On This Day – Kinsale in Ireland

While the current travel restrictions are in place I have no new stories to post so what I thought that I would do is to go through my picture archives and see where I was on this day at any time in the last few travelling years.

On 16th June 2016 I was in Southern Ireland in the town of Kinsale…

At around about lunch time we arrived in Kinsale and checked in to the Old Bank Town House with rooms overlooking the harbour and the brightly painted shops in the High Street opposite and after a glass of Guinness and a bowl of Chowder we spent the afternoon exploring the narrow sinuous streets, the tourist tat shops and the exclusive harbour area.

There is no getting away from the fact that Kinsale is very much a tourist town and it felt as though the whole place had been recently spruced up for the summer season and everywhere there were overflowing flower planters and fresh paint, bus tour blue, tourist turquoise and visitor violet which gave the town an uplifting vibrancy which was fake but at the same time friendly.  It is said that Queen Elizabeth of England thinks the world smells of fresh paint and I sort of got that impression here.

Later we looked for somewhere to eat but this proved difficult on account of how busy the town was and it took some time to find a restaurant that could accommodate us.  Someone always finds a table however and eventually we were accommodated and enjoyed a final meal and had a reflective conversation about the week away.  It was our third successive year in Ireland, we have visited the West coast and the North and now the south and for the third year running we had not seen a single drop of rain.

Kim really believes that the sun always shines in Ireland!  On account of this I am beginning to think about starting a travel business specialising in escorted tours to Ireland because it would seem that we would be able to give a no rain guarantee.

As we left the restaurant we could hear genuine Irish music playing nearby so like children drawn to the Pied Piper we followed the sound to a nearby pub where a trio of musicians called ‘Goats Don’t Shave’ were playing traditional music and we stayed and watched, tapped our feet, clapped our hands and joined in when we recognised the lyrics.

We had had a good day, Clonakilty and Kinsale, an excellent way to finish the trip and before we went to bed we discovered more Irish music in the hotel bar where a man famous for playing with the Riverdance show was playing for free with his band of excellent musicians.  It was quite a show and we stayed longer than we planned and long after we had left we could hear the music of his accordion wafting across the street and through the open window of our room.