Wild Rover Tour

Today was an awesome day :-). (if you're in a hurry and want to miss out on all the funny details don't read the italic text)

When in town yesterday I was convinced to book a Wild Rover Tour... It sounded great and so I signed up for it.

This morning I got up at 7:20, had breakfast, talked to Fionnula and left for the Luas (more about public transport another time). In the city center I and all the others were picked up by a real nice coach. We drove a bit through Dublin (I think we took the "scenic" route, because if you drew it on a map you'd think there must be a better way of heading out of town than going in "circles"). I learned a lot about the city: ***e.g: South side is more in than North side (with regard to the Liffey - the river that flows through Dublin)... luckily I live on the south side. (actually all the flash people used to live on the North Side a while back and the South Side was mostly green... but then Lord Leinster decided to build a new house south! He said that fashion will move wherever he's going and so it was... today the Leinster House is actually where Parliament meets, if I remeber correctly). Well, enough waffling and back to the actual story...***

So we arrived in Glendalough less than 2 hours later... ***We would've been quicker had it not been for all these bloody cyclists on the mountain road... There was some kind of fundraising biking event going on and had to go REALLY slow nearly all the time (overtaking not often possible due to a narrow road and crazy drivers coming the other way). I would've gone nuts had I been the driver :-). But he was actually pretty cool about it all and we kept on joking.***

In Glendalough I set out towards the Lakes. It was a very nice scenic route, really green and also quite wet, lol! It started to rain couple of times, but it usually stopped again after a bit. It was a nice 1 hour hike there and back and had it not been so bloody freezing and windy it would've been perfect. Back towards town I went to the monastery which is really old and I also had a look at the Round Tower.

Back at the nice and warm coach we set out to Kilkenny over some windy mountain roads ***and through "place" called "the gap"... which is - wait, here it comes!!!! - just a gap in the mountains, yeah, they're very creative those Irish. Apparently a couple of movies have been shot around that area called Wicklow. (e.g. Braveheart, P.S. I love you, Excalibur,...) and Wicklow sheep stew or something like that is supposed to be really nice... Talking about sheep, they were actually jamming the road once ;-) Just like cows in the Swiss Alps! Also we drove through HOLLYWOOD! I'm not kidding! I didn't have time to take a evidence picture, but we drove through it... and it took us about 1 minute ;-). It's a really small village which used to have the name HolyWood (because apparently St Patrick came that way and somehow the forest was not passable but then the trees bent down and he walked through and then they went back up again... or something like that) and over the years someone just made a joke and added an L! *** Somewhere along the way I actually fell asleep and missed out on the great contryside...

Sometime around 2 we arrived at Kilkenny. It's this small medieval (crazy word to spell) town, where all the nice places are really close together. So I was hungry and first went to this lovely cafe just across the street from Kilkenny Castle. I had a nice cappuccino and some - funny, I must add - bread with butter (yeah, it's salted here... ) and jam. Afterwards I made my way in the rain over the street and into the dry castle. Admission was just 2.50Euro for students. I must say, the castle was absolutely beatiful - even tough it has just 3 sides (some bad guy from the other island came over and knocked down one side of it.... I forgot why). It's in a very good shape and you can see the place as it used to be. There's also a lot of pictures and a huge library. The people working there where really friendly and I talked quite a bit with some of them!

After the visit I set out down this long street... Parliament street I think and checked out some more places. Most memorable of all was - in my opinion - the black abbey. The church windows are absolutely stunning! Also they have funny coffins outside, they're empty luckily... After that I walked to the Saint Canices Cathedral and I walked inside... LOL, they were taking wedding pictures and so I backed out quickly. Just as I walked out 2 girls wanted to go in... I started talking with them... They were french, Margot (maggie) and Charlotte. They were planning on going to jerpoint abbey and were in kilkenny with their own car. So they asked me if I wanted to come along. After informing my tour-guides I went with them.

The drive to Jerpoint Abbey was faily short and we arrived at 4.45 pm, just 15 minutes before they close. The abbey was pretty small, but still nice to have a look at. The roof of the cathedral was taken off by some other guy from over the other island and so we would have been standing in the rain had it been raining (lol, is this even correct English?), but luckily it stopped raining for a bit. After that we drove back to Dublin.


*** Heading into Dublin we actually pretty much passed the place where I live, but I didn't recognize it... Yeah, embarrassing, but I'd only been there once in a car with Kilian. So Margot let us out somewhere in the center and Charlotte and me where waiting at the bus stop. Number 122 came along and I asked the bus driver if he was going anywhere close to Herberton Road... Well, turn out we were going close to Herberton Drive, which is luckily not tooooo far from where I live. So I made it home safely :-). ***

All in all it had been a great day, I drove through at least 5 counties today: Dublin, Wicklow, Kilkenny, Carlow and Kildare (and maybe also Laois, not sure tough) and learnt a lot about the history of Ireland, religion (really interesting... have a close look at Irish crosses... their quite different from swiss ones for example) and also got to meet many new people!

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