Ireland, County Wicklow

This year's trip for Waddell and Reed was to Ireland. We started our adventure in County Wicklow in a little town called Einneskerry. There is a beautiful English Estate from the 1840s there called Powerscourt. We stayed in the Ritz Carlton next to the Estate. Very nice accommodations. We were in a suite with our own balcony. We had a wonderful view of Sugar Loaf peak the dominant part of the surrounding landscape.

Our first activity was a visit and demonstration from a Falconer. Here is Marla holding a baby barn owl.

I'm holding a Red Tailed Hawk. We have a lot of these birds at home, but I've never been up this close. They are beautiful creatures. The Falconer gave us a demonstration of their hunting abilities.

We had a very nice suite for this leg of our stay. This is the marble bath room. Notice the "in mirror" TV set. Just in case we got too far away from the TV

Here is Marla just outside the Gardens at Powerscourt. There is not a lot to see in the old Estate. There was a fire in the 1970s that gutted the inside. The gardens were incredible.

This is the Japanese Tea garden section of the garden. It's amazing what 160 years can do for the tree population. The watch tower below was modeled after a pepper shaker on the dinner table.

On Sunday evening we had a private dinner at the Kilruddery House. It is still a private residence of the Earl and Lady Smyth. Their family has been in the house for a couple of hundred years. We met the Earl and Lady and had a tour and dinner in their home. There were beautiful gardens here as well.

While in Einneskerry we went to Church. There is branch of the LDS church in Bray. It was about 4 miles away. This was very fortunate for us since there are very few branches of the church outside of Dublin. As we have found in other places of the world, the church is the same everywhere and we easily made friends. They were even on the same Sunday School Lesson as we would have been in Nevada.

We now traveled to Dublin. On the way we stopped for some "Pub Crawling" in the town of Dalkey, a lovely town on the coast. One stop we had Irish Dancing, one stop we learned how to play the tin whistle, and the bodhran (pronounced bowron) (an Irish drum). The last stop was a whiskey tasting stop. ( we drank lemonade) They had a great traditional group playing Irish Music.