Ireland Adventure, March 22

Sunday the tour left at 8am – Kelly and I were a little late, it’s hard to get up and get ready quick. But we all slept a little on the bus through the Wicklow Mountains. We got to Glendalough and realized this might not have been the best day for a tour because it was so cold but it was still beautiful. We got scones and coffee inside the hotel there (which I would’ve loved to stay in) then walked around. There’s an old cemetery, two lakes and just beautiful outdoors. We walked and took pictures for awhile.

The Smaller Lake at Glendalough


Then we drove on through the mountains to Kilkenney. We passed where the Braveheart wedding was (which I don’t even know), and a road where they have filmed a lot of random movie and TV things, also we passed a little town called Hollywood which I thought was funny. We pulled up in Kilkenney an hour or so later and got out of the bus right next to the castle. There was a huge lawn in front of it so we took some pictures and hung out before getting some lunch. We found this little place called “Nostalgia Café” where this cute old Irish man worked and was so incredibly friendly (as most people in Ireland were). We made our own sandwiches, chatted with him for awhile and headed back to the castle to eat and relax. We lied in front of the castle, got some ice cream, talked, and took tons of pictures.

Kyle in front of Kilkenney Castle


Before we knew it it was time to leave and we had only seen the castle and walked through less than a mile of town – but it was a great and relaxing afternoon and we were able to sleep the whole bus ride back to Dublin. Once we got back to Dublin we had a couple hours before dinner. It was my job to find Kyle some fried chicken – so I looked up a place my sister suggested on the internet but it was at least an hour outside of Dublin and the guy at our hostel didn’t know the term fried chicken. But we figured out a general idea of where we could go to look but Tyrel had ripped out a page from Lonely Planet Ireland and we went to eat at “Gruel”. This was basically a hole in the wall for locals – supposedly it was supposed to be cheap but we got free water refills so that was good. The whole menu consisted of maybe 10 things written on a chalkboard and three of us got chicken (on a bone, boo), some other concoction that looked like cornbread, asparagus and sun-dried tomatoes and Tyrel got lamb. We were all pretty much exhausted and Kyle had to wake up at 5am the next morning for his flight so we weren’t too lively. We went to the pub Kelly & I had gone before to listen to some more live music but it wasn’t as exciting. We just hung out and talked for a little bit before we needed to get some sleep. And the boys were craving donuts so we stopped by a grocery store. Then we said goodbye to Kyle which was sad, but I’ll see him in Italy in a couple weeks so that’s exciting.