The trip continues to be an incredible experience. On Thursday evening we flew to Dublin, spent the night at a hotel there, and then in the morning took another short flight across Ireland to Shannon, where we rented a car. From there we visited the nearby Bunratty Castle and then drove southwest to Killarney, the starting point of the road that circles the peninsula, known as the "Ring of Kerry". We stopped along the way and ate at a small, family-owned restaurant named O'Flynn's, which I loved. The people were so nice and friendly, and the food was great. I had my first pint of Guinness in Ireland (on draught, of course).

We picked a hotel at random in Killarney, and then set out the next morning to drive the Ring, which is amazing. It's a seemingly non-stop sequence of incredible views including lakeside scenery, mountain panoramas, and rolling coastlines. However, it's deceptively long, especially when you stop often to take pictures and enjoy the scenery.

We left the hotel around noon, which left us about five hours before the ridiculously early sunset. As it turns out, the Ring takes quite a bit longer than that to drive, and the last half or so ended up being driven in the dark. As the one who did all the driving, I'd just like to say screw Irish roads. These tiny, winding one-lane roads can be charming during the day, but driving on them at night requires constant, unflagging concentration, and it's exhausting. I was so happy once we got back onto a larger motorway where I could speed up and relax.

Around 8pm we entered Cork, where we drove around aimlessly for an hour, trying to figure out where we were. I hate driving in a big city when I don't know where I'm going, and dealing with the whole "driving on the other side of the road" thing only made it worse. Thank god for traffic — it gives you a chance to slow down and think and read street signs without holding up the cars behind you.

We originally planned to stay in Cork for the night, but we were coming to realize that we had underestimated how long it takes to drive certain distances in Ireland, and so we started to revisit our plan to reach Dublin on the following evening. The drive from Cork to Dublin would probably take an entire day, so we decided to leave Cork behind and try and get farther that night.

Finally around 11pm we made it to Waterford, where we stopped at the first hotel we saw (the Ramada Viking, awesome) and promptly went to bed.

This morning we had breakfast and set out for another day of driving. We didn't make all the frequent, relaxed stops that we did on the Ring of Kerry, but we did take a small detour to a monastery in the mountains, which we reached around sunset. The combination of mist, sunset, and a graveyard full of celtic crosses set a very cool mood, and it was great walking quietly around the ruins, despite the cold.

An hour after getting back on the road, we were in Dublin, where we did more lost, aimless driving. Fortunately, after so much time on the road, I'm pretty comfortable with the "driving on the left" thing, so that's no longer much of an issue. We did eventually find our way to the hotel where we checked in and then went out for dinner.

Tomorrow we plan to get up at 7am so we can catch one of the "hop on, hop off" tour buses at 9:15am. There's several things we hope to see around Dublin (including, of course, the Guinness Storehouse), and that seems to be the simplest, cheapest, and most flexible way to get around. Expect plenty of pictures, of course.