Saturday, August 18, 2007

It was time to leave our cute little rental, sob sob. We put some towels in the tiny washer, stripped the beds, and cleaned up as best we could, said goodbye to the Randles, and left for Adare near Limerick. Because we knew the drive wasn’t that long, we elected to stop at the Coolwood Wildlife Sanctuary near Killarney. We pulled up and all of these young adult males were getting out of a bus and we were thinking “This isn’t right” and then we realized that they were going to play paintball.

We found our entrance and went into the park. Charlotte, as usual, decided she didn’t want to walk as soon as we got there but we forced her to and we made it to the animal cages. They have quite a lot of critters there. Deer and Llamas and playful raccoons and chipmunks (exotic there of course) and monkeys and all sorts of other things. The deer were making strange noises because I think they wanted to be fed. I’ve never heard deer make noise before! Of course, it was raining so of course we got muddy, especially once the kids decided they still had to play in the playground. And now we were without laundry facilities the rest of the trip, drat it!

We got a very grumpy Mark into the car and drove to Ulrich’s restaurant which is a pub at the junction of N22 and N21 in Farranfore which I think was the most authentic we went to. They were the only place that had the ploughman’s platter, which is supposed to be an Irish staple. Lots of fancy cheese and chutney to go with it, very yummy. Then we drove to the Adare Country House where we had a very nice family room. Adare is a really cute town and by now the sun had actually come out so we could enjoy the thatched roof cottages and park. We checked out their library (Internet access) and the church which had a very cool dovecote so I could see what it looked like and then had a very nice dinner at the Inn Between, which was a pretty fancy restaurant in which they still welcomed our children. On the way back to the B & B it started pouring and we got soaked!  Man, they aren’t kidding about the weather being “changeable”! The kids had a nice bath and then into bed.

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