Ireland

Ireland’s Heritage

/ Tina Lavelle

One of the best things we did when we first arrived in Ireland was purchase a one year family pass from Heritage Ireland.  For €60 we got a year’s worth of monuments, castles and manor houses.

We purchased it on our visit to Tintern Abbey and Colclough Walled Gardens last September down in Wexford.  Since then we’ve tried to visit as many Heritage Ireland sites as possible, though there are many more that we didn’t manage to get to.  Some of our favourites were:

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Tintern Abbey

A Cistercian abbey, founded c. 1200 by William, the Earl Marshall, and named after Tintern in Wales. It was occupied until the 1960s by the Colclough family.

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Glendalough

/ Tina Lavelle

We’ve been keeping pretty quiet lately since our last weekend away in Kerry. After school/work/study during the week it’s tempting to just relax on the weekends.  We’ve settled into a routine of strolling down to Dalkey village for coffee and a visit to the library on Saturdays and then spending the afternoon reading the papers and just generally relaxing.  Sunday occasionally we venture out for a drive or excursion.

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Striking a pose by the river

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To Kingdom Come

/ Ralph Lavelle / 6 Comments

We looked on Couchsurfing recently for options for a two-day midterm break stay somewhere in Ireland, and Bert from the Netherlands got back to us. He lives just outside Abbeyfeale, in the county of Kerry, or ‘The Kingdom’ as they like to call it down there, so we thought: why not? That was far enough away to make it worthwhile going for the Sunday and bank holiday Monday, and there’d be plenty of things to see en route, so we accepted, and he confirmed, and that was that. We were going to stay in Bert’s cottage just over the Kerry border with Limerick, barely a stone’s throw from the river Feale.

Gap of Dunloe

Gap of Dunloe

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Back in Dublin Town

/ Tina Lavelle / 2 Comments

Well, after being on the road for the last three weeks we are now settling into our new home in Dublin.  The plan is to stay here for a school year while the kids attend school and Ralph finds a job.  Ideally I’d like a job too but the librarian job market here is almost non-existent so instead it looks like I’ll be doing some postgraduate study at Trinity College instead.

Since leaving Zakynthos (sob) we’ve traveled to Berlin and northern Poland (Pomerania) and hopefully soon there will be some more detailed blogs to follow.  But just now we’re concentrating on all those mundane things like getting the internet connect, bank accounts, getting the kids ready for school and starting the job hunt.