Day 3

Okay we'll see when I get to upload this... We've arrived in Londonderry, or as those in Southern Ireland refer to it, "Derry." It's definitely interesting to see the sharp, marked difference between Northern and Southern Ireland. Although there's no border that we could see driving in (we had no idea exactly when we even entered Northern Ireland) -- everything feels more British here -- the phone #s use the British country code, the money is the British pound, and the accents are very different. In Southern Ireland the accents are very easy to understand, closer to American - The further North you go it's harder and harder to understand what people say. Anyway, today was a big driving day -- we had breakfast at Ashford Castle, which was very nice -- but still, between you and me and everyone reading this blog, I preferred our 80E a night B&B breakfast the night before, and pretty much everything else about it... Rained ALL day today, we drove from Cong all the way up to Londonderry, stopping at Kylemore Abbey and Croag Patrick -- both were fun but hard to see or do much in the rain. The car is squished... we've got everything in it but that's only with stuff piled up to our eyeballs -- we're quite a sight driving down the road.

We stopped for ice cream at a gas station -- they have soft serve -- the woman said it was "plain ice cream" -- and she wasn't kidding -- it was actually not vanilla, just sweet cream. The texture was great though. Yummy, yummy. Anyway we drove through the country, saw lots of sheep, which appear to have green and pink paint on them. We have yet to figure out why.

Anyway Derry is much more of a city than anything we've experienced -- ate at a restaurant that was sort of like an Ireland version of TGI Friday's. But it was good. Tomorrow we'll walk around here and we'll see Belfast and stuff so I'm sure I'll have more to tell... bye for now!