Ok, so we didn't exactly adjust to the whole time change thing right away. This was somewhat indicated by the fact that we all slept till about 11:00. I mean, I know it's a vacation, but we're not teenagers.

But eventually we managed to rouse ourselves and had a delicious breakfast of Golden Nuggets and Cheerios (Do you ever worry that the British think we are mocking them with the cereal? It would be like if they had a cereal called "Hey Y'all.")

By now, the day was half gone and unlike the beautiful sunny weather that we had managed to sleep through the day before, we now were looking out at a dreary drizzle. We decided to stay close on our first day. So we looked through our guidebooks and picked out a castle to go see.

That's what's great about Ireland, they have castles all over the place. They have big castles and small castles and well preserved castles and castles that look like they are just a couple of rocks away from crumbling into a pile. Castle castle castle. Heck, half the castles aren't even in the guidebook, you'll just be driving along and pass a tower. No sign, no marker. No giant billboard saying "COME VISIT THE AMAZING CASTLE OF LORD SEAMUS O'DOOLEY!" Nope. Just a tower in the middle of a field with sheep grazing around it.

So we picked out a castle and headed up toward it.

On our drive in from he airport, we had been mainly on the highways so hadn't gotten the fulll effect of Ireland's country roads.

Well... roads might be a strong word for what they have.

Ireland's secondary roads are about the width of 1 and 1/2 cars and have 10 foot hedge rows on either side. And they curve and wind as if they had been laid out by a drunken .... oh, let's say a drunken German, since we're , you know, in Ireland now.....

So, you're traveling along (speed limit for these roads is often around 65 mph.) and it's just fine as long as the only one on the road is you. Then you can just barrel along on these quaint little roads which are choc-full of blind curves (thank you 10 foot hedgerows) and there is no problem. It's a fun little trip! The difficulty is that other people DO drive on these roads and that complicates matters considerably.

If you can see another car coming, it's not a big deal. You just slam on the brakes, drive your car half way into the hedgerows and pray to sweet Jesus above as the other car barrels by you at top speed, inches away from your mirror. (This explains why every hedgerow has a small line of indention at car mirror height running through the middle of it)

Truly, no big deal. After the first four or five incidents, you hardly even pray any more.

The problem is that, quite often, you can't see the car coming. The hedgerows and curves are such that you often can't see the car until it is part way imbedded into your drive shaft, so I have taken to rolling down the window and listening for cars as we drive on the roads.

This is less effective than you might think.

I am also very fortunate because Sarah appears to have an invisible brake pedal on her side of the car that she uses frwquently, and I believe this has saved us from possible death a number of times.

So, after several mild coronary attacks, we arrived at this massive castle out in the middle of nowhere. It appeared to have been a massive single tower sitting in the middle of the bog, except that the front part of the tower had a giant gaping hole as if a series of flaming balls had been catapulted into it. ( I wonder how that happened).

We parked next to what I am pretty sure was a gypsy caravan (hide the children!) and walked toward the castle.

We looked around for somewhere to pay, but there wasn't any. In fact the whole thing was complerely unattended. It's just sitting there in the middle of the bog waiting for tourists to visit, or teenagers to break in and drink cans of Budweiser.

That's right. In Ireland they have so many castles they can't even bother to take care of them all. Some of them they just put a sign in front of and say "go at it. Nobody's destroyed this building in 1,000 years, I don't reckon you're going to do much harm either."

So, we went inside and climbed all over that sucker.

Here's another thing about Ireland. They clearly don't have a lot of lawsuits, becuase safety seems to be sort of a secondary concern. There's this massive castle that has had no significant improvements in 1,000 years or so. There are steps that are crumbling away, no hand rail any where, and any number of places where a slight slip would get you a free trip to an Irish hospital or graveyard (at least they would probably sing "Danny Boy" at your funeral!)

In one way, it was totally awesome. I loved that there was not someone telling us to "not climb that" or "don't touch this!" You could touch whatever the heck you wanted to and climb anything you liked.

You could also die a sudden and painful death falling 50 feet onto a stone floor.

Needless to say, we spent lots of time holding very tight onto the children and telling them to "not climb that" or "don't touch this!"

We had a terrific time wandering around the completely unmarked ruins guessing what might have been here and acting out various scenes from Camelot or Beauty and the Beast.

We then walked back through the drizzle and got in our car and headed back into the hedgerow slalom.

We ate peanut butter sandwiches in the car and drank an overpriced Coke Zero for lunch, because.... well.... we're kind of cheap.

Then we arrived at our next stop for the day - A windmill!

Yep, that's right, a windmill.

All I know is that the guidebook said that it was the largest windmill in Ireland and that it was close by.

Good enough for me!

The windmill was interesting, because I had never actually been inside one before, and it helped me understand the whole "henny penny" story a little better.

What was more interesting was a completely unrelated exhibit they had about the potato famine. Apparently, one year there was a "blight" (whatever that was) and no one grew any potatoes and since the Irish didn't eat anything except potatoes they all started starving. And when I say all, I mean pretty much ALL. Over 2 million people either died or left for America. It was apparently very bad. (There are now more people of Irish descent in America than there are in Ireland!)

So, that was random, but interesting. So after risking our childrens lives as we climbed up and down the rickety wooden ladders of an old windmill, we came home and cooked supper (Fajitas! With some weird sauce that I'm pretty sure they don't sell in America) and let the kids play on the playground out back.

Then, in an effort to overcome the time change, we put the kids to bed early where they thumped aorund in the broad daylight for several hours before falling asleep while we watched weird Irish television (Look! A vicar is in the drunk tank! Call Father O'Malley! Ha ha) and old CSI re-runs.

We also ate a potato, just because we could.