Travel Awards - England / Ireland - Part 1

Best place to stay: Temple House, outside Sligo, Ireland. In Ireland, you can stay on at a manor house on a 1000 acre plot of land. This is sort of like spending the night in Downton Abbey. You dine with the other vacationers in a big group meal, take pre-dinner drinks in a sitting room, and can do an after dinner stroll out to some castle ruins on the land which were built by the Knights Templar over 800 years ago. I'm serious.

Best meal: The Habor Bistro, a restaurant in Portsrush, Northern Ireland. You know how ribeye steaks are always said to be the steak of steak lovers? I never got it - until eating at the Harbor Bistro. They serve it thin - somewhere in between a ribeye at an American steakhouse and how the Koreans slice Galbi thin for the BBQ. This is the way to prepare a ribeye. It helped that the steak cost only a little more than a burger costs at most pubs and the Guinness on tap is the freshest in town.

Best name of a town: three way tie between Bourton-on-the-water, Upper Slaughter, and Lower Slaughter. These are all names of towns in the Cotswalds and you can walk between them along footpaths being grazed by sheep.

Best deal: Deals are hard to find on vacation, usually you are deciding between being ripped off or ripped off outrageously. But we found a flight on Ryanair between Bristol and Dublin for 20 pounds (roughly 33 dollars). To put in perspective, a train ride from London-Cambridge was 12 pounds and filling up a tank of gas was about 30 pounds.

Best drink: The bitter ales are terrific in England (and you'll feel buzzed after 2), the Irish serve three great beers: Smithwicks, Guinness, and Heverlee, but the best drink in the UK are Gin & Tonics because their tonic has quinine and I have no idea what it is, but it makes you feel like you're sipping one on the steps of an Embassy before the Great War in some faraway land like India, Burma, or Singapore.

Best English Saying: "Is it of interest...?

Best English or Irish Breakfast: Ye Old Kings Head in Santa Monica makes a better "full British" than I had in all of the UK.

Most Ridiculous Site They Wouldn't Have in the US: Cliffs of Moher. 700 foot cliffs that fall straight down into the sea (for a film reference, watch the "Cliffs of Insanity" bit from Princess Bride, it was filmed there). Anyhow, you can basically walk just along the top of the cliffs with literally no barrier whatsoever. People stand less than a foot away from a 700 foot fall. Truly, the Cliffs of Insanity. No wonder I noticed so many Irish people walking around with injuries.

To be continued...featuring Best Drive, Best Car Rental, Best English Candy, Best Irish Saying, and some Worst Of's...