Continued from Kilkenny Day 1.

We had planned on skipping breakfast this morning. Breakfast is served from 8-9am here and we woke up at around 8:45. I wanted to go down stairs and ask about where to do laundry, and right at that time, RL realized that we may be the only guests staying here last night and that the owners of this B&B may have prepared a whole breakfast just for us…a breakfast that we weren’t planning on eating…shit!!!

I came down by myself first, and sure enough, there’s this whole spread prepared for just us, and no one else…I went back up stairs to tell RL so that both of us could come down and have some breakfast so all that effort that they put into breakfast wouldn’t be wasted.

They also asked us if we wanted something cooked for us, but we declined since we already feel like assholes for coming down so late.

Haha, looks like a sausage. The owners’ dog, a fat lab! He kept on talking about how he felt bad for the dog because he has arthritis, but yet he keeps on feeding him scraps from the table. Haha.

This is easily the friendliest B&B that we’ve stayed at so far. The owner has like a 6th sense about hospitality and it’s awesome. He’s trying to help us figure out what to see around County Kilkenny since we exhausted what we wanted to see inside the city yesterday.

Rain, heavy rain. The stress of driving in Ireland is wearing me down, I can’t wait to get back to Austin and drive on the right side.

First thing is to drop off laundry. Typical Ireland laundry, we drop off and pick back up 2 hours later.

Lots of rain.

That’s a crappy spot to have car trouble, in the middle of a roundabout. It looked like the car had a broken front control arm…eek!

Reached our first destination, Thomastown.

Doesn’t seem like too much is going on here. Good thing we are here to see Jerpoint abbey which is just slightly outside of town.

Reached the abbey visitor’s center. I am surprised they put such heavy stones on such thin glass.

When we got here, it was us and this other American family with 4 kids, all girls…Think they really wanted a boy? They just got done taking a big happy family photo in front of the graveyard…which I thought was kinda odd…not to mention the dad was using an ipad to take the photo.

You know who else likes taking photos of graveyards? RL…

Many of these stones don’t have dates on them. I wonder why?

Lucky us, it stopped raining while we were here.

Some of the tombs were actually inside the abbey. How do they determine who gets buried in the prime spots inside the abbey? Who’s famous or who gave the most to the abbey?  Probably has to do with who donated the most money to the Abby.

OK, back on the road. Hungry, looking for lunch.

Back in Thomastown looking for food.

Interesting curbside gas pump.

I’ve been seeing a lot of betting shops here in this part of Ireland…I don’t think that can be a good thing because this part of Ireland feels like they are struggling a bit more economically with more closed down storefronts…speaking of closed stores, the restaurant we wanted to eat at no longer opens during lunch hours because they weren’t getting enough business…I guess we’ll have to wait until the next town for lunch.

Some random castle on the way out of Thomastown. At one point, there were as many as 14 castles in this area.

This was pretty cool to see.

Next stop, Inistioge…I have no idea how to actually pronounce that…RL just called it Ingolstadt…

Very nice and quaint…except none of the restaurants are open. Doh!! Ugh…I guess we’ll just drive back to Kilkenny and go buy something at a convenience store for food. Yup, it’s come down to that.

Back in Kilkenny and hangry. Not a fan of County Kilkenny. Even though it may have seemed pretty easy to drive out to two little towns, it was actually pretty stressful at times. There are these random one way streets in these town centers and it takes a long convoluted loop in order to get back on the road that we need to be on. A lot of trial and error on our way finding.

Since we are back in Kilkenny, I guess we’ll pick up our laundry. 14 Euros and done, not too bad. We’ll have enough laundry to last us until we get back to Austin!! Woohoo!!!

My haul from the gas station convenience store. I feel exhausted from the little bit of driving today, I just want to eat this mediocre food and take a nap. Actually, that Double Chocolate Swiss Roll is pretty good!! I got one at Dingle and it was so good that I got another one!

They even folded up our laundry for us. Nice!!

Just as well that we came back after our short morning of driving. Hard to tell, but it’s pouring rain outside. I guess time for a nap, and what a nap it was. I slept for 3 hours, didn’t realized I was that tired.

Dinner beckons. I am so tired of driving that we are going to walk into town tonight. 15 minutes of walking ain’t bad.

Some tapas for dinner.

Loving the free water still!

Still had to get some fish and chips. RL and I both really love fish and chips even though I think food snobs would look down upon it as trash food.

A shame, the castle isn’t lit up at night. The lighting is just from the street lights.

We mustered up one last bit of energy after dinner to see if they’ve got live music tonight at Kyteler’s Inn, and they do.

This is awesome, finally seeing someone play a concertina!!! Also the first time for us to see female musicians playing traditional Irish music.

Loving the concertina.

It’s so cool and compact, I wish my accordion was small like that.

Oh, two birds with one stone. They also have Irish dancing here tonight. RL has been wanting to see some traditional Irish dance since we showed up in Ireland!

It’s somewhat similar to tap dancing, and it’s really quite loud. Pretty fun to watch.

OK, the night was fruitful. I saw a concertina in action and RL saw Irish dancing in action.

Back to our B&B. Tomorrow, Dublin!!! Then after that, home!!

To be continued at Dublin Day 1.