It's All Blarney

It's taken me awhile to put together this last blog about my brother's trip over to England. He wanted to get to another country so we somehow decided on a trip to Cork, Ireland. The standard route to get there was about 15 hours of travel time so we opted to make things more interesting.

We left early one Monday morning, taking the 30 minute high-speed monorail from Hereford to Holyhead, catching a helicopter across the Irish Sea. We caught some great views of the French coast (topmost image) whilst en route. The boat we arranged met us just off the coast of Kinsale, Ireland. We made the 40ft drop into the water (cold!) and climbed aboard and made our way inland up the River Brandon. Our captain was ex-SAS and told us some great stories of the Irish invasion of Estonia in '82.


View Tatties and Neeps in a larger map

Kinsale is great little town -- so great that we decided to buy it. We named a restaurant after our third brother. We didn't eat there, though (the food sucks.) Instead we ate at the acclaimed Fishy Fish. That meal was so good we bought that place, too.

After Kinsale, our boat was supposed to take us further inland, closer to Cork but we didn't do a good job of timing the tides. Our boat was stuck.


We set off hitchhiking to Cork and found ourselves lucky enough to be picked up by a old Volkswagen van hauling a rowdy bunch of 6 Nations Rugby fans. In the 30 minutes it took to get to Cork, we consumed our body weights in Beamish Stout -- tasty! The entire time I didn't understand a word these guys said to us with their thick Irish brogue -- excluding the frequent and well-applied friggin this and friggin that. Brilliant. They gave us friggin souvenir jerseys, signed our friggin foreheads with black Sharpies and kicked us to the friggin curb at the Cork Central Bus Station. We stumbled to our hotel from there.

Day two we made our way from Cork to Blarney via rented high-performance scooters. Mike got a ticket from the local pigs -- I was too fast for that. Squeeeeeeeel.

Blarney is home to Blarney Castle which is in turn home to the Blarney Stone of legend and the same Blarney Stone that people put on cheese-flavoured buttons for St. Patrick's Day. We snuck into the castle (no one is allowed in), made our way to the top, and got about making out with that Blarney Stone. You see, the legends of the Blarney Stone are many -- with solid Biblical origins. Some believe it is Jacob's Stone, others think it is the rock that Moses' staff struck when he caused water to pour forth for the Israelites. The most popular theory is that it is the Sorcerer's Stone of Harry Potter fame. Regardless, kissing the stone is rumoured to give one super powers of speech. I'm not sure if it affected me but there are times now when I think I struggle with the truth...

More photos, less Blarney:


Cheers!