This is a pic of our driver, a lovely man from Cork named Brian O'Gorman. If you ever want a driver in Ireland, look him up. He was awesome.
Doing a vacation with a driver is a little weird for me - on the down side, we probably stumbled on fewer things by accident. On the plus side I probably got less wet than I would have if I had been wobbling around the country on my own. Actually the weather was overall a lot nicer than I packed for. It really does rain every day, but never like it really meant it. And it was sunny for a few hours at a time on several occasions.
Friday we went to a tiny town (the name of which I honestly cannot remember) and climbed around in a graveyard looking for names. I use the world "climbed" quite intentionally there. There were city workers cleaning it up while we were there, and it had obviously been a while because some of the brambles were up to my waist in places. Many of the headstones were broken, knocked over or worn smooth. BC visited the library and apparently they had put together a list of all the graves in the area but the name she was looking for didn't show up. So that was a dead end.
From there Brian drove us to Dublin, where having a driver did not stop us from getting very lost. Once we finally made it to the hotel I called my cousin, who took us out for drinks and an evening of shit-talking. It turned out that it was a long weekend, so everything was packed and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only person in Dublin with a hangover the next day.
Saturday was more tourism. We visited Dublin Castle and one of the sites of The National Museum. Dublin is gearing up for the centenary celebrations of the The Easter Rising, so there is lot going on for somebody who is interested in the history of the country.
Sunday we got up at gawdawful o'clock dragged ourselves to the airport and I had Dreadful Flight II: Electric Fuckaroo because not only did we have to contend with the seats from hell, but we were stuck in them for an extra hour because the guy who's job it is to put the gas in the plane fucked up and didn't give us enough. The flight itself was really bad for turbulence so they couldn't even give us coffee. And then they tried to feed me this.
Seriously, what the fuck is that?
After a week of living in smoked-salmon-at-every-meal-if-I-damn-well-feel-like-it land, sticking this in front of me was just adding insult to injury.
Anyway.
I am home now and still lagged so I got up at the asscrack of dawn. This week is going to be all about the painting and then maybe I can get some of the pictures sorted out.