Thanksgiving in Ireland

John and I decided that since we weren't going home for the holiday that we would take a little vacation instead. We flew out Wednesday evening and had an overnight flight to Dublin, we got in around 7am and immediately got a rental car. Even though I was super tired there would be no sleeping in the car for me because I was FREAKING out! Thank goodness John loves an adventure and thought it would be fun to drive on the other side of the road. To make it even more fun he had to get used to shifting gears with his left hand too! No matter how smooth John was driving it seemed like every time I looked back up from the map I panicked that we were on the wrong side. 

When we stayed at a castle turned B&B last year on our trip to France we decided that those are really cool and we should stay at more of these. We drove about an hour and a half north of Dublin to a tiny little town to stay at the Castle Leslie Estate. The castle was built in the 1600's and is still in the original family's possession.

(I know this is a terrible picture and there is stuff on the lens but unfortunately its the only one I took of the outside)

The estate is about 1,000 acres and has lakes and forests and is absolutely beautiful! They even had an equestrian center.

John surprised me with a tour of the estate on horseback when we got in. I tried to take pictures while we were on horseback but it didn't really work out, not quite as smooth as I thought :)

Since the castle was in the countryside there wasn't much to do besides relax which is not our usual vacation but turned out to be really nice! We even ended up eating all of our meals on the estate too since they had several options and it was all really great food. Sadly our Thanksgiving dinner did not include turkey but instead pigeon! Definitely interesting and pretty good although very gamey, not sure pigeon would pass as food in NYC :)

The next day we just walked around the estate and then ended the evening watching the AR vs LSU game. You of course knew we would find a place to watch the game even if we were in another country :)

This definitely was a nice setup, unfortunately the game didn't turn out quite the way we hoped :(

The next day we got up early and continued our journey North. I'll share more on that in another post.