Blarney Castle

I fell and hurt my wrist while traipsing through the woods around Blarney Castle so typing is not easy for me right now. Instead of writing all about our day, I'll just hit the highlights and then post a bunch of pictures. Pay particular attention to Samantha in the photos, she's just super funny and cute.
Today we woke up super early and drove to Stansted so we could fly to Ireland. We experienced a travel miracle at the airport - there were zero lines to get through security, we didn't even have to get our visas checked, and then we got right on the plane no problem. Once we arrived in Ireland we had a little battle with the car rental people. They wouldn't accept our UK policy from USAA and wanted us to either pay for their insurance or put down a 2000 euro deposit. Um, I do not have 2000 euro people, but their insurance made our total jump from about $100 to just over $500 to rent the car for four days. Ugh. But we needed a car so we handed over the money. 

Then we headed to Blarney Castle to kiss the famous stone! We lucked out with the weather today. It was in the upper forties and it wasn't sunny but it wasn't raining either. Perfect weather to tromp all over the 60 acre castle grounds. We traveled in our hiking boots (except for Abby who didn't think hiking boots went with her outfit's aesthetic) and that was a good choice because it was muddy and wet pretty much everywhere. We headed for the castle first and climbed the steep, narrow circular staircase up to the top of the castle. I think late November on a Wednesday is the time to come to Ireland. There were signs along the way that said "from this point your wait is 90 minutes, or 60 minutes, etc)" like we were waiting in line for a roller coaster or something. But there was only one other group ahead of us and we waited for maybe 2 minutes for our turn to hang upside down and kiss the stone. The rest of the morning and early afternoon was spent exploring the grounds. We walked through the poison garden, the fern garden, went to the ice house, saw a bunch of funky trees, found a lake, played at a playground, wandered through the fairy garden, pushed our way into the center of a huge bamboo glade, and even found our way to the back of a cave under the castle. Blarney Castle is worth the hype because of all there is to see and do on the grounds, not because of the Blarney Stone.





























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