Losing the Schedule - Kinsale to Kenmare

Before we booked any hotels or our rental car for this trip, we planned out our whole itinerary, very nearly down to the hour. We had noted down alternatives in case of weather, highest priorities, opening and closing times for things we wanted to do - it was all very organized.

Today's list of planned events included a walk around Kinsale, the first distillery tour at Jameson's Midleton facility, visiting the town of Kilkenny, hiking through Kilkenny National Park, touring a castle/manor house on the grounds and finally checking into our B&B.

We accomplished exactly two of those things. Luckily, one of them was checking in, so I'm writing this from a comfortable bed! Today, the schedule went out the window based on recommendations from friends and our excellent B&B hosts from yesterday (and another day of unusually spectacular weather - we've heard several Irish folks complaining about how much fine weather they've been getting this summer).

After a very filling and mostly delicious breakfast (porridge with Bailey's is an excellent start to the day, the bacon is delicious - the black pudding is not), we headed off to Charles Fort outside Kinsale. This is a huge old military fort, which was recommended to us because of the spectacular views of Kinsale. It didn't disappoint.

We agreed to go into the fort for 10-15 minutes, so we would only put our schedule for the day behind by half an hour or so. This was a great plan, until we started following a tour group with a fantastic, funny tour guide full of information that made an otherwise somewhat unremarkable ruin interesting.

About an hour later, after listening to his entire tour and taking a good handful more photos from the walls, we finally start out towards Midleton for our distillery tour.

We're missing photos from the tour since I forgot my phone in the car (and to be honest, after their tasting requirement of comparing the flavor differences between Scotch, Irish whiskey and American whiskey, I don't think I'd have thought of taking many photos anyway!). The tour itself was interesting, and not only because of the whiskey tastings, but ended up taking nearly 2 hours rather than the hour I had believed.

When we came out of the distillery to find it still not raining and ourselves about 4 hours behind schedule, we finally threw away the rest of the schedule and went on to one of our backup destinations - Gougane Berra National Forest. We did a beautiful hike here, up through a mountain path around waterfalls and a whole lot of very suspicious sheep, to get some great views.

Finally, we decided to take the long route across to our B&B in Kenmore. I'm slowly getting the hang of driving on the left side of the road (although parking is still a challenge and I have no idea how the Irish can manage to drive anything approaching the speed limit on most of their country roads) - and this drive was incredibly beautiful. We only found a spot to pull over and get photos once or twice, but this is just an idea of what we were looking at for our hour and a half drive! If drives keep looking like this, our idea of driving for nearly our whole vacation won't be so bad.

Finally, we ended up back in our B&B before heading out for some dinner and more Irish pub music. Again, a beautiful view - I certainly won't mind looking over this during breakfast tomorrow!