Vacation Recap Days 1-2: Galway

I am so excited to start recapping our vacation!  I will break it down into several posts though, in order to not crash the blogger server with picture overload :) We had a little snafu before we left on April 20th.  We had planned on waking up at 6 to go to the airport, but I couldn't sleep and ended up waking up before 5.  I decided to check my email, and good thing I did, because I had an EMAIL sent to me at 3am (no phone call, no voice mail, nothing!) from United Airlines telling me our flight was cancelled and we were rescheduled to leave the following day!  UM, noooo we aren't.  They gave us some sort of "bad weather" story, but there was NO sign of bad weather anywhere!  After making 4 phone calls and being shot down every time, Mark finally convinced the stellar employees over there at United to rebook us on a Delta flight that left later that morning.  Ugh!  Thank God for Delta!

Well, 2 flights later and we were landing at Shannon Airport in Ireland!  We got our rental car, tried to orient ourselves to driving on the opposite side of the road, and took off for the Cliffs of Moher!  I knew we would be super tired and probably wouldn't be looking too

hot (see exhibit A below) but I have always wanted to see the cliffs and this would be our only chance!  It was so worth it, seriously one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen!

From there, we continued on our journey to Galway, where we stayed for the next 2 nights.  The road was a little treacherous, but the scenery was amazing!

The first thing we did in Galway was go to a pub:

And then a church, makes sense right?

Even though we were exhausted, we forced ourselves to stay up and go out for dinner.  There is a great little pub in Galway that I had read about and it turned out to be only a few steps outside of our hotel!  

After some MUCH needed rest that night, we spent the next day wandering around the town.  We went into a big cathedral, did some shopping, went to the Claddagh Ring museum, walked up and down the shoreline, and stopped a long to way for a couple pints!

We had a great time at the Cliffs of Moher and in Galway!  It was a great place to start the trip, we were able to just explore and adjust to the time change without feeling like we had to jam a million things into the day.  It was perfect!  The next day, we packed up and drove to Dublin, come back later for that recap!