Dublin, dirty clothes, and driving to Northern Ireland

Tuesday morning we woke up early and made our way out to Gatwick Airport. We were both a little nervous about our tickets and passports to Dublin, as we realized the day before that Rollie's ticket to Dublin said "Rollie" instead of the official "Gordon". No problems there. And we found out in Iceland that I had never changed my last name on my passport to Leeman. Ooops. I had looked at both of our passports at least 5 times before leaving the US to make sure they were still valid. It had never occured to me that we had gotten our passports before we were even engaged. It's been 7 1/2 years since we were married but we haven't needed passports since then. Thankfully no one even asked about it at Gatwick or upon arrival in Dublin. We had a very easy one hour flight to Dublin and took a bus to our hotel in the trendy Temple Bar area.

We picked up lunch and then wandered around the area a bit before taking a hop-n hop-off bus tour of Dublin. The tour guide was very funny when we could understand him. We ended our afternoon by taking a tour of the Kilmainham Gaol (a famous prison which is now a museum) and Rick Steve's #1 thing to do in Dublin. So we paid to go to a jail :) Some of the first events of the 1916 Easter Uprising occured outside the jail and it's leaders where held and executed by the British. So the jail is closely linked to Irish Nationalism and was full of history.

Wednesday we woke up and had a traditional Irish breakfast at the hotel (lots of meat and tea). We are now completely out of clean clothes, so today is "dirty clothes day". After breakfast we headed to Trinity College. We walked around the grounds and saw the Book of Kells exhibit, which is an intricately decorated copy of the four Gospels (done by Irish Monks near Kells in County Meath). Before we left we went upstairs to the Old Library and walked around which was really cool.

Then we walked to Dublin Castle and walked around the grounds and into the church and library there. 

After Dublin Castle we picked up our bags from the hotel and went to pick up our rental car to drive 1 1/2 hours north to Kilkeel, Northern Ireland (UK) to our friend Sarah's house. Rollie had the adventure of driving on the other side of the road (and of the car!).

Rollie did a fantastic job of driving and the scenery was beautiful. It was nice to get out of town after being in big cities for the past 4 days. We had a wonderful afternoon and evening with Sarah, Samuel, and baby Caleb (4 months). We talked till late at night and Sarah made us a great dinner of fajitas. It's nice to be in a home with a homemade dinner and a good friend that we haven't seen in about 4 years. (And it's nice to have clean clothes!)