Driving around the South of Ireland

We picked up our hire car and made our way south along the East coast, we had lunch at Wexford and then drove down to Kilmore Quay to visit John and Maggie Nunn (John grew up in Birchip). Kilmore Quay is the most beautiful little Irish fishing village, it has the traditional thatched roof houses and a boat harbour where the fishing industry work from. John and Maggies's house is only about 50 metres from the sea and they had great views of the harbour and ocean. We had organised to meet John at the pub for tea where we were staying which was just down the road from their house, but John and Maggie invited us to their home for dinner and we had a great night with them and two of their three sons Rory and Sam where there too. The next morning we left and drove to Waterford, Cork, visited the Blarney Castle and ended up staying in Killarney that night. Blarney Castle was built centuries ago, and whilst the floors between the different storey's are no longer there, you can still climb the 100+ steps up the original spiral staircase to the top, there were signs telling us what the different rooms would have been and we saw things like a hole in the floor near the door where if they didn't like the visitor that had arrived they could open the trap door and you would fall in, also the places where they used to tip hot oil or water on the approaching enemy were still there. They were pretty mean people back then!!! The view from the top was great. David got down on his back and kissed he Blarney Stone, I thought there were way too many people kissing it for my likingso I gave it a miss!!! Killarney was a beautiful place, all the streets were narrow and the shop front and buildings all nicely maintained and looked very traditional. We hadn't booked ahead but found a really lovely hotel called the Fairview Hotel which had bed and breakfast in a spa froom for only 76 Euros, a bargain and the breakfast was excellent. The next day we drove to a another lovely seaside town called Dingle, then on to Tralee, Limerick and then to Galway where we stayed at Salt Hill Hotel on the promenade overlooking Galway Bay. We saw a lot of different countryside today from the sea side to bare hills to rolling green hills, we love the stone fences, the look so cool and the sheep are really nice, some have long shaggy wool, but they all seemed to be branded with a big splodge of pink paint which makes the sheep look a bit messy!!!