November 9: Kilkenny

So the interesting festivities from last night continued on into the morning. When we left the Grand we (being Sam, Maxx, Drew, Conor and myself) thought we were the last ones to leave, but no! Blakey never even made it home! Hahaha. And then it turned out that Lukey got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom... all over Skye's bag and on the bottom bunk where Bec was sleeping. I'm glad I wasn't in that room. I think the girls handled it well considering that they/their stuff was covered in drunken boy pee. Skye beat Luke with a rolled up newspaper and that seemed to work.

Blakey made it back just in time for the bus, and then we headed to Kilarney national park for some photos at Torc Falls. Pretty stuff, kind of reminded me of the Falls we get in the Dandenongs. We also went to the Mitchelstown Caves which was a big underground cave system that was excavated in the 18-somethings... the rock formations were really cool and the Chicago boys gave us a great rendition of "My Humps" in one of caverns so we could check out the accoustics. No photos though because the flash would damage the limestone or something.

Next stop was Blarney Castle!! First we stopped and checked out the caves/dungeons under the castle, but they didn't seem to go anywhere, although it was fun to just crawl through teeny passages with a LED flashlight and a cellphone for light. But anyway, yes, we got to kiss the Blarney stone and all that stuff; it turns out that the Blarney stone is a stone in the wall on the top floor of the castle and you had to climb all the way to the top and then basically lie on the ground and kiss is upside down, all Spiderman-like. So now I have the gift of the gab, but the gross thing was that given how smooth and shiny the Blarney stone was, so have thousands of other scabby lips. Even Boris got to kiss the stone, when the stone-kissing attendant guy held him up to the stone so I could take a picture, which was pretty cool. He also then threatened to drop Boris, which was slightly less cool, but maybe that's just him gabbin'.

The castle itself was neat, but there was also the castle grounds which included things like a big garden with lots of neat things like a Druid's cave, Witch's kitchen (which was basically a cave with a fireplace), pond thingies and a faerie garden. The faerie garden was seriously something out of a kid's storybook or something. You'd walk through this garden and leaves would rustle and stuff and it seriously sounded like there were faeries and stuff (but I bet they were birds or whatnot). The story was that the faeries weren't like cute little Disney-esque faeries, but they were more the mischevious kind, and they'd play tricks on you and stuff. I thought I escaped the faeries alright until I got out of the faerie garden and realized that everyone from the tour group had left, and that I was late for the bus, so I freaked out and left the grounds and ran down the street and almost into a stop sign... which had recently been painted bright yellow so I had yellow paint all on one side of my clothes. Damn faeries!

After that we stopped by the Rock of Cashel which was an old castle. Yep, another castle. And then it was on to Kilkenny for the night, only the hostel we were staying at was pretty shithouse. Meg and I had to share a room with randoms and the others had shitty rooms, and I got in to find a girl in my room cutting her feet with a stanley knife, and the ceiling leaked and ew. Meg and I basically put our stuff down and got the hell out to look for dinner, and after that a bunch of us hung out because it was our last night together and stuff, and we found a pretty neat pub to do so in.