Blogs from County Kilkenny, Ireland, Europe - page 3

We are about to farewell beautiful Ireland - on a ferry tomorrow bound for France. Our last days have been fun-filled - silliness and laughter!! :) :) Kilkenny was quite possibly my favourite city from our visit to Ireland. It was quiet - guess it was easier to enjoy as there were not too many other tourists around. It just had so much character with lovely, old buildings and cobblestone roads - also seemed a bit better maintained and cleaner than the bigger cities we've been to. All the streets and shops in both County Kilkenny and County Tipperary were extensively decorated with team colours for the All-Ireland Hurling final - it's a bit like hockey mixed with lacrosse as far as we can tell. We visited the Smithwick Brewery (pronounced Smiddick) - they make the ... read more

Note: In this blog are a total of 45 photos. Go to bottom of this page and click on Photos. Finally arrived to one of the countries we've wanted to visit for years - Ireland. We've wanted to visit Ireland especially after seeing the movie Leap Year which was filmed totally in Ireland. Our flight took us 7 hours before landing in Dublin Ireland. Not a bad flight but getting a few hours of sleep was important as we landed at 7:00 am and hit the road with our rental car out of Dublin. You would know it that we would catch the Dublin rush hour traffic on a Tuesday morning. Good planning!!?? So we had a crash course in re-learning to drive on the left side of the road and all that goes with it ... read more

Today it’s all go in the district. Callan has a festival, so has Kilkenny and another has an Agricultural Fair. Add to that that Bruce Springsteen is doing two concerts in Kilkenny it’s a good place to stay away from (unless you are a Bruce fan). Breda had given us some places to visit not too far away that would be interesting to visit but not part of the tourist route. We first went to Bennttsbridge after a few hassles of finding our way there across small country roads with no names but only numbers and eventually found our way to the pottery she had recommended that was supposed to have great scones, but it was shut until the afternoon. On the subject of scones, they are heavy here and not the nice light or doughy ... read more

We have no internet here in Callan so doing the Blog is being done in Word then copied when I get a connection. We also discovered that our European plug does not work in their sockets and we need it for the phone, the computer, the e-reader, and the camera. What a pain charging things up is – a cord for this, a cord for that. Today we got an Irish plug each so we now have a NZ plug to a European plug to an Irish plug, plugged into each other. For internet we will have to take our computers to somewhere in Callan to get a connection. Callan is the nearest town about 4 kilometres from the cottage. It is a very old town and celebrated it’s 800th Anniversary in 2008. It is mainly ... read more

It is sunny, windy, and cold. We are traveling to Gowran (pronounced Goran) and I am slathered down with extract of green-lipped mussels. Don't ask me how or what they extract because I really don't want to know, however my back is thoroughly trashed from our ring fort climbing and this stuff seems to be providing some relief. By this morning I could barely walk down the stairs and down the path to the breakfast room but somehow I forced myself to make the effort :-) We arrived at Father Donley's residence for our morning appointment and he showed us into the front room where he presented us with the computerized list of all the information that is recorded (actually it is only a brief summary and not complete) and then, he began bringing out these ... read more