Ireland – a view from the Rock of Cashel

Just one of the few good photos I took back in the summer when I traveled to Ireland.  This is a view of an old tombstone at the Rock of Cashel seen while looking out at the nearby Abbey ruins.  I love these crosses.  I made a walk down to the ruins there, but they weren’t nearly as interesting as the castle itself.
celtic-cross-and-background-ruins.jpg

If I ever win the lottery, I’m going back to Ireland.  Maybe I’ll stay, even.  It’s a beautiful country.

[tags]Ireland, Rock of Cashel[/tags]

Another Ireland image

While in Ireland, we visited Desmond Castle in Kinsale.  One of the especially interesting things in the castle is a room with something of a history of wine in Ireland and the contributions to the wine world from the Irish.  In this room was a stainglass window that I thought looked really cool, so I took this picture of it (click the image for the full-size, slightly blurry photo):

ireland-wine-window.jpg

I have some other pictures from Desmond castle that I’ll get on the site soon, plus some of the information on the castle that made it so interesting to me.  While you wait for what I have, why not check out this Kinsale guide to Desmond castle that has some of the wine history information?

[tags]Ireland, Desmond castle, Wine history[/tags]

Good Irish music

If you happen to have a chance to travel to Dublin, try to find where The Naked Fiddler (Brendan P Lynch) and his friends are playing.  My wife and I saw him at a pub in Dublin Friday night, playing with Joe Brennan and Paul O’Sullivan and again found where he was playing on Saturday night.  These two nights are easily the most memorable of many great things we saw and did on this trip.

[tags]Naked Fiddler, Brendan P Lynch, Irish music, Ireland[/tags]

Thus endeth a long day

Ireland-castle01.JPG

I have just returned from a vacation in Ireland. And if I can get everyone to leave me the hell alone, I’ll be going to bed after posting. I was up at 1:00 AM Memphis time, and it is now 10:17 PM Memphis time. I have not had any sleep today, and have spent over 18 hours getting from Ireland back home. When I have some time, I’ll select a few more images like this one to post, and I’ll write up a bit on the vacation – it was fantastic, so I’ll try to say more about why it was. It will take a few days to really get posting here going again, as I have a lot of techie-world crud to go over and catch up on.

I’ve also had some thoughts on how to better handle future absences so long periods without posts don’t happen again. I only had a little time to get the site as ready as I’d like this time. Not that I didn’t know enough in advance to get posts ready, but that I didn’t really know how to auto-post in advance, so just played around and figured it out just before leaving. But that shouldn’t be a problem again, if I can get myself into better practices on posting.

[tags]Ireland, My Vacation[/tags]