This will be my first “real” blog entry in three months! I finally have use of my laptop (instead of my tiny little cell phone) and I can type 5 times as fast (ie 5 times as much partially useless information!). I saved this chunk of our trip to blog about until the end because it lasted so long. Ireland, here we come (there we went)!
So I have to admit that I wasn’t too keen on going to Ireland in the first place. Not that I didn’t want to see the country, it just had never been on my top list. Katie did want to see it, though, and the stars aligned just perfectly. We decided to wwoof (work on an organic farm) in this country for anywhere from 2 to 3 weeks in order to save money and truly absorb this country’s culture. We were extremely fortunate and had an incredibly sweet family respond to one of the 50+ emails we sent out to farmers (their previous wwoofers had canceled on them). Long story short, we booked a flight to Dublin the second we could and left from Amsterdam at the end of June! After not waking up to our alarm and thus not showering and feeling disgusting off of maybe 4 hours of sleep, everything went perfectly (okay we almost missed our first bus, and with no cell phones at this point in our trip, that would have been detrimental, but we thank our lucky stars). After a rather LONG and MISERABLE three and a half hour bus ride to the small town of Nenagh, we finally met our “host dad”, Fergal!
Fergal is an extremely quiet guy (his 2 daughters and wife completely drown him out) but throughout the two weeks we were at their house, Katie and I both got to spend a lot of time with just him and got to know him as a person. Since I didn’t write down what we did every single day (we honestly had a lot of down time and pretty much kept the same routine), I thought I’d just give a typical day and talk about the cute, cute, cute family! Okay, let’s see!
-8am: Wake up, let out chickens, feed chickens, let out dogs (Prince and Roxy), open shades, make breakfast, feed dogs
-9am: get ready and count the cows/ check on their water
-10am: Chore #1 (either inside organizing/housework or outside gardening in either the lower/upper gardens or in the pollytunnel)
-12pm: Lunch (we got creative and they left us SO much food. Our favorite was making pizza!)
-2pm: Feed chickens again; collect chicken eggs, either relax for a bit or complete Chore #2 (either inside or outside again)
-5pm: Start dinner and then eat dinner (when Fergal came back we’d cook for him as well. Didn’t always go as planned…)
-7pm: Take dogs on nightly walk (SO beautiful!!!)
-8pm: Feed dogs, feed chickens, any last minute small chores, relaxing time, etc.
-10pm: Dogs to potty (“busy, busy”), lock chickens up, close everything up, shower, die of exhaustion or read a nice book or talk or house hunt on the laptop (that had to be plugged in outside of the office door that was locked. In other words, we’d have to sit in the cold hallway tethered to the door).
There you go! It was just Katie and I for about 6 days running the farm (don’t worry Svetlana left us a VERY detailed handbook) and then Fergal came home from Russia before the girls for about a week. We mostly kept to ourselves during that time except for dinners where we’d always have nice chats with Fergie (our secret nickname for him). He was SO Irish by the way! So so so Irish. Very quiet, hard to get a lot out of, but so genuinely kind and he had that accent of course. I am kind of sad that we only got to spend about 4 days with the girls by the time they returned from Russia (not counting the very first day when they gave us an extremely speedy tour around the farm, showed us their favorite hideouts near the stream, and taught us some Irish slang). The last days we spent with Emma and Zoe were filled with fun games, such creativeness from the girls, watching movies together, and almost no work J They loved us just as much as we loved them and by the end of the trip I was even starting to say some words in a slightly Irish way!! For example, they say “that’s lovely” instead of “cool”. “leads” instead of leashes, “plats” instead of braids, “fringe” instead of bangs, and tooooons more. We left them with a new love for the game of “Spoons” (I swear we played more than 50 rounds with them). What fun!!
One large part of our trip to Ireland included visiting nearby cities to Killaloe. It was extremely nice of the family to pretty much let us tag along whenever they left the farm. They’d just plop us in a random city and then pick us up on their way back! We got to visit the towns of Ennis (saw a rubber duck river race that the entire town went to), Limerick (cool castle, lots of good shopping and fresh food), Scariff (extremely tiny and not touristy at all, but with lots of character and true Irish people), and Galway (our FAVORITE with tons of live bands just playing away down the huge pedestrian street with tons of cool Irish shops. We also had a magical tea party here) when we were with them! We would have never thought to go to any of these cities so it was all a huge added bonus. I love the Irish!!
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