out of NYC and into Shannon Airport in Ireland - that's where we picked up our itty bitty car - and Sarah drove off with David navigating through an unbelievable number of "roundabouts". Fortunately, our first stop on our brisk tour of SW Ireland wasn't very far away. Bunratty Castle.

Bunratty is a restored and functioning castle and "folk park". We spent a good couple of hours climbing castle steps and through the folk park village - mostly pressing through our jet lag and stretching our muscles after the long flight.

Let's just stop for a moment to say, for what will not be the last time, we had exceptional weather the entire trip to Ireland, save the day of the wedding we had gone to attend. We had more sun-shiny days and blue skies than anyone would expect of the famed "beautiful Irish weather" - we were told to expect wet and chilly - we got sunny and mild.

Bunratty was a lovely way to ease ourselves into Ireland, and, we got to see all manner of animals to boot! (We live in a city, please understand, this was exciting.)

And we took the opportunity to do some of those cheesy touristy things.

We finally headed back out, but not after Sarah took many more photos. We will try to get those up on a separate link.