Thursday, September 29, 2011

Ireland, Day 6 - Near, far, wherever you are...



We woke up to a delicious breakfast again. Standard Irish fare with fresh fruit and juices and then we picked a hot dish. I wisely kept it to eggs, sausage and bacon and toast and avoided crazy things in order to not get sick. Mark did not and we left him in his room to recover while we headed down to the Cobh Heritage center. They had a lot of interesting information about the potato famine and the conditions on ships when people were leaving. There also was a lot of info about the Titanic and Lusitania disasters. They have some cool setups that use existing parts of the ships to show what some sections would have looked like.
We went back to pick up Mark and also got Megan’s iphone she had left there. As soon as we parked at the Titanic walk in downtown Cobh, Mark realized he left his jacket, so we left Megan and her parents and drove back to get his jacket. Today would prove to be the day of losing stuff. We got back in time for the Titanic walk to start and we toured around Cobh seeing the different sites and getting stories about the Titanic. Truth be told, all this info is in the heritage museum and you can probably just walk around Cobh yourself to get a good idea but the tour wasn’t bad by any means, and the guide was very enthusiastic. We got a suggestion for lunch and headed over to Gilbert's Restaurant & Townhouse. I had the burger which was really good. Megan had a slight problem ordering and ended up with a salmon sandwich with a full salad on top of it. It wasn’t that good.
Next we headed out towards Cahir to see the Rock of Cashell. It is an enormous walled fort with an abbey inside the walls. Unfortunately it is under construction right now to protect the 800 year old chapel in the middle. They have the chapel covered in a scaffolding and then they put tarp basically over it so that they can dry it out. Once it dries out, they will start repair work. Their best guess for the time it takes to dry out? About 5 years. Don’t hold your breath. Even so, it was a great tour. Although the tour was packed with people, the tour guide was really good and did a great job of stories to which we could relate with history and mythology. We had a great time and the grounds are wonderful. Unfortunately, we had taken too much time and the Cahir Castle (where we went afterward) was closed. Due to our strict schedule, we didn’t have time to see it the next day, so it’ll give us something to go back and see in the future!
We headed out towards our B&B in Kilkenney. It turns out this was the one time our GPS was wrong. We ended up in the middle of nowhere and luckily found someone nearby who directed us to the town near the B&B. We were then able to figure out where to go and got there okay. The road was so narrow that we narrowly missed a few dogs who came running out to keep us away from their property but we found it. This B&B was on a farmhouse and Megan was SUPER excited because they had 2 baby hedgehogs that the dogs had brought in. Megan played with them and then played with the two cats they had there (which she named Drooly and Stretchy). We took a walk around the farm and saw the horses and pigs and chickens among other things.

They told us about a sweet abbey ruin nearby on the way to Kilkenney proper. We had dawdled too much at the farmhouse so by the time we got to Kilkenney we were all grumpy and we ended up eating at a crappy steakhouse. This was probably our worst meal in Ireland. We headed back to our B&B and went to sleep in preparation for a long day the next day where we would be heading back up to Dublin.

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