Chip Butty Come Shake Me Up

Just back from a camping trip to Kerry. The weather was a little bit.... vigorous for July. We found out yet again that when pitching your tent, you can have a spectacular sea view OR sheltered structural stability .....but not both. We got badly battered by wind and rain on subsequent nights but kept warm and dry thanks to our ever suffering tent. D's first comment, pointing to the roof inside the tent when she crawled inside out of the wind was "Is that sickness...?" Remind me to tell you sometime about "the night of the big sickness" in the tent in the Glen of Aherlow.

Perfect Pitch

The Ring Of Kerry...*sigh* "Does that mean we're just going around in circles?"

Coming down from the highs of Stage Academy

 Fairy House Hunting in Daniel O'Connell's back garden

We repeated our no star / five star trick to great effect. The girls handled the transition from wearing woolly hats to bed and eating coco pops from dirty sporks in a dull morning mist to fine dining using edible chocolate spoons remarkably well.

Scooby the Pony

 "Texas" the Harris Hawk

Waiting for Texas 

 The 9 week old Barn Owl was WAY more cuddly...

...and elicited a different kind of nervous excitement :)

 Where's Kenmare?

 I can't believe it's not Chicken Nuggets!

Being A Fearless Leader

Dreaming of Endless Hotel Breakfasts

I'm definitely getting softer in my old age. 

Cashing in (heavily) on the holiday dietary amnesty, minutes before the window closed, we stopped in Douglas on the way home for some of Cork's finest chipper chips (and assorted side orders) in KC & Son & Sons. Check out the highly impressive, terrifically calorific  menu here. We queued around the corner in the twilight with the locals, shouted our order across the Q which doubled back on itself by the time it got inside the tiny shop and stayed classy by dining on a box in an un-occupied unit in strictly no-star Douglas Shopping Centre. We mopped Flying Fish from our faces, savaged a Veggie, poured Chip Buttys into us, enthusiastically scraped condiment soaked Potato Cakes, Onion Rings and Cheesy Fries from their wrappers, all to the visual accompaniment of a video demo of black belt kettle bell, spinning and cross-fit die-hards living their dream on a large screen in our dining unit (re-purposed into a walk-in advertisement for a local gym). This pastoral scene of peaceful co-existence between humans harvesting their endorphins in diametrically different ways was surely a fitting end to our no-star / five-star / dietary penalty points Summer holidays. One more infringement and we could have been looking at a 3 year ban from hotel breakfast buffet counters nationally.