My wife is Irish.  Not as in her great-great grandparents came to the States from Ireland, but she holds an Irish passport, she studied at UCD and her mother moved here from Dublin.  A couple of years ago, we spent Christmas and New Year's with her family in Dublin.  I wrote a little travelogue about our trip.

We got to Dublin yesterday afternoon - only a 45 minute flight from London.  The 1st thing that I noticed when we got off the plane was the amount of smoke!!  More smokers here than in London, if that's possible.  Amber's Aunt Ellen and Uncle Charlie met us at the airport and drove us to their home, our base in Dublin.  They're really good people.  After dinner, more of Amber's family came over and we proceeded to talk and drink. And drink.  And drink.  And a little more drinking.  I think by night's end, I ended up doing UVa proud by drinking 10 pints of Guinness, alond with a shot of  Jameson's, and God knows how much German wine.  The Ricards (Amber's family) were duly impressed by their "Yank" cousin!!

Today, we're just walking around the city with Amber's sister Vienna, whose also in Dublin.  She's on her way home from spending the past 2 years in Ghana with the PeaceCorps.  Activism runs in the family!!  We're in the Temple Bar area, kinda like Georgetown.  Very trendy.  Tonight, Uncle Charlie is taking me to his favorite pub to show me off and buy me a "real" Guinness (the stuff last night was canned).   I'll let you know how it goes!

I won't be writing again for a few days, so everyone have a very Merry Christmas.

We've just arrived in Killarney, in southwest Ireland after driving all day from Galway.  We got to Galway Friday night, and I, Charlie Hundley, stayed in a hostel.  Never again!!  I don't think the concept of showering has caught on in Europe, at least not among people under 30!!  We hit a few pubs in Galway, and yesterday morning, caught a ferry to Inishmore, largest of the Aran Islands(off the coast of Ireland).  Inishmore has only 800 inhabitants, and they survive mainly by fishing and knitting the famous Aran Sweaters (Mom, Dad - you got me one last year for Xmas).  We got a great tour of the island from Tom O'Toole, who was about 100 years young!  He knew everything there was to know about the history of the island, and was full of wisecracks.  We toured Dun Aengus, a 2500 year old fort on the south shore of the island, on a very steep cliff.  Can't wait to see how the pictures turned up.  Since nothing was open on the island but the pubs, we created our very own pub crawl and ran into a guy who lives in Mt. Pleasant!!  Small world, huh?  We left this morning and drove south about 4 hours to see the Cliffs of Moher, but the fog was so thick we couldn't see our own hands, much less the cliffs, so we hit the road again and are now in Killarney.  Tomorrow, we do the Ring of Kerry and we head back to Dublin on Tuesday morning, about a 5 hour drive.