Our flight left New York at 7:00 in the evening. We got off the ground without a hitch, and were in the air for about six hours. We only got an hour or two of sleep. Then our plane arrived at the Shannon airport around 6:30 in the morning. We grabbed our luggage, and then a shuttle took us to the car rental place. So at 7:00 in the morning, before the sun rose, with two hours of sleep and jet lag, we were put into a car and told to drive on the left through the construction. Ack!
We somehow managed to make it, though. Of course, at that hour of the morning, we couldn't check into our hotel (the travel agency had arranged for us to stay in a hotel near the airport), so we set off for our first adventure.
Here's Jonathan behind the wheel of our Fiat Punto, who we named Augusta. This is after we had driven her for a few days and gotten her really dirty.
Our first adventure was a little town called Ennis. We got there not long after the sun rose. We were hoping to find somewhere with some food and a bathroom, but nothing was open yet. So we wandered the quaint little town for a bit. We found a few sculptures, a nice little path along a river, and a church that was open (but regrettably had no public restroom). Finally, after an hour or so, the town began to liven up. We found a bakery and a coffee shop and had breakfast--after food, hot tea, and a stop in the bathroom, we felt much more prepared to face the world.
Here's Jonathan, sitting next to a mill next to the river in Ennis, just after sunrise.
By the time, things were starting to open up, so we wandered through the intermittent rain to the Ennis Friary. The 13th century Friary was small and fairly ruined, but it did have some interesting stone carvings.
After exploring the Friary, we wandered around the town for a little while. When we got hungry, we went to a little cafe and had our first taste of Irish soup and soda bread (which they just call Brown Bread). Irish soups are fantastic. You want to eat soup there all the time because it is so cold and damp, and their soups are always rich and thick and filling, and the brown bread that inevitably comes with the soup is also thick and filling, and doesn't get soggy when you dip it in the soup.
After wandering around Ennis, we were really pooped--there was no way we could stay awake for the whole day. So we went to our hotel and had a brief nap before setting out again for the next adventure.
Our next adventure was the nearby Bunratty Castle and Folk Park Museum. This place is rather touristy, but lots and lots of fun. Bunratty Castle is a tower keep that had fallen into bad disrepair, but a wealthy English countess decided to restore it for fun, and furnish it with period furnishings. I have never seen a fully furnished castle--it was really neat to see a castle all full of furniture that was more than 400 years old, most of it quite elaborate. The inside of the castle is whitewashed and filled with massive wooden tables, ornately carved chests and wardrobes, canopy beds, tapestries, and other period fineries. Although the castle looks small from the outside, seeing it furnished gives you an idea of just how much room there really is in there. The castle also offers nightly Medieval banquets, served by waiters in period costume with Medieval music and entertainment. We'll do the banquet on our next trip to Ireland.
In addition to the castle, Bunratty also has a wide range of old buildings--apparently the first one was moved there because it was in the way of the Shannon Airport, and they've been moving old buildings there ever since to create a c. 1900 village, depicting everything from a poor farmer's home to a wealthy landowner's. We didn't have a lot of time left to explore the whole village (it's huge and could easily take up an entire day), but what we saw was neat. Most of the cottages were thatched--there was actually a man thatching one, and he climbed off his ladder to talk to us for a long time.
Most of the cottages had little peat fires burning in their hearths. Peat gives off a nice smell when it burns, and although the fires were small, they were really warm.
During our entire tour of Bunratty, we kept bumping into a very nice couple from Florida named Vince and Mercedes Durso. We decided to go to dinner with them, and had a great time eating at a pub near the castle called the Creamery. We had more fantastic soup there to match the great conversation. After a lovely dinner, we collapsed into bed.
