When I was 17, just after I graduated from high school, I got to take a trip with my best friend, Katie O'Gara. She and her sister, Josie grew up in the house next door to me.
Josie and Katie's dad, Tom, was born and grew up in Ireland. He still has quite a bit of family that lives there. Tom and Katie were planning a trip to Ireland for the summer of 1994, and invited me to tag along.
Super cute genuine Irish pub very close to the O'Gara home we stayed at!
I apologize right now for the crappy quality of these pictures. They are 19 years old, you see. If you can remember back that far, photography technology consisted of choosing 100, 200, or 400 speed film for your 35mm camera, and bringing it to Walgreens and paying a lot of money for them to send your film away to some secret Walgreens lab where you'd have to wait two weeks for them to print them all out and send them back to your store. Then you brought them home and put them in an album with sticky cellophane over cardboard pages, that only stayed sticky for about a week if you tried to un-stick them. So these are pictures of pictures, in a yellowed old picture album with only half of the pages still sticking.
Katie's dad loved driving us around to all of the places he remembered as a kid. Katie was bored of it and rolled her eyes a lot. That's what 17 year olds do when they are forced to be a tourist in places they've already been. :)
The architecture was incredible and I couldn't even guess how old some of the churches and castles were that we saw.
Oh, I suppose I might be convinced to live in this house some day.
The western coastline of Ireland is absolutely gorgeous.
I bet you've always wondered what Irish jellyfish looked like, right?
Oh hi there. Man, if I was as much into knitting back then as I am now, I would have come home with a LOT of wool. These buggers were everywhere.
This is Katie and I on a little boat trip we went on. Wasn't I HOT at 17? I mean, look at those bangs.
We took a drive to Dublin. The pubs are so cute!
The customary colorful doors on the streets of Dublin...
I didn't get to kiss the Blarney stone, but I did get to see the O'Brien Castle!
A seriously magical place.
One of Katie's Aunt and Uncles lives on a farm with milking cows. We went to visit them one day. Katie was more brave than I was when it came to getting up close and personal with the cows. Cows are freakishly huge when they are standing right in front of you.
This was as close as I was willing to get. Even with that big fence inbetween me and the lady, it was killing me to turn my back to her for this picture. I was so scared she was going to turn her head and, and, I don't know. Moo at me?
We got to attend a wedding of a family friend while we were there. This is us with one of Katie's cousins.
Me with Katie's aunt. We stayed with her. Soo welcoming to me! What a great time we had!
And here is the whole group at a luncheon we went out to on one of our last days. Again, these are the pictures you ended up with before the slick invention of the display screen on the back of your camera.
Excuse me, sir. We are trying to get by.
I seriously need to figure out how to rotate my dang pictures on blogger. I'm sorry. This is exactly what Ireland looks like. Just like you see in the movies. Soo green, and soo pretty.
I hope you are all enjoying your St. Patrick's day. I think I get to skip the corned beef and cabbage this year (GRODY!) but I'm going to celebrate by watching P.S. I Love You, and having a shamrock shake.
Slainte!
XOXOX
NH
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