Cliffs of Moher, Ireland

Our trip to Ireland was courtesy of a lovely thing called "positive space" tickets. Each year, Southwest has an auction of these tickets for a ton of different airlines and we were fortunate enough to purchase some for Aer Lingus. This confirmed our seats into Shannon airport. We had a few hours of a stop over in Boston (which I will talk about later), and then we arrived in Ireland super early the next morning (around 6am).

We rented a car for our entire trip and I would definitely suggest doing the same. It was great to be on our own schedule and stop wherever we felt like. It took maybe 10 minutes for Jason to get used to driving on the other side of the road thanks to the awesome phrase our rental car guy told us - "driver to the center lane!" This made regular driving and those ever-present roundabouts a piece of cake.  

We took advantage of the early start and, armed with coffee, headed to the Cliffs of Moher. Another thing I have to mention here was the amazingness that is summer daylight hours in Ireland. The sun rose around 5am and set around 10pm! So it was well into the daylight hours when we arrived. Technically the cliffs don't open until 9am, but we arrived at 7:45 and walked straight out! 

It had been raining on our drive out to the cliffs, but once we arrived, we were greeted with a beautiful rainbow and sun. We had the place virtually to ourselves for a few hours, until the tour buses started arriving. We took advantage of this time by wandering north and south from the visitor's center - testing our sanity by jumping the fence to walk along the edge.

After a few hours of wandering around, we jumped back in our cars and headed south to our home for the next few days (and my favorite city) - Dingle!

We're Off To: Ireland!

Jason acquired some positive space tickets for Aer Lingus, so we're off to Ireland before they expire (2 days after we get back - cutting it a bit close!). 

We'll spend 9 days exploring the Cliffs of Moher, Dingle, the Beara Peninsula, Kinsale, Cork and finally - Dublin! We have a few days in Boston on either end as well.

Follow along on instagram for pictures of our road-trip around the Emerald Isle!

Russian River Valley, CA

It's really true love when you can keep traveling to the same places over and over again and still find new and amazing adventures to be had. This time, we were lucky enough to travel to Russian River Valley with our great friends John and Mallory! Our flight times synced up perfectly, so we arrived and headed straight to Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa. We had a delicious dinner of pizza and wings (and some pretty epic beer of course)! I tried the Supplication (a brown sour) and the famous Pliny the Elder.

We drove to our AirBnB in Monte Rio that night, but didn't get to appreciate it in all of it's glory until the next morning. We stayed at the appropriately-dubbed "Pyramid Castle" right along the Russian River. God, this place was gorgeous and so peaceful!

After a breakfast of leftover pizza, we headed out for our first tasting. Korbel was on the way to our appointment, so we dropped on in for some morning bubbly. Always a good way to start the day! We skipped the tour, but definitely enjoyed our free sparkling tasting (5 tastings for free? Pretty awesome deal!). They have many other sparkling wines beyond the normal stuff you see at the supermarket, and we all really liked their organic!

We had made reservations for a tasting at Copain. The views were obviously incredible, the wine was delicious and the food pairing was perfect! Basically just an excellent tasting. Made even better when our server smacked Jason in the face to kill a mosquito - I still laugh thinking about his face. HA!

For lunch, we drove into Healdsburg and grabbed some sandwiches and libations at Oakville (aka Old Folk's?) Grocery. Afterwards, we wandered into Noble Folk for ice cream. The coffee-flavor was excellent!

Our very favorite winery was up next. We are wine-club members for this great little "garage-style" winery right outside of Sebastapol, so our free tastings were an added bonus. Taft Street is pretty amazing - we grabbed a few bottles to take back for our dinner that evening.

Our last stop of the day may have been the day's best though. Sparkling wine is my favorite and Iron Horse's was incredible. The setting didn't hurt either. That night, we picked up some groceries and were treated to an amazing meal by Chez Lineberger!

The next morning, the boys went to play golf at Northwood Golf Club in Monte Rio and Mallory and I headed to grab a bite to eat at Big Bottom Market, enroute to Boon Hotel for our massage and facial! This relaxing morning was much appreciated! We caught up with the boys afterwards and grabbed lunch in Guerneville. Our lunch at Boon Eat + Drink was super tasty. After our meal, we set off for more wine tastings!

I love just driving on the backroads of this area. So many beautiful vineyards, bridges and windy roads! I definitely don't love all of the bikers though. I get it - it's beautiful, but oh my gosh, they are going to get hit by someone! Anyways, our first stop was VML. The winery itself was beautiful, but I don't think any of us particularly cared for the wine. They did have fun games scattered around the property, so we got to channel our "Texan" with some corn hole.

Next up was a brief stop at Matrix, where we split a bottle of rose while the boys played bocce. Unfortunately we just didn't have a ton of time to enjoy the winery because we had an appointment at...

MacRostie! This winery may have been the prettiest we visited. I loved that each tasting was seated and that we got to try a variety of wines. We were definitely glad we had made reservations though - make sure you do if you want to visit! We took a bottle of their rose home which will be enjoyed the next time the four of us get together!

We had dinner reservations for tapas in Healdsburg, but we all really wanted to go back and enjoy our Pyramid Castle some more. We grabbed some take-away at Taqueria La Tapatia and some s'more supplies at a local market. We settled in and enjoyed a nice, relaxing evening.

We really only had one goal in mind for our last day - drive along the coast and find somewhere to have a picnic. We gradually made our way south towards San Francisco -  stopping a few times to take pictures, walking on the beach and grabbing a baguette and freshly-picked cherries for our picnic. We also found a great little place to have lunch at - Samuel Taylor State Park. After that, we had to make our way towards the airport - ending a pretty amazing trip!

At the end of the day, I only have one complaint about this trip - I wish we had more time! I know we'll be back though - our love affair with Northern California continues. I would love to kayak along the river and check out the redwoods in Armstrong State Park. Thanks to the Linebergers for accompanying on this wonderful trip and thanks Jason for winning Employee of the Quarter and ensuring us confirmed seats :)

Up Next: We're headed to Ireland (with a few days in Boston) in a few weeks. These are positive space (aka confirmed) tickets that Jason won, so no praying to the standby gods for us this time. We'll just be busy switching our mentality from wine to plenty of Irish whiskey and Guinness! Stay tuned!!