Introduction, In which hopefully you realize what you are about to get into.

We spent nine nights in Ireland, the beginning of October 1999, for our honeymoon. There were a lot of firsts: our first honeymoon, our first trip to Ireland, the first time we had been away from home for so long, the first time I had flown overseas, and a bunch more subtle things as well. So, the excitement anticipating the trip was accompanied with a touch of anxiousness and nervousness as well.

What the following pages represent is my account of the trip based on notes Nicole had been taking the entire time we were there. I probably left some good stuff out, and I probably elaborated on some things that are next to meaningless, but then such is the existance of the web. Hopefully, you'll find the account entertaining, and if you are considering or planning on going to Ireland, it may be a little informative as well. At least, I dropped in a few helpful hints along the pages.

Overall, we had some general expectations going into the trip. Some of these were met, many were not, and a good deal of things took us by complete surprise. Little of the wrong expectations is bad, and although you'll probably discover some of this throughout the pages, I'll tie it all up in a summary just in case it isn't entirely obvious.

Keep in mind, we were two people, 28 and 30 years old, from Washington D.C., on our honeymoon. We had no set plan of attack; more or less, we just determined where we would go, and what we would do, day by day. We are both vegetarian, an ideal we entirely expected to be challenged over the course of the week and a half in Ireland. So what I'm getting at is: you'll be reading an account of two lazy American slackers staggering through Ireland being absolute pains about the food we would eat.

With that said, happy reading.