Back from Ireland

Our last trip around Ireland before returning to Washington DC was to a little town called Kilkenny. We took a train to get there since the thought of renting a car was really stressing me out, with driving on the wrong side of the road being the norm in that country. I think that was the best way to see the countryside anyway since neither one of us had to do anything but sit and look out the window. The purpose of this trip was to visit Kilkenny Castle, which dated back to the 12th century. It was a cool thing to see and we took the tour but it was self guided and we would have preferred to have taken a guided one. They had offered guided tours here recently but discontinued them maybe as a cost cutting thing, I'm not sure. Anyway, the castle had been renovated and the decor was 19th century which was not as old as I would have liked it, but very interesting nevertheless.

We didn't have much time to walk about as they say there, but we had to walk from the train depot to the castle so the next picture is what one of the streets looks like and some signage.

There was this cool oak tree on the castle grounds so I had to take a picture of it. It's obviously very old but maybe in the hundreds of years and not as old as the castle itself. It had a label on it that said it was an "evergreen oak." I never heard of one of those before, maybe idigenous to Ireland.

We also had a family day and went down to the local fish pond and did a little fishing. The goal was to take little Krishna fishing but I ended up doing the fishing since Krishna found other things to do. We had to rent the gear and bait which was maggots. It was about 12 euro for that, and the rules were that you had to release any fish you caught. Unfortunately both times my bobber went down I had the pole laying on the ground... wouldn't you know it. There were many types of fish in that pond, some I recognized, some I didn't. The guy said there were brim and carp, so the brim was what I was after. I did see a few big carp but they weren't biting maggots that day. Still it was a nice family day and the sun was out.

So now we are back in the states after getting back to DC yesterday. It was a grand trip and quite an experience and we had a great time with Edie and her family.

I posted a bunch of our pictures in my web album, if you want to see any of them, go to this link. http://picasaweb.google.com/lvfire68/Ireland#