Well, the Three Stooges completed their lap around Ireland without incident, unless you count a blown tire and several bouts of car sickness as incidents.

As I’ve reported before the roads and driving in Ireland are an adventure. A nauseating, torturous adventure for those who tend to get car sick when crammed in the back seat of bobbing, weaving, swerving, stopping and starting automobile. Two of the stooges, Paul and Bubba, seemed to have an issue with this.

As for the blown tire…. well, I was driving at the time but it wasn’t all my fault. Who builds stone walls right next to a highway and then lets so much vegetation grow on them that you can’t see the rocks in the rock wall?

I recall Bubba yelling from the back seat to pull over quick so he could take a picture of a castle. Being the obliging tour guide I pulled over quickly and apparently too far as a large sharp rock that had been holding up a rock wall for a few hundred years tore into the sidewall of the front tire.

So, Paul and I put on the spare while Bubba snapped award winning pictures of his precious castle. Paul didn’t mind the mishap and was delighted with the opportunity to take a break from the nausea rocket. Back in the nausea rocket to find a new tire we tottered along on the little spare donut for a bit and then shelled out 90 Euro for a new tire. The rental car insurance didn’t cover rock attacks. We saw a lot of Ireland but of all the lovely sights we saw nothing compares to the people we met along the way. We had many a wonderful “jaw wags” as they call it.

We spent the last night in Ireland the same as we spent the first, enjoying the Dublin nightlife. The plan was to enjoy it to the point of exhaustion so we could sleep most of the seven hours of confinement in the airplane ride back across the pond. At 3 a.m. we bought some Pringles and decided a rickshaw ride would be the best way back to our hotel.

The rickshaw puller was a spry young man, and we cheered him to pass other rickshaws as we made our way through the Dublin streets. A few blocks, a long up hill, and the burden of three guys and a can of Pringles wore on the poor guy, and his stride was reduced to shuffle as we approached our hotel. The charge was five Euro, but we gave him 15 and a half a can of Pringles for his trouble.

Riding in a rickshaw made me feel a little uncomfortable. There’s just something wrong about having some guy pull you around when you’ve got two perfectly good legs of your own. I offered to help and even offered to give him a ride but apparently that’s against the Rickshaw Code of Conduct. He probably would have gotten more than 15 Euro from us if the gypsy ladies outside the pub hadn’t guilted us into handing them over some change.

All in all, it was a great trip and we all agreed if we went again we would just pick one specific area and see a lot of a little rather than a little of a lot.

I highly recommend traveling to a foreign country, other than Canada or Wyoming, nothing makes you appreciate life in America more.