/travel/ireland/Kells, Castles, Bikes and the Zoo
Fear not, dear readers, I have not abandoned ye!
There's a few galleries of new photos, and some old ones captioned. But more importantly I've got a good way of posting them now, and also I replaced my charger that I lost when I was in the US, so I have my camera back. Yay!
So a while ago, Clare went off to Mallorca. She had a good time. I worked a lot, I guess. When she got back, my friend Hildur from Iceland (via Finland) came to visit us. We went to the zoo, which was interesting..it was apparently a lot better than it had been, but in the fight between animal comfort and peace vs. human interest, the latter won out too much for my tastes. We went with Clare's friend Alice's uncle Duncan, and some other of Alice's family. Duncan had been involved in some plans for the zoo that never came about, so he had an interesting perspective on it all. I haven't been to a zoo in a long time, and it didn't make me want to go back.
Then a few days later, we went to Dublin Castle. I had been warned that it wasn't very interesting, but we got a pretty good tour, and then got taken underground to the foundations, where they showed various bits of walls from different periods of construction...most amusing was the viking wall, which was all fallen apart, because apparently they didn't know how to build walls, only boats. Aah, if only there had been someone of viking decent around to tease. Oh. There was. hah.
The next weekend we went up to
Kells, a little town famous for a big
book. They seemed very bitter that their book, an incredibly ornate book of
the four gospels from c. 700, had been "stolen" by Dublin. They had a big
round tower, like the one in Glendalough, and some very tall single-stone
celtic crosses. It was a cute little town, and we managed to do the rounds
pretty quickly. Mostly we went there because I insisted on going northwest
since it's the only direction I haven't been, and it was the only reasonable
destination in that direction. The town was reputed to have lots of
medieval tunnels between the church and other places. There was a big old
stone house that apparently had tunnels to somewhere, with a sign saying
where you could get the gate key.
Yesterday I went to a music festival at a castle. That's pretty fancy. The castle also had what was reputed to be a Freemason's cave (which I readily believed) and a 700 year old tree (which I was a bit more sceptical of.) The cave was, unfortunately, recently locked up, due to partying teenagers. It was all built into a mound. There was lots of good music, mostly fairly folk-rock-ish, but some solid Irish folk, with spoken-word-plus-guitar poetry, and all that. It was raining most of the night, so we were pretty wet. And I left a water bottle open in the tent, so it got wet inside too. That sucked.
Today I went cycling with Clare to.. Enniskerry! Yes, I keep going to the same place. This time we went to the Powerscourt waterfalls, which are pretty famous around here. They're actually both bigger and nicer than I expected.
Then we cleaned the flat. And now I'm writing a blog entry.
You're officially caught up. :-)
