{"id":13322,"date":"2016-05-13T13:25:22","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T13:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/?p=13322"},"modified":"2016-05-13T13:25:22","modified_gmt":"2016-05-13T13:25:22","slug":"wednesday-august-19th-first-day-in-ireland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wales-2015\/wednesday-august-19th-first-day-in-ireland\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, August 19th – first day in Ireland"},"content":{"rendered":"

we started our day with a delicious breakfast at the charming\u00a0Archways B&B<\/a>, conveniently located right up the road from Rosslare Harbour. they have their own animals and garden and everything, so it’s all homemade. \u00a0i had both black and white pudding, a poached egg and some delicious sausage.<\/p>\n

black pudding is made from pork fat or beef suet, pork blood and oatmeal. \u00a0white pudding doesn’t have the blood in it. \u00a0i just read this now, not wanting to ask before i ate it. \u00a0everything was scrumptious except the “bacon,” which is never the same in the UK as it is here – it’s more like ham, which i don’t like. \u00a0but so this is your super-healthy traditional irish breakfast.<\/p>\n

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and now i’ve started reading about the different kind of traditional breakfasts in the UK and ireland, and it’s making me hungry. \u00a0must focus here! \u00a0i will say that i’m mad i never tried any laverbread, a traditional welsh breakfast item made of seaweed. \u00a0i can’t seem to find it anywhere online, so i guess we’ll definitely have to return\u00a0to Wales sometime.<\/p>\n

back to our breakfast…kevin, of course, wolfed his down so fast that i didn’t have time to take a picture. \u00a0we had a nice chat with friends of the proprietor’s from Spain.<\/p>\n

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the kitchen was right off the living room, and the night before we peeked in and saw the owner cooking away.<\/p>\n

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great place, i’d love to go back someday.<\/p>\n

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our room was small, but very nice.<\/p>\n

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why did i feel the need to take this photo? \u00a0it was a great shower, though.<\/p>\n

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it was an hour and a half drive to Kilkenny, where we wanted to stop and see the castle. \u00a0kevin had been to ireland twice before, so he’d seen most of the popular stuff over on the west side, but he’d never visited Kilkenny.<\/p>\n

the roads were good, not narrow and crazy like in Wales, and we stopped to stretch our legs and look at this crumbling old castle.<\/p>\n

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driving into Kilkenny, we were suddenly besieged with so many tour buses and cars and people…i only panicked ever so slightly and we managed to find parking not so far from the castle. \u00a0 we parked in a parking lot in back of a large department store, where i bought a cheap red very foldable and compact little raincoat.<\/p>\n

we weren’t even sure we wanted to go into the castle, because gobs of buses lined the street outside.<\/p>\n

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so it was a delightful surprise that it wasn’t crowded in the least bit. \u00a0and kind of relief that they didn’t allow photos or videotaping. \u00a0but i wonder why not? \u00a0the odd thing about this castle is that it’s completely reconstructed. it was quite nice, interesting, with photos showing the huge amount of work they did on it. \u00a0plus like i said, not crowded.<\/p>\n

here’s the nice view across the river. \u00a0i kinda wish we’d gone down to that restaurant across the way and had some lunch, but we had more driving to do before the day was over.<\/p>\n

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castle gardens, lovely.<\/p>\n

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instead of eating at that restaurant patio, we walked around town looking for a grocery store to buy a sandwich. \u00a0we ended up walking a lot more than we’d thought we would, down all kinds of streets off the touristy main streeets, and luckily finally found a store where we got a chicken\u00a0sandwich plus some jaffa cakes, some other delicious biscuits with chocolate, plus a pack of cadbury bars. \u00a0we spent quite a bit of time in the biscuit aisle, looking for the mouthwatering jaffa cake bars like we’d had in Dale, when the nice woman at our first b&b packed us a couple of jaffa cake bars, but they had none. \u00a0we walked back towards the car park and sat on a bench to eat, watching the tourists go by.<\/p>\n

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it was another hour and a half to our final destination the\u00a0Riversdale House<\/a>\u00a0in Glendelough. \u00a0We chose Glendalough because it is part of the Wicklow Mountains National Park, so that sounded good for more hiking, plus Glendalough is where St. Kevin lived, and, well, St. Kevin, sounded like a good spot.<\/p>\n

i found a B&B in Glendalough called the\u00a0Riversdale Guest House<\/a>, which sounded lovely and quiet.<\/p>\n

As we got closer to Glendalough the road got smaller, but it was nothing like the craziness of tiny Wales roads.<\/p>\n

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and the landscape was beautiful.<\/p>\n

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we finally found the small sign for the Inn, after passing it by.<\/p>\n

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and then, we drove down an incredibly rough path to get there.<\/p>\n

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but it was worth the drive! \u00a0well, i didn’t have to do any of the driving…but our room was nice, with a fabulous view.<\/p>\n

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we unpacked and sat out in the garden.<\/p>\n

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here’s the mountain across the stream from the B&B.<\/p>\n

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upon arrival we were greeted by a friendly dog and a cat, and as we sat in the garden this dog was so desperate to chase anything that she kept bring a rock over for us to throw for her. \u00a0we found a stick, instead, and she could have done that for the entire rest of the day, i think.<\/p>\n

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the view from our room!<\/p>\n

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we walked to the only place around for dinner, but that will have to wait since this post is already very very long.<\/p>\n

ok then,<\/p>\n

mrs. hughes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

we started our day with a delicious breakfast at the charming\u00a0Archways B&B, conveniently located right up the road from Rosslare Harbour. they have their own animals and garden and everything, so it’s all homemade. \u00a0i had both black and white pudding, a poached egg and some delicious sausage. black pudding is made from pork fat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[226,234,229,232,231,233,236,230,235],"class_list":["post-13322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wales-2015","tag-archways-bb-rosslare-ireland","tag-black-pudding","tag-glendalough-inn","tag-kilkenny-castle","tag-kilkenny-ireland","tag-laverbread","tag-riversdale-house-glendalough","tag-st-kevin","tag-white-pudding"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6JLYy-3sS","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13322"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13351,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13322\/revisions\/13351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}