Dublin to Kilkenny

Powerscourt House

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Today we found out exactly what everyone had been warning us about... driving in Ireland.  It really is as bad as everyone says, the drivers are incredibly, outstandingly, brilliantly inventively terrible!!!   There is the standard no indicating, changing lanes with no warning and so on, but they also park in the middle of the lane or the middle of the road, pull out right in front of you, slow down to chat to people and every other crime against traffic flow you could imagine.  Adding to this is the poor quality of the roads with potholes that you could bath in and narrow lanes on winding roads that the above mentioned drivers like to park in the middle of!

However what was even more interesting about our drive out of Dublin and for the next day or two were the amount of luxury cars.  It really did seem like every third car was something over $200,000 AUD!  It was like being at the car show with top of the line mercs, ferraris, lotus, Bentley, etc crawling past us.  Things are very very good in republic these days....

Gardens at Powerscourt - nice weather!

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Anyway, we left Dublin and headed south to Powerscourt House, an old mansion that had sadly been gutted in a fire in the 1970's, but it also had a stunning garden modeled on Versailles in France. We continued south to Glendalough through pretty valleys and villages and stopped at the ancient monastery site in Glendalough.  It was an interesting stop as there were quite a few stone ruins and semi intact churches, all set in a valley with a lake and mountains surrounding it.  The story of the monastery was pretty ironic, a devout man decided to get away from everyone and devote his life to God by living as a hermit in a cave nearby, however other people got wind of what he was doing and thought it sounded like a great idea and so went and joined him in the caves and eventually set up the monastic village!