It’s Tuesday, June 2, even though my WordPress account thinks it’s June 1. My Mac has been wonky since I fired it up this morning – it rebooted itself unexpectedly, so…we’ll see what’s up. It’s mostly working now.

The last 24 hours after arriving in Ireland have been interesting. We arrived in a foggy, driving rain that only got worse as we were driven toward the coast and our hotel, the Armada House. I checked the weather and the outlook for our entire stay is/was the same – rain, fog, etc. Our first impressions of Ireland were a bit rough.

The Armada House was first class, though we were only there for about 12 hours. We had a meal across the street at the Armada Hotel – great seafood, as expected from a North Atlantic island. The next morning we had a short drive up the western coast of Ireland to the Cliffs of Moher, an allegedly beautiful sight. We couldn’t see it much at first, as the fog was in, thick and cold. Not conducive to sightseeing. Here’s a selfie and what we saw of the Cliffs.

It was cold and windy. Of course.

We decided to leave and visited the shops toward the entrance. Just as we were leaving, it cleared up a bit. Of course. So here’s a slightly better view of the Cliffs that we got by hustling back the quarter mile to the view.

After that we had a looooong 3.5 hour drive from Moher to Dingle, where we are in the middle of a 2-night stay at Pax House. Pax House was advertised by our travel agent as the highlight of our two week vacation, so we had high expectations. When we arrived, the House met expectations, but our promised room did not. The travel agent messed up and booked us what is politely referred to as a “Snug Room”, a tiny room without a view, underground ( a basement). It was a shock, to say the least, given what we paid and what the travel agent knew. I had a few tense go-arounds with the agent, and we’ve got it mostly sorted out by now. We’re still in the Snug Room, but we have some significant compensations/reconciliations for that. I did pretty well not letting this setback ruin even a day of our vacation.

Today we had a great tour around the Dingle peninsula. I’ll post about that later.