Preface, but the pretty pictures are coming

A few notes to start: I’m a very amateur photographer and my camera wasn’t anything special, a Kodak M340(10.2 MP, 3x optical zoom with 1/30th ’shutter’ speed) It was very susceptible to shaking and it doesn’t help that my hands aren’t extremely steady which made zoom shots a tad difficult. A good bit of the shots were taken while riding our bus(coach) so there are some reflections/glare but I’ll try to only include the better pictures. I ended up taking around 1500 pictures before removing duplicates/terribles and ended up with about 1200 though I didn’t get the idea to make this post until a day or two after the tour started so I didn’t take as many pictures for those first few days.

I also don’t know how to go about making this post so I’m going to pretty much tell the story of what we did as long as I have pictures to go with it.

About a year ago(as of 2009) my parents signed up for a tour to Ireland led by Alex Beaton, a musician whom they took a Scotland tour with. Originally I wasn’t going but a few people dropped out so space opened up and upon being asked if I wanted to go my answer was, of course, ” Are you serious? I can go? Hell yes“. The tour was to last 10 days and we were starting on the East coast, in Dublin, and ending on the West, in Limerick. We travelled South to the coast, then West along it, and then North along the West coast. We made various trips inland and we were not at all restricted to the coast but it was the general path we used. The entire country is extremely small, only about the size of the state of Maine, so we could travel fairly far inland 
without too much time invested. The longest of bus trips was about 2 hours.

The months roll by, I finish the semester, and summer break starts. We pack, etc and get up at like 5 in the morning. My plan, as with anything involving long bouts of doing nothing, was to not sleep the night before and sleep on the plane. The trip to LAX was harrowing as the shuttle driver was utterly insane: imagine a driver who knows only brake or gas, nothing in between. Now put him in a shuttle bus with you as a passenger. But everything else went fine and we arrived at the Dublin airport.
This is mostly a picture log of the trip. I’m going to split it up for a post for each day and plan on having a minimal amount of words, using them mostly to describe the pictures. I'll likely post all of the pictures I took at some point rather than just the best of list I'm working off of to put in posts.