Friday, August 10, 2007

When the girls woke up we told them about Shadow and they were sad but handled it pretty well.  We went to breakfast and it was okay, but not as good as Sliabh gCua. After breakfast it was raining, but we still wanted to sight see, so we went to the French Prison, which started out life as a custom’s house in the 1500 but was later used as a prison for captured American and French sailors during the war of independence. Then after that it was used as a workhouse during the potato famine. The French Prison also has an exhibit on Ireland’s influence in wine and it was interesting to note that many of the big California wineries (like Ravenswood) were started by Irish immigrants. After we saw the French Prison we went to the Kinsale Regional Museum which was located in their old courthouse. Mark said it looked like they asked everyone in Kinsale to clean out their sheds and then they put what they found in the museum. But they also had some interesting documents, like proclamations of new rules and punishments from the 1600s (a couple guys were cited for making beer with sewer water, for example) and the shoe of the Kinsale giant. Then we went shopping and bought Genevieve a pair of Lelli Kelly shoes that were the shoe of choice for every little girl in Kinsale. Very cute beaded shoes that look like they will wear well. We had lunch at a pub and then stopped at Super Valu for sodas, cookies (biscuits) and umbrellas, where I earned a very dirty look from the clerk because I did not take the groceries out of the little red basket. Genevieve mailed the first of her postcards (I saw lots of rooins) and then we decided to walk to Charles’ Fort because it looked close on the map.  Whoops. About a mile and a half into our journey we realized our error but it was too late to turn back so we walked the rest of the way (maybe a mile and a half more) and got a little soggy. Genevieve never complained a bit, just walked the whole way, up and down hills, like a trooper. The star fort was really interesting but it was also raining fairly hard so that made it difficult to enjoy. Fortunately they had a good exhibit about the history of the fort and the life of the common soldier inside one of the buildings, so that helped. We had the nice people at the entrance call us a cab (they say it happens all the time, especially when it’s raining, people walk in and they don’t want to walk back out) and went back into Kinsale where we had a snack/ dinner at a tea house place. Mark checked his email and Shadow was recovering well from surgery ($4,000 later!).

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