Creacon Lodge Hotel New Ross

... effects of reaching a ripe old age setting in, Jimmy played with gusto, correcting my mistakes and setting down his own fiddle every few minutes for a little break while I played the tune in question back to him. For over an hour we played jigs, reels, polkas, hornpipes... And at the end, as always, I was disappointed to leave, but renewed with enthusiasm filled by the magic of sharing music with a master of his instrument.

... besides pasta, lunch meat sandwich, or pizza. Then when we came back Lindsey & Brittany had made me a cake while I was gone and put up a birthday banner. Jordan also got be a flashing birthday girl sash. Everyone hung out in my apartment till about 10 and then we went downtown to the pubs. We called for taxis for 16 people and ended up getting this party bus with lights and loud music. The ride was really cool and the night was a blast!

We managed to sort out the car hire, however Avis was way out of town. We had to take the DART out west and walk about 7 minutes, again poor Amy lugged her backpack out that way!! We picked up our black Kia Rio we dubbed Seamus and headed to Waterford. I was a bit nervous hadn't driven for about 2 months and there were some very strange markings on the roads!!! Lucky they drive on the same side of the road as us!! lol

We also hired a GPS system.. dubbed ...

... before going down to the shop at the bottom of the hill to get out of the wind.

We saw a sign for St. Patrick’s well just beyond the car park, so we walked up to it. It was dry, but we gave it a little time before getting back in the car and driving to the town of Trim.

Trim Castle dominates the landscape as one enters the town. We entered and rather than wait half an hour for a tour, we chose to explore just the grounds. The grounds were quite extensive, and the ...

Well I have been getting demands to update my travel blog so I thought I would leave you a guys a quick update on the past week. Most of classes started this past week and I already have recieved a ton of homework from my nursing course. I think that it is going to keep me fairly busy. I also started Microbiology which I don't think will be too bad exepect for keeping our lab notebook updated ...

... be near the water. The GPS lead us through the village and back out into the country. I started to get nervous. I thought we were getting lost. We turned a few times and then headed down a rather narrow track that seemed to get more narrow as we got closer to the water. The track was fairly long and we passed only three or four houses along the way. Finally on the left we saw the gates into the O'Leary ...

... GPS! Even though is led us on roads that looked like cow paths, we reached the final destination. Glendalough was St Kevin's Monastery and had a lot of ruins and an old cemetery located on the grounds. We also hiked up towards the lakes. We decided to take a break and sit on a log and met a really funny Australian couple. They were retirees and had traveled extensively.
We wanted to ...

... Imagine this, 6 people around a table, 2 speak English, 3 Spanish, and 1 French. The only thing we had in common was sort of "hydrating" beverage.. okay, I admit, it was wine.. anyway, I digress - Somehow, we managed to teach everyone how to play and work our way through a very successful game of Texas hold 'em. The young girl from France played guitar so one of the guys from Spain went to his room and brought it ...

... to a pub called Langton’s for dinner and a few drinks. It wasn’t quite the style of Irish pub that I had imagined, it was all marble and brown couches in the modernist design I was more used to in the try-hard pretentious venues around my former work-place in Martin Place in the middle of Sydney. But it was an evening we all enjoyed immensely, the craic was grand and it was a total gas. T’anks a million Shauna for a wonderful time.

... by the hire car company to get us out of the airport car park coming to a fee of €48, the unclear route signs heading south out of Dublin towards County Wexford leading me to take a slightly convoluted course, the struggle to find a pub still serving food at 9pm in the town of Arklow, and then when we did chance upon one finding out they didn’t have my first, second, third, fourth or fifth choices ...