I think I may have pushed through that transition phase to where this now feels like the new normal. I'm guessing coming down might be nasty, but sooner or later it is probably inevitable. The trick might be to be as jet lagged and hungover as possible, and maybe I won't notice it? Nah, I didn't think so either.
The sun came out today, at least some of the time. In fact, the weather for the last couple of days might not be as bad as originally promised. That would be nice, because the whole rationalisation about Ireland being the sort of place that is attractive in it's own particular way on grey rainy days has been revealed as mostly sham, and only very partly true. It probably can handle it more than other places, but every part of it comes alive with some sunlight. We even sat out on the deck for dinner tonight, with the kiddos in the spa while us big people wined and dined to the background of the stream rushing past below us. It's fair to say that the house scrubs up pretty well with some sun and blue sky.
If you have eyesight that borders on the supernatural, or you've borrowed a computer screen from CSI Where You Live, and are able to resolve a closeup of Lauren in the picture above, you will have detected a strand of colour on the left side of her face (your left, not hers). No, this is not a technical fault, as she now looks like:
To be honest, I thought €8 was a bit of a rip off for a hair wrap, but she was mentally committed to the thing, and being the path-of-least-resistance type of dad that I am, in choosing between blowing some Euros and hosting my own song and dance festival on Main Street (it really is called that!), it wasn't a difficult choice. Supposedly it 'lasts for months', so this will probably be the last you see of it.
Other highlights of the day were Mum and the Kiddos [mental note: if ever asked to manage a band called "Mum and the Kiddos", decline and decline fast] going on a "Jaunting Car" ride around Kilarney. A Jaunting Car, for the uninitiated, is:
It makes people look like this:
When accumulated and put in the grounds of a major heritage building, say, Muckross House, they start to look like this:
This is not a bad thing.
It is also handy, when you pick up, say, Muckross House at auction, that it comes with a ruined Abbey in the backyard (just past the parking area, which can handle, at a guess, about 10,000,000,000 cars and a few dozen buses). Where you park your Jaunting Car was not clear, but the grass was pretty green, and looked well fertilised, if you get my drift.
Anyway, your ruined Abbey looks a lot like this:
This is also not bad.
You can kind of see here how you cross the threshold of what normal is (if anything).
I haven't even mentioned the farm yet, and that was the whole morning. The other part of Muckross is the 'Traditional Farm' section. This is deserving of more than a throwaway few lines, because it is a superb recreation of several stages of farm history, complete with restored buildings, people cooking soda bread on log fires, suckling piglets, 'small farm animals' (which turn out to be babies, rather than bonsai versions), and fully realistic muddy paths to walk down.
And tomorrow? Tomorrow we do Dingle! I'll just leave that line dangling there, though if you have a dongle-equipped device you might be able to disentangle my deliberately discursive double-entendre. _amn, the '_' has _ied on my _igital _ictation _oover.
Location:Kilarney, Ireland
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