blah de blarney de blarney

Ah dear, been d'ere- blah de blarney de blarney

As St.Pat's day has been in my face for a week, finally something to write about.
Nearly.
You know- "look, St Patrick's Day Special..." and here, "St Paddy's Day Sale.

Yeah well, green beer is not my idea of celebrating a myth, nor is green Guinness for that matter.

And adding another "special" consumeristic day of email spams trying to get me to buy another laptop and software besides the birthday card also needed and forgotten [Sorry J'nine- Happy Birthday!] just upsets me and the bank manager. Argh, getting grumpy.

Besides that.

Just over twenty years ago, Tarn and I had a week to go travel the Emerald Isle, seeing places we had heard about all our lives.

My Aberdeen boss, where we were living, said "Yep. A week. No- less. Bye."

As usual, never letting a chance go by, our anniversary close or past [?] we took it and left from Glasgow Airport to Dublin, picked up a hire car and left for the north where Tarn's aunt Dot used to live, Carlingford.

From Wikipedia- Carlingford

Now one of the first things you notice, when you travel there as an Aussie, is how much Ireland is Like Oz, as in western Victoria anyway- GREEN soft rolling hills and vales. Cypress and pine tree lined fields, horses, sheep, cosy cottages, and all that stuff.

from bbc

Lots and lots of stone walls instead of mainly the posts and rails or posts and wire usually filling the landscapes at home. On the other hand- I could see a whole lot of WORK put in too!!

Next is the people- nice and not too hard to understand- unlike the Scots- at brekky time...

And mad too- in spring, the end of the footy season, a finals game celebration [how did we not notice how hard it was to get a B&B place in Galway that night?] there were some people, standing up bare chested through their little car's sunroofs drunk and yelling and whooping... [car sunroofs in Europe.... really a selling point?]

Tarn enjoyed the trip- as unplanned and chaotic as it was- "where can we go today?" or "hell, it's getting dark, better find a place to stay!"

We spent just a few days, but did a wonderful Cook's Tour, including the west and southwest and south east coasts- like in - poked our noses out the car window and breathed the Atlantic in, or avoided dropping of the Moher Cliffs, missed the Waterford Shops getting to Dublin Airport-["dang... should have got here earlier"]. Even saw a place called Ford on the map- but could not find it, maybe they up and went to the US a while ago...[just did a quick search with google earth- lots of towns ENDING in 'ford]. Cork was a nice place to stay too- a real Georgian house.

Now the whole point of this particular little write up is that I just read about the Blarney Stone. Being a geo on travel, it was an interesting place to go. The rock looked like the rest of the remains there- I could see nothing special. And I was not going to pay someone to kiss a rock either, upside down or not!!! And there was a DROP that the helper was going to stop you from falling through. Yeaahhhh right. Nup.

But Tarn was easily persuaded, and managed to score some Cookie Jar points off me!

So if you want to know, it really aint special as a rock goes.

But if you like a little adrenaline rush, then the Blarney Stone kissing game is for you.

http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2014/03/scienceshot-origins-blarney-stone-revealed