When you wake up in a castle they had better make you an effing awesome breakfast. luckily our rooms included breakfast so we headed down to the amazing breakfast buffet. They had multiple smoothies, all sorts of meat and cheeses and of course, eggs, sausage, bacon and pudding. They had a bunch of homemade breads as well and everything was delicious. After sufficiently gorging ourselves, and trying to convince the server to give us a free coffee mug, which he didn’t go for, we headed out to the castle grounds to take pictures of the castle as well as the gardens, including a great planking picture (hard to explain to the other guest so we just went with it and let them stare at us).
Sadly we had a full schedule again so we headed out this time for the Cliffs of Moher. We got in and paid for the visitor center experience, which turns out it was terrible. However what would turn out to be the defining moment of the trip happened in the men's bathroom. While Mark was at the urinal a 45 yr old man sauntered up and yelled "guns out"..."aim"..."fire" before doing his business - this can only be described as AMAZING. By the time we left the visitor center to walk up to the actual cliffs, it was driving rain with 30mph winds. Once again my rainpants/jacket got a workout. We took some pictures and then went up the other side for more pictures before heading out to Bunratty Castle which was a restored medieval castle with an attached medieval town.
At this point it was 3 pm and the last admission to the castle was 4, so we booked it to the pub there to get some food before seeing the castle; we had such a jam packed schedule fitting in lunch was difficult. Luckily the pub was absurdly fast and we were in and out in about 30 minutes including Guiness and a chowder appetizer (recommend both). The castle was amazing. I didn't realize medieval castles were whitewashed with lyme annually to keep them clean. Due to this whitewashing, the walls were actually white which didn’t match up with how I imagined it from my legos. The castle itself is awesome. They had all the rooms decorated in typical medieval fashion and it was amazing to see the setup. They were prepping for a banquet dinner at the castle and it was fun to see the castle bustling with activity. We had actually tried to book that dinner but it was full so we were planning on driving an extra 2 hours each way to a different one. Luckily Megan mentioned that to one of the workers and they set us up by transferring the dinner to this location because both castles were run by the same people. That meant we had time for Megan and her mom to do some shopping and then to drive up to Adare, a cute little town nearby with thatched roof cottages, etc. We wandered around the town, looked in a few shops and finally settled on a pub to get a drink before we headed back down for our banquet dinner reservations at Bunratty castle.
We walked up the narrow staircase and were greeted by women in medieval era costumes serving mead as well as some minstrels on harp and violin to keep us entertained. After a short greeting, they crowned an earl and lady of the castle before we got down to our multicourse dinner. Along the way, the maitre d of the event stopped by to tell us that Mark was going to have to go to the dungeon for flirting and having immoral relations with the ladies of the house (sorry Kelly, sadly this is true) and that he would have to sing a song to get out. Lo an behold, hilarity ensued
Once he was in the dungeon, he had to sing a song to get out. Once again, hilarity :
The food was good, with the exception of the chicken dish. We had a Swedish group sitting next to us and they asked in very broken English - do you think this tastes like...ummmm....paint. Megan’s mom was like “we said it tastes like shoe polish, but same thing”. Next thing we knew, they were flagging down the staff to inform them the chicken tasted like, well...shoe polish...or paint!! The waitress lady was so confused, and Megan was mortified for them to mention it (their plates were empty so clearly it didn’t stop them from eating it) so she tried to soften the blow by asking if there were special spices or wood the chicken was grilled over to give it the “unique” flavor - nope, it was broiled chicken. So basically, it just tasted like paint.
We finished up our meal before heading out to Killarney which is the origin city to begin our trek around the Ring of Kerry the next day. We had said we would get in late, and it proved to be the case as we pulled in to our B&B, Friar’s Glen around 12:30. The guy who let us in was not super happy, but he can deal with it.
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