The Claflin's Life in Paradise: Kiss Me I'm Irish...

After a very long day and long night trying to locate our hostel we finally made it to Dublin. We were so excited to be in Ireland! We decided to sleep in a little bit the next morning and try to recover and then it was off to explore Ireland. We did not have any plan at all for what we were going to do so we decided to head to Wicklow (the place from P.S I Love You) for the day. Here comes the first lesson I learned about Ireland...
1. Information desks have no information. They only thing they can do for you is give you a map.
We were at the bust station for a good half hour just trying to figure out how to get to Wicklow it was a very frustrating process. After an hour and a half bus ride we made it to Wicklow town.

We were expecting something like this...

and ended up with this...

Yeah, not the same thing. We decided to stick around the town and see what we could find. It wasn't much. After grabbing some lunch we headed to the tourist information where once again they couldn't help us out so we headed to a Taxi Cab service where I learned...

2. There are no public transportations to National Parks in Ireland.

Does that make any sense to you? Because it sure doesn't make sense to me and the taxi cost 100 Euro so that plan was thrown out the window. I then looked down and found a pamphlet to Usher Gardens, I had no idea what it was but found out a taxi was only 6 Euro so to Usher Garden's we went.

There was the cutest little shops in front of the garden entrance

We felt like we were entering Secret Gardens

Our Irish Family

We became the parents of the trip guiding our way through Ireland

The girls

After returning to Dublin we decided to call it an early night since we would be waking up at 5:30 the next morning to catch a train to Limerick for a scheduled day tour. 5:30 came pretty early but we all woke up and found ourselves in Limerick excited to have an actual tour set up. Surprise Surprise when I walked up to the information desk and they told me they had never heard of our tour. I then called the tour office where they told me that the tour started down the street. We had a few minutes to spare so took our time walking through the little town. Lesson 3 of Ireland is...

3. Locals are very friendly and useful when it comes to information about their country.

We discovered that if we ask locals they know exactly where and what to tell us. Our tour was called Paddywagon Tours

This is our tour guide Sean

The tour took us to the Cliff's of Moher. Also known as the Cliff's of Insanity from Princess Bride or the cliffs where Dumbledore takes Harry to destroy the horcrux in HP 6.

After the cliffs we went to a little town called Doolin where we grabbed some lunch before hitting the road again.

Next stop was along the coast where everything was covered in Limestone. It was absolutely gorgeous.

The tour lasted through the day and by the end we were exhausted. After our 2 hour ride train home we found a little pub to have a nice baked potato in and then headed home for bed. This was the night I learned lesson number 4...

4. You will probably get told that you look sad by a 60 yr. old man in a pub and called kitty, kitty on the street don't worry this is just how the Irish flirt.

The next morning was our last day so we decided we should spend it walking around Dublin. We hit all the sights in about 3 hours time, we were on a roll.