Hello from County Down!

Hi, family! Just dropping a note to say hello from Northern Ireland. We're having a wonderful time getting to see the wee bit of the country where Korina is living. The countryside is gorgeous out here -- lush green farmland covers rolling hills everywhere you turn. The weather has been a bit... adventurous. We've had snow coming in sideways the last 2 days, but it hasn't been sticking, and it's interspersed with rain that washes it away soon enough. There's been a bit of sunshine, but rain and wind has been a lot more consistent. It's supposed to clear up the rest of the week -- we hope! -- so that should make the rest of the sightseeing and shopping fun.

We got to spend Thursday through Sunday hanging out with Korina. Our first day we were exhausted after an 8-hour negative timezone change and 20 hours of travel on 2 hours of sleep, so there wasn't much we could do even though we arrived at 7am. Driving here hasn't been as rough as I thought it would be, so on Friday we drove an hour north to Belfast to return our automatic car for a smaller, sportier manual-shift rental. Driving that on these winding country roads is a blast, but the locals seem to think I'm going pretty slow! We spent the rest of Friday walking around Belfast. Saturday was St. Patty's Day and we wanted to stay away from the raucous crowds, so we took a picnic lunch to Tollymore Forest and got to wander around the inspiration for some of Lewis and Tolkein's best adventures. Sunday we visited some of the smaller local towns (Castlewellan, Dundrum, & Newport); Dundrum Castle was incredible!

After a more relaxing day today -- more bad weather kept us from doing any outdoor sightseeing -- we'll be driving down into the Republic of Ireland tomorrow to see Dublin. It's been wonderful getting to see Korina. We're having some of her friends over on Wednesday to play games and eat chocolate chip banana bread (!); everyone we've met so far has been very friendly. There's a cow in the field next door that seems pretty grumpy, but I'll win him over by the end of the week. Amy says that she's only said "Shaug" once, at the airport (oops!), and "pants" once, in a shop, but the lady we were standing next to seemed pretty understanding ;)

We love you guys, and we'll see you all soon!

-- O'Shaughnessy and Amy

Hello Spam.

Here's a t-shirt that Shmamy, Daru, and I came up with at breakfast the other day...

I don't do gravy in the morning.

Too funny not to post.