Back in the US of A

Alright, well I'm finally back in Connecticut. Our flight got in Sunday night and was pretty uneventful (I guess that's a good thing!) I need to backtrack a few days however to cover some of the events that transpired on Morgan and my trip to Dublin. We left early Saturday morning on what I assumed would be a nice scenic trip to Dublin...little did I know that I would be severely disappointed. The trip ended up taking about three and a half hours, which was expected, however there was absolutely no scenery the entire way, which I wasn't expecting at all after seeing some beautiful sights on the trip to Killarney and such.

Anyways, after getting near Dublin city, we quickly learned the hard way that Dublin doesn't like to put up street signs on any of the roads barring the one major motorway that surrounds the city. After passing multiple roads that would have taken us to the hotel, we finally found our way there after about half an hour cruising around the city. Luckily the hotel was nice and was a decent distance from the city center. When we got there, we immediately tried to catch a bus from in front of the hotel, only to realize that the lady had misinformed (lied to) us and the bus wasn't running. We ended up sharing a cab with two girls from Italy and had to listen to one of the most broken conversations I've ever heard between the Irish cab driver and the girls, as they had a terrible time understanding each other and Morgan and I didn't feel any need to become interpretors. The cab driver ended up not wanting to drive us into the city though, so he dropped us off nearby and we took the train into the city, which was pretty convenient actually.

Once we got into the city, we realized that it was probably a good idea to immediately hit up the Guinness Brewery as we'd probably miss it if we didn't. The tour of the brewery was a self guided tour, but was one of the best parts of the trip. We got to drink a Guinness at the top story of the building, in the Sky Bar at the top of the Brewery, which was awesome. From the bar you could see the entire city in 360 degrees.

After the tour of the brewery, we wandered around to see most of the other major sights of Dublin, such as the Christ Church, Trinity college, and Temple Bar. We were only minor-ly impressed with each. After wandering for awhile, we decided to call it quits on the "tourist" thing and decided to get some food then start hitting the pubs. For some reason, I decided I wanted pizza and we ended up making the second worst decision of the trip, as at the pizza place they forgot our order and we ended up being there over a hour. We then begin hitting up some of the pubs there, trying to figure it out so that we could hit several pubs on our way back to the hotel. We went to a few that were pretty decent, then we decided to head back to the hotel. We immediately realized that we forgot the way that the taxi driver had brought us, so we tried using maps and our intuition to lead us home. This is where we made our worst mistake of the trip, which is a little cloudy on who to really blame for. We end up on the road we think is the right way back to the hotel (it actually was) and we ask two old Irish guys if we're heading the right direction. After they ramble on about strange things such as why New England is called New England and not New Ireland, and why we should steal everything that's not "nailed down" in Ireland, they tell us we're going the completely wrong direction. Of course we believe them (not sure if they intentionally lied to us or they were just basing their directions on a map made when they were young'uns) and turn around to go the direction they told us. This ends up being a nightmare, as we end up going through a few construction zones and crossing one interstate en route to realizing that when we first saw the old men, we were on the right street already! Eventually though we made it home for the night, although I was completely detox-ed and exhausted.

The next morning, we decided to save ourselves trouble and not head into the city. Our flight was at 5pm, so we had a little time to burn. We ended up heading to the east coast of Ireland, right by Dublin, to a place called Howth. There was awesome bluffs there that we got to see...however, somehow we again ended up taking the loonnnnnnggggg way back, so I was completely done and ready to head home after that.

So the trip's finally over though and as far as I can tell, I'll probably be heading to Puerto Rico sometime this summer. One reason I was happy to be home was to finally be able to watch baseball on tv and I was not disappointed to come home and see the Red Sox in first place with the best record in baseball...and the Yankees in last place (boo yah!). Also...the Patriots made the pick-up of the century, giving Tom Brady the awesome end zone target in Randy Moss. The Patriots definitely look like the team to beat this year.