Come Visit Ireland!

What a weekend!
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Jen, Ben and Dan all came in on Friday night. Then the 5 of us went to the airport on Saturday morning to pick up Tina and kept heading north to Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.
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The only rainy spot on the island was Northern Ireland this Saturday. The Causeway was still a sight to see though.
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Here are Tina and Dan trying to keep their camera gear dry!
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These hexagonal rock formations were apparently formed by rapid cooling of highly fluid molten basalt flowing through chalk beds. Click here for the wiki-link for more info.
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Karen and Tina standing on top of the hexagonal columns.
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This picture of a guy with an umbrella looked funny. Umbrella can only be so effective in this place. Nice try though!
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Jen and Ben post in the wind and rain!
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Here are the Bryn Mawr trio. So nice that a trip like this is possible. How lucky we all are!
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Here's Dan acting like one of the columns. ; )

. This was actually the only picture of the 6 of us. We offered to take a picture of a full family first, then they took this one of us.
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Little blurry, but that helps capture the weather of the day!

. On the way back from the Causeway, we stopped at the Bushmill's Distillery for a tour. It was pretty neat!
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At the end of the tour they gave us a sample of a few of the different whiskeys. We all tried sampling
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Here's an action shot Sunday morning on Grafton Street. Today we walked through and explored Dublin City Center.
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Jen and Tina stopped to do a little wedding flower research.
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Here we are outside Dublin Castle.
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Jen and Ben outside the Chester Beatty Library. We went in and saw some of the old religious documents, etc. They have some really old bible papyrus pages dated to 150 A.D. Really fantastic collection of religious artifacts from Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc.
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This is the famous Temple Bar. The name Temple Bar refers not only to the bar in the picture above, but the area just south of the river Liffey to Dame Street. The earliest historical reference to the name Temple Bar is on a 1673 map.
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Now there's a sight!
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Here we are donning our Guinness moustaches. We wear them with pride!
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Monday morning we headed down to Glendalough for some Irish country sightseeing and picture taking. It was hard to pick and choose which pictures to post... enjoy!
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The weather held out for us pretty well. There was only a little light rain for a few minutes.
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Dan took this picture. Great use of shallow depth of field.

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Again the depth of field utilized for effect here. There are so many great trees to photograph in this place.
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Here's a great picture of us in front of the valley we just hiked.
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There's a great lookout point along the hike back. Not a bad view, huh!

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I'm sure there are HUNDREDS of pictures like this one taken by visitors. This tree bough was pretty well worn on the seat section.
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Here we are in Toner's with a few pints. This is a great old Dublin pub. It's named after the owner who operated it.

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Apparently it is the only pub WB Yeats ever visited. Having sipped on a sherry he was said to declare, 'Okay, I've seen a pub and never want to see another one' or something along those lines.