Monday, March 24, 2008

Back home again in Indiana

So I am back from my Irish adventure. Overall the trip was fun and I wouldn't mind going back. Of course without the students or the parents. I have a lot of pictures from the trip and here they are.
This is from The Rock of Cashel, which now is ruins of a cathedral. Before there was a Cathedral there was a Castle. Oddly enough a place that gives us drunken Irish Brawls and soccer Hooligans had what has been described as a peaceful transition to Christianity. I have to so I was surprised by that. When the Christians came in the Irish pretty much gave them one of the strategic castles for them to build a church. Who knew? Of course it had to be up hill. much everything in Ireland is either up hill or up many flights of stairs. None of these places I would ever call handicap accessible. It's really a good thing that we don't have these in the US we would have ruined them all by now with ramps and elevators in old castles. Anyway moving on.
Hey look a castle. This is Blarney Castle, home of the famous Blarney Stone. It is said that anyone kissing the stone would be gifted with eloquent speech. I don't know about that but the could have put the stone in a far more convenient place.You see the top of that. Yea that's where it is and you have to hang upside down over an open hole to kiss the damned thing. I would post a picture of me kissing the stone but I did it so quickly that only one person had time to click a photo and it wasn't on my camera. Again had to go up hill and what I would say about 5 flights of spiral stairs that were not made for anyone with feet size 5 or bigger. Also I am convinced that people in Ireland 6oo years ago were tiny people. I barely fit in most of these places.
Now we are off to the Cliffs of Moher, these are some of the tallest sea cliffs in the Atlantic. It is also hella windy up there. The wind gusts were 80-90 mph. The fun part was that the winds are coming from all directions. Stories being told of people getting to close to the edge and being blown off. So this is what I was trying to avoid in the pic below.
It was nice that they gave us diagram of what to avoid. I would have never guessed that I shouldn't get to close to an edge of a cliff when there are 90 mph winds, that could blow me off the edge.


This is one of the battlements of yet another Castle. This is Bhunratty Castle, we had a medieval banquet in the great hall that night. I left my camera at the hotel so I missed some good pictures. This of course was eating with no utensils. And what did they feed us? Ribs. Yes it was a bit of a mess. Overall it was fun and the kids had a lot of fun with it.

So those were some of the highlights from my trip. I would have rather been on a trip that would have required this afterwards
But I didn't only one night of drinking and even then I wasn't too bad off. Maybe someday I can have the Irish Pub crawl.

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