London/Ireland Trip, part 2

(continued from previous post)

     Having successfully navigated London and Dublin, we climbed back in the car and headed out to see other parts of southern Ireland. After navigating out onto the appropriate highway, I learned two things. 1) The best way to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road is to be on an open highway for mind-numbing hours. 2) Drivers in less urban areas are rather nice, and pretty darn mature. We quickly picked up that the thing to do is to be in the left lane (slow lane) until you need to overtake someone. You move right, go around them, and then get back in the slow lane. We had zero issues with getting stuck behind some jerk going slowly in the fast lane and holding everyone up. It was quite pleasant.

No room for an imax theater? No worries, everyone pile in,
wait for it to re-inflate, and we'll show the movie here!

    We must have lucked out, because there were only two rainy days the whole time we were over there, and one was really more just persistent mist. That was our first day in Cork, when we drove down some of the narrowest roads in the UK to the Blackrock Castle Observatory - a 16th century castle that has been turned into a science museum and (optimistically) telescope observatory. They've kept the castle walls, structure, and even a couple cannons strewn about the place, but the rest is pure science. Not always high tech, as shown by the inflatable imax-style "movie screen" (which was awesome, and easily fit 10-12 people), but it was still pretty darn cool.


    After a general overview of how the cosmos works, we climbed a tiny circular stairway to the observation roof where we could see the Lee river which, while narrow, is apparently extremely deep, and a major stopping point for ships even today.
The guide related that it is not uncommon to see cruise ships and freight liners churn up, unload/reload, and then do a 3 (or more) point turn just inside Cork to sail back down to the ocean. I'm somewhat sad we missed that. He also related that the telescope at the castle only gets about 3 clear nights per month, but that it's linked to an array of other telescopes across the world, so it's still pretty helpful.

     We did a bit of exploring otherwise around Cork, but the rain wasn't letting up, and apparently Cork shuts down at 6pm on Sundays, so we just relaxed in the hotel that night. After some confusion the next morning, we located a laundromat, but they only did full service, and we needed to be in Killarney that night, so, looking perhaps a little scruffy, we left Cork behind us.

    A quick note on navigating - we splurged on a package to unlock our phones in the UK, but it still meant data roaming charges if we weren't on a wifi network. Since we're both pretty reliant on technology (I adore google and it's my first go-to for almost every situation), and we didn't really see any paper maps of Ireland in the stores, that meant that driving was accomplished by taking screenshots of the googlemaps route the night before (on my phone, which is in Russian), and hoping we don't get too lost the next day. For the most part, this worked out okay, but there were some interesting moments of "where the everloving heck are we??" Thankfully, we both view this as adventure, and hey, you can only get so lost on an island 100 miles wide, right?

     I'll preface this bit with a warning: Killarney was my favorite place, bar none, out of the trip. Which is odd, because what we did for a good portion of the one day we were there was... laundry. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The site I used to book this trip (europeandestination.com, highly
recommended), let you pick your cities and hotels, and the cost of the trip depended on which hotel you chose. This means that some of the hotels were eh, so-so, not bad, and some of them were clearly high-end business-savvy hotels looking to pick up extra patronage in off-season. The Killarney hotel was actually a golfing resort located on the edge of the Killarney National Park. It. Was.Gorgeous. We got a room that opened out onto a few greens, and then forest, lake, and mountains. You could hear birds, the occasional whack of a golf ball, and that's it. It was pitch black at night, serene, peaceful, elegant, and just amazing.

View from the breakfast room the next morning. 

     Most of the time spent driving was also going through scenery like this. Huge, cloudy but bright skies, and greenery everywhere. Loved it; probably retiring there. Anyway, since we only had one night in Killarney (alas), and the laundry service took 24 hours, we drove into Killarney (getting thoroughly lost along the way), found the one laundromat there, and spent some quality time looking less like hobos. The laundromat was literally 3 stacks of washers/dryers, and a counter where you could drop off or purchase soap/coins/etc. As we were waiting, we overheard the lady say that she has laundry contracts with all the local hotels, which lead us to believe there must be a sweatshop in the back, with people bent over huge washtubs 24/7, cause she sure as heck wasn't keeping up with all that via three machines. Although I didn't take a photo of the laundrette, it did happen to be right next to (apparently) the only LOTR-themes pub in Ireland. My co-worker, Jen, is rather a fan (understatement), so I snapped a picture, but we did not go in.

     Instead, with laundry done, we discovered that we'd parked right on the edge of walking/shopping area. Since it'd been a whole day since we'd walked excessively, and we hadn't done any shopping so far, we wandered around and found some various and sundries to amuse ourselves. Then, ladies and gentlemen, then we found the Aran Sweater Market. If you've never had a true Aran Island sweater, well, you're missing out. They're gorgeous, warm as heck, and expensive. I've kind of moved away from wearing bulky clothes so I wasn't too worried about overspending, but upon entering, I discovered they had hats. Pretty hats. That fit me. And if you've known me for any length of time, you know how rare that is. One-size-fits-most is a bald-face lie, so when I resignedly tried one on and it actually fit, I was in heaven.

I won't bore you with the resulting delight, agony over spending money, and selfless and loving offer from my gentleman to purchase some of my choices for me as an early birthday/ Christmas gift, but I walked out of there with more hats than I have had before in my life (three), and all of them pretty, instead of the typical boring black male hat that's all that fits my head. In hindsight, this might have something to do with my love of Killarney, but really, the whole city is quite lovely, too.

We continued walking around, and, as was our modus operandi, we randomly picked a pub to have what we hoped would be a light dinner, as Ireland is not well known for their moderate meals. I ordered a kids' sized fish-and-chips meal, and angel ordered Irish lasagna, neither of which turned out to be "light," but both of which were, as usual, delicious. We walked around for a bit more, then went back to the hotel and sat in the car park, enjoying the weather and peace and quiet for a while before calling in a day.

Would you believe the trip still wasn't done? I guess I'll have to do a part 3, even. To be continued...