Just looking for a nice picnic spot
I haven't actually been to Kinsale in years and it was going to be my first time driving there but I was picturing a picturesque seaside down and lots of food stalls and thought if we could pass a few hours there then it would be worth the drive.It took us just over two hours to get there which in case you are wondering is just enough time for Laura to get hangry. It also involved some terrifying driving on the outskirts of the city, namely when I came out of the Jack Lynch Tunnel into a fast moving stream of very aggressive drivers with no idea what lane I should be in or what turn I was taking. Fortunately they were all pleasant and understanding. No, wait that's a lie, they were all quite mean about it and I was dreading the return journey as we headed away from the scary big roads towards Kinsale. We parked just outside the town and went to scope out this food festival and soon discovered one tiny problem. Aside from one courtyard outside a bar that had several stalls, there didn't appear to be much of a food festival at all. We wandered into the courtyard and noticed everyone was wearing silly hats and had laminates around their necks. I had read something about a mad hatters food trail that you had to buy tickets for and realised we had accidentally gate crashed it so we left but not before Stephen had several samples. We did a proper tour of the town and realised it was mostly a collection of bookshops, wine bars and art gallery's but there was no real food festival to be found. So we just went for a regular lunch before someone got hurt.
We ended eating in a nearby hotel and getting a small lunch plus desert, and I got a bit excited trying to share some icecream with Stephen and accidentally dropped lots of it in my glass (mid attempt to pass it across the table). After lunch we toured the town a little more, I stopped to buy some very expensive handmade chocolate and we looked at paintings in all of the gallery's but didn't touch because we couldn't afford a single one any time soon. I was a little annoyed we had travelled quite so far for a lunch out and probably a bit ugh from all my sugar but I will ask you not to judge me when I tell you I had more Ice cream before hitting the road. In my defence, It was a long drive home and I was feeling like a nap was well in order so it was a safety precaution as much as a desert. We eventually got home to a most uneventful Saturday night but we still had Sunday to make that picnic happen.
Sunday arrived and the weather was still holding up so we decided we would make a trip to Mahon falls before the weather got too cold, snowy, windy or rainy. As anyone living in Ireland knows that you could set out on day trip in nice weather and arrive at your destination to find any number of unfavourable weather conditions but we are brave souls so we put a picnic together and we headed off into the countryside. Mahon Falls was much less of a drive than Kinsale which was already a point in its favour. I wasn't quite sure what we would do when we got there other than walk a bit and then sit somewhere scenic to eat our picnic. I drove about 3/4 of the way to Dungarvan before seeing a sign for Mahon Falls and then thought we must be close but first we had to drive up about a million different windy roads up the mountain, it was probably more like 8 but it felt like more. We then arrived to see many other people had the same idea as us. In my opinion this was a shame, I would have enjoyed the trip more if we didn't have to share it with strangers but the only known way of avoiding that would be to go up there on the sort of horrible day that no one would want to be out in. Naturally that approach has its obvious disadvantages. By the time we got to the car park I realised I really needed to pee, the trouble with lovely natural places like waterfalls up mountains is that they don't usually have any sort of portaloo arrangement, we also had to contend with all of the other families and couples on their day trips and I couldn't see anywhere private enough that accidental flashing wouldn't be an issue. My approach was to ignore it and hope it would go away. I found climbing the rocks by the Waterfall less fun than I had imagined it to be as I was worried about losing my foothold, the fact that at some point we needed to get down again and the fact that I really needed to pee. We found ourselves a nice spot a few yards away from everyone else to picnic and I pretended I couldn't hear running water. The view was amazing and the picnic was delicious and had I managed to get a comfortable space to lie down without lying in sheep's poo, I'd have considered a nap but it was not to be and after half an hour or so of sitting on our rock I started to get worried about some of those shadier looking clouds so we headed down the mountain and found a much less scary way of getting down than we had gone up. On our way back to the car I was convinced it would be a really good idea to get up onto a rock that I needed a boost to get up on so that Stephen could take a picture. I immediately regretted it as I was up too high and the top of the rock was all sharp and pointy although some of that might have been the broken glass up there and I got so freaked trying to get down that I briefly considered living up there and making it my new new home. We arrived back at the car much too early so we detoured to Clonea beach on the way home for a quick walk but my clever plans to nip in and use the hotel loo were foiled when we saw it was closed for renovations. We didn't walk long as the sea is considerably less soothing when you really want to pee. At this point I felt we could say we had hit our quota for fresh air and outdoors for one Sunday and could safely head home. At least we got our picnic.
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