as in, I have been.

This is what I’ve been up to. I have photos and everything.

We had a holiday. An unprecedented move as holidays tend to happen at the end of August. But as the schools ended when they ended and the summer camps started when they started we were left with a week of childcare juggling and thought hey! Why not go away?

Why not go somewhere none of us had ever been without going too far or flying (not keen on flying, not with kids anyway. Alone I’m fine, with kids flying=hell).

So we went… to the Aran Islands. Well to an Aran Island – Inishmore to be exact.  With a little trepedation as I was expecting a holiday in the 1970s. And in a way it was, but that was not a bad thing.

The pace here is slower. The world is more relaxed. We walked, we took our time, we wandered into restaurants whenever, had prawn cocktail and chicken curry for dinner (and amazing beef stew, smoked salmon, mussels, crab claws etc), stopped for coffee and ate sandwiches sitting on stone walls. It was awesome.

The highlight was (and kind of had to be) Dún Aonghasa, a prehistoric fort on the edge of a hundred foot cliff. To get the full impact you really have to see an aerial view, like the one here and be aware that EVERY ONE of the staff we encountered there said something alone the lines of “hang on to the kids when you get to the top, ok? No, REALLY, hang on to them!”

There are no barriers. There is just a very long drop.

As is traditional on this blog, there are pictures. Many many pictures.

On the way back home we stopped overnight in Birr. We would have explored the town but encountered the awesome public library there and ended up spending all our time there. Don’t believe me? There are more pictures below. Then we went to Clonmacnoise, the monastic city founded by St. Ciarán in 545 and attacked by, well, everyone until the dissolution of the monasteries. It has the most amazing castle, which sort of fell down on top of itself and now balances precariously on its hill like something from a very dark fairy tale indeed. I couldn’t take my eyes off it!