This was an interesting weekend for sure. On Thursday my class took a field trip out to a small city by the name of Bunratty, which is known for it's one castle, which was pretty cool despite that its surrounded by a "Folk Park" which is one of those historic parks where everyone dresses in era clothing and works jobs that would have been done in a historically accurate manner. It also had the first pub I've found that puts the shamrock shape in the head of a pint of Guinness. The castle was interesting and as we went with the class we actually took a guided tour that gave us some very interesting insight on how clever the architects where back then. I thought this was a really cool shot of a castle with the Irish flag blowing in the wind.
This is a full shot of the castle. Every corner of the castle is a staircase, and each staircase is narrow and rotates clockwise upwards. The reason for this is because if soldiers were attacking the castle then they would have to charge up these stairs, and as most used their right hands to carry their swords they wouldn't be able to get very much strength in their swings because the center pillar of the staircase would confine their movements. Pretty smart on the builder's part if you ask me. They also had all sorts of traps and hidden areas, along with eye holes in the tapestries that the guards could watch from and spy on what was going on in the castles. This place was straight out of Scooby Doo. It also used a draw bridge as the only access point to the castle.
Besides the castle the only real interesting things are the long walkways covered with tree's over hanging the whole area. It was like Lord of the Rings scenery going on in this place and it was absolutely breath taking. I got a little trigger happy with the camera when we were walking about the folk park.
Who said there's no mountains in Ireland? This is from the weekend trip we took up to Killarney. We hopped a bus up there Friday afternoon, and came back Sunday morning, so we really only had one day there, so we rented bikes and rode around in the national park which was absolutely gorgeous. We spent the majority of the time looking for places in the park that were in a different segment of the park. Apparently the national park is actually several parks all about 3 or 4 km from the last. This is in the second park we got to, and took about at 4 km ride through which was very scenic. This was on the way to beautiful waterfall that is nestled deep in the forest on the side of a mountain. Everything here is super green and super awesome. I completely understand why it's called the Emerald Isle.
Torc Waterfall. Pretty big, pretty beautiful ----->
<------- Climbed up the waterfall past the rocks... probably weren't supposed to but it was worth it. I drank a little bit of the water (partly because I was out of water and really thirsty, partly because I wanted it to give me eternal life) I hope it doesn't kill me. It probably won't because people down below were doing it. I don't know if there are any superstitions as to what will happen if you bathe in/drink the water from this waterfall, I'm just hoping its magical really.
After the waterfall we rode back out of the forest and went and chilled down on a rocky beach by an enormous lake. We hung out there for a while and skipped stones but really nothing interesting happened (so I'm not really sure why I brought it up... I think it's just because I really like this picture).
Nothing really special about this picture, I just really like the landscape shot again, so I thought I'd share it.
That's all for now, check back next week for a new post (probably)
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