Kinsale - my favourite stop on our Irish visit

We're nearing the end of our Irish visit, so my daily proclamations of 'this is my favourite place in Ireland so far' will soon be drawing to an end, which means, in essence, that most likely Kinsale will take the crown.

We've spent 2 weeks now in the Emerald Isle, starting in Dublin, then across to Tralee in County Kerry which was a great base for exploring the rugged beauty that greets you around every turn of the winding West coast roads, and finally, down to County Cork, where we have delighted in the quaint villages and rolling countryside that surrounds us. There's a lot of competition out there, and as we were driving along today, Mr Traveller quite rightly pointed out that you can't really go wrong with a visit to Ireland; everywhere is so pleasing to the eye, the food is delicious and the people are charming to the max.Up until today, Clonakilty took the favourite spot, but it seems we had been inadvertently saving the best until last.

Having to work our sightseeing around the necessity that is toddler nap-time, we arrived in Kinsale post nap-in-the-car, just in time for lunch, which was news enough to make everyone smile. After a quick rece of the centre of town we chose a lively looking modern fusion cafe called the Lemon Leaf Cafe, and we weren't disappointed with our choice. After refuelling we set off to explore the town with the renewed ability to focus on things other than our stomach and were delighted by what we found.

Kinsale is a harbour town, which gives it an immediate high score in my book. The town itself has that old-worldly charm that is par for the course around much of Ireland. Every second building was a b&b, and they were generally kept in pristine condition and painted in vibrant colours which would look ridiculous in so many situations, but seem to work so well against the muted light that is the norm under an overcast sky.

Around every corner was another winding street with narrow pathways which us amused for hours. My only sadness was the 6 coachloads of cruise passengers who were visiting at the same time as us and insisted on clogging the paths and proclaiming loudly about how strange it was that another country could count their small change as cents when their notes weren't dollars.

After a couple of hours exploring (and a chocolate brownie sundae from the ice-cream shop - who knew how great Irish ice-cream was?) we headed back to the car and drove the 5 minutes or so out of town to Charles Fort - one of two ruins of forts which guarded the entrance to Kinsale harbour. Although I'd done a bit of background reading about it, I wasn't prepared for how magnificent the ruins would be, and 4 euros each seemed like a tiny price to pay for the hour plus that we spent exploring the fortification. Wide open grassy spaces and tiny hidey hole doors made it the perfect exploration point for the littlest hobo and the views, both back to the town and out to sea and along the coastline were breathtaking.

In Dublin, by the skin of our teeth, to be sure!

We’ve spent the last 9 days on the Wirral and in North Wales (more to come about that later). We drove up from my parents place in Hampshire, last weekend, intending to spend time with my family then go straight to Holyhead and across to Dublin to start our tour of the Emerald Isle. Before we left my parents we booked the ferry crossing and our accommodation in Dublin, but not much else. We’d had a bit of a panic when we couldn’t find Mr Traveller’s passport,  but as him and I have dual nationality we decided he could travel on his UK passport and we’d find it when we got back to my parents in a month or so, and after I’d given him an earful about taking more care where to keep important documents and proclaiming that I’d be taking the role of chief passport holder in the future, we headed off.

We spent our week with my family then in the packing frenzy that accompanies each departure we make, and with 15 minutes to go before we left for Holyhead, I had a quick flick through the passports. It was one of those moments that you dread, those times you hear about but think will never happen to you, something that my parents will never experience because they do have a sensible place for everything, and could never live with being as disorganised as we are. As the realisation struck that I’d apparently lost the littlest hobo’s passport while I was trying to get her English passport a couple of weeks ago (which incidentally we’d decided to delay until after the Ireland trip in the end), and, even more ridiculously, while we’d been waving around 4 passports in the panic of the previous week, we had somehow overlooked the fact that the one we were missing was for the smallest member of our family who also holds no other photo ID.

In the minutes after we realised, we pulled everything out of the cases, asked my dad to ransack the room we’d been using and eventually drew to the conclusion that we’d better cancel our ferry and accommodation booking. We decided our Gaelic tour would be rerouted to a somewhat more northerly location (Scotland) and jumped online to get the phone numbers we needed to see if we could salvage any of our hard-earned mullah that we’d paid up front for our bookings. It was in the midst of this that Mr Traveller stumbled upon a little gem of a paragraph on the Irish Ferries website which stated that you don’t usually need a passport to travel to Ireland from the UK So we called them and they confirmed that we shouldn’t need a passport. Who’d have thought it? We didn’t need telling to take a risk twice - we jumped in the car and headed for Holyhead as fast as the law would allow us, breezed through security and made the ferry with minutes to spare.

It was plain sailing (excuse the pun) at both ends and before we knew it we were navigating the roads of Dublin in search of our beds for the next few nights. Our only other hiccup was when we found ourselves face to face with a toll booth and not a Euro to our names… could we pay by card? Uhm, possibly, give us a minute… We’ve got some English money if that helps at all… Ah, that’ll do you - off you go. Got to love the Irish!

And the moral of today’s story, boys and girls? Don’t describe yourself as disorganised in your first blog post, because it just might become even more true than you could previously have imagined!