In the morning we set off from the hotel in Cork – encountering roadworks on the way, which would not have made the previous night any easier if we had come from the ‘right’ direction! – to Blarney Castle. The grounds there were quite extensive and pleasant even though it was raining somewhat. It was amazing to see how much of the castle is still intact; no doubt because of the upkeep required so people can still go and ‘kiss the Blarney stone’. Unfortunately for us, we arrived about the same time as an unknown number of tour buses full of Americans, so the atmosphere was completely wrecked by these people vocalising every thought that came into their head. Yet despite this they were all queued up to kiss the stone at the top of the castle – as if they needed the ‘gift’ of extra verbosity!
From there we drove to the Waterford crystal factory only to find that the factory itself had closed down, although the visitor centre (including the shop, of course) was still open.
Then it was on to Dublin. We had been warned by the rental car people in Belfast that driving in Dublin was akin to driving in Paris, but we didn’t find it too bad at all (maybe because we didn’t have to go near the city centre).
We checked into the hotel and walked down to the nearest shops, where we found one of the best meals of the entire trip – roast dinner cafeteria style for about €8.
No comments:
Post a Comment