9/10 Around 6pm
We had to take the shortest ferry ride(car included) that we will ever take in our lives. I kid you not, it must have taken us 2 minutes to cross the river to get to Waterford Castle. We have been travelling by the "Flying by the seat of your pants"
strategy...literally making reservations for our hotels and B&Bs the nite before we arrive. In the case of Waterford Castle, the server recommended it to us, so we decided to go with it.
As we arrived onto the Island, we were amazed at the tree lined roads leading to the castle. The Castle was so beautiful with Ivy already showing the signs of fall colors(chlorophyll finally stopping...)with vibrant hues of red adorning the building. We played soccer with Zach out in the gardens area for about an hour since he hadn`t gotten much exercise during the day...followed by a quick dinner inside the castle.We get shown to our lodge and you would have dropped me with a feather-huge with 3 bedrooms and a gorgeous living room- wow what 239 dollars gets you in Ireland!!!I had to go out and get some food and a golf shirt(I bought it then was going to return it-god am I cheap!!)
When I got back, my poor wife was sitting on the bed shivering in terror as she saw the second largest spider crawling on the floor in her bedroom. I assuaged her as much as one could given the situation...we marched on down to the main lobby to see what could be done. I came back to hunt down the spider with one of the hotel employees alas to no avail. Finally we were given a tiny room inside the castle as they were no other lodges/rooms available. I felt that the manager on duty didn`t give a rats behind what had happened and didn`t even try to apologize to me or my wife. She just said that this area has alot of spiders!!!! Wow...thanks for the consoling message sweetheart!
9/11
Next morning I woke up to play 9 holes of golf next to the castle-nice course, weather was chilly, but sunny. I finished in 90 minutes(playing by yourself can be so incredibly peaceful) and headed back to the hotel for a chat with the general mgr.
Explained the situation and was comped for the nite and our meal(dont let me go there-the hamburger I had was smaller than a slider from Krystals for 10 times the price).
We wandered over to the Waterford Crystal exhibit. It used to be both an exhibit and the factory, but due to the downturn, the factory had closed in January of this year and all of the labor/workmanship was moved to Poland.
You can sense the despair and sadness in the voice of the lady who was kind enough to watch Zach while Marie and I walked around the exhibit.
It was getting a little late so we decided to head over to Kinsale, which is one of the requisite stops one makes when you are heading to the Ring of Kerry. Kinsale is a lovely harbour town with a checkered past, which I will discuss later.
First order of the day was finding a B&B to stay at...since we were essentially homeless. Came across a quaint B&B right outside of the city called Waterside and negotiated 85 Euros a nite for the 3 of us...the owners were in their 70`s and also very cordial hosts! Dropped our luggage and headed into town for some dinner- our host Phyllis recommended going to Jim Edwards for some fish and boy was that a good call-great clams casino(or was it mussels?), crab claws and Maries Sole was surprisingly good!
9/12
As luck would have it, this weekend was the first dry weekend since the end of June in Ireland. We were told that it rained 26 days during the month of August, which is all the more shocking since we have had nary a drop of rain during our time in both the UK and Ireland. The scenery in Kinsale was so beautiful with almost a fairytale type feel to it. I completely forgot that when we first arrived into Kinsale, it was the tail end of an Irish version of the Cannonball Run with a bunch of exotics (DB-9,Lambo,Rarri(Britspeak for Ferrari) and other beauts)...Zach was beside himself with all the cool cars driving by!!!
We were told that you have to visit Charles Fort while you are staying in Kinsale, so we did just that. Little did we know that this happened to be the weekend(happens only once a year- timing once again is impeccable) that they do reenactments of various battles that took place over the years in and around the city of Kinsale.
1601 was one of the more noteworthy events when the Irish looked to the Spanish Armada to join forces to defeat the British. Unfortunately, the Brits were able to pin down the Spaniards in Kinsale preventing a joint attack against them.
1915 was also noteworthy since the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-Boat right of the coast of Kinsale(I think 1198 people perished out of 1900) this incident was instrumental in finally pushing America into participation in the Great War...
Alot of the people that participated in the different reenactments had been doing so for more than 30 years. It was quite fascinating to learn about different events that had taken place nearby...great little history lesson for yours truly!
We headed out to the next port of call namely Kenmare...which will follow in the next blog.
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