Sunday Drive

Sunday came around and we headed off to mass with the family. The church was a quaint little country church placed up on a hill over looking the rolling green hills. It was a children’s mass and the whole church was packed with young families. It was quite nice except that everyone said the prayers as fast as they could. The whole mass was 30 minutes max.

After mass the family was gracious enough to take us to the local national park. The forest was covered in a carpet of bright green moss. It was so beautiful.

I took a family portrait of the Cronin family. They said that they hired two other photographers to take their photo but neither of them was able to get a decent photo. I was the first one that was successful.

There were lots of trails but it was quite cold and it would be too complicated to take all the children on the paths although the oldest wanted to walk up to one of the waterfalls. We saw a couple of sheep grazing on the grass along one of the many creeks.

Mike took us to an old monastery that was right on a lake that looked like it was filled with black water. It was established in the seventh century. We saw the cells for the monks and they were small coves built where they prayed the Stations of the Cross. They were very drippy coves. Although there are no monks there anymore, people come to pray. The little church had stained glass windows with a number of Irish saints we had never heard of.

We joined the children at the playground and played around a bit.

When we returned home, the family had some wine (from their wedding!) for dinner and then left the half used bottle and their half full glasses on the table. Meanwhile, while we were busy in the sitting room, Eamon wanted to play with colored pencils and a coloring book on the dinner table. Fiona went to check on something in the kitchen and discovered that Eamon had stuffed the bottle to the brim with colored pencils. He had also filled the crystal wine glasses with colored pencils!! Kids!!

Today we put in six raised beds for raspberries. It took most of the day and was a lot of fun. The weather was really interesting, too. It was very sunny in the morning, then it snowed for about half an hour around 10AM. The sun came out again and then it hailed for about half an hour around 12PM. Then it was nice for the rest of the day.

We had bought some chocolates on our trip to Cork and were saving them for Valentine ’s Day. Bernie picked out a chili chocolate truffle. I think he wanted to blog about it so I will let him. Or maybe he’s not excited about it anymore. He thought it was really great. Super spicy and sweet.