Awesome Kilkenny

Now this is what I was expecting. Kilkenny is a very neat little town with a ton of very cool old buildings and a million tiny shops on bricked and cobbled streets. Above is Kilkenny castle, originallly built in the 1400s and has continueally been added onto and worked on. The Butlers, the family that owned this castle, which they tried to defend against Oliver Cromwell at one point, also owned roughly 27,000 acres of land! Took a short tour of it today, very cool place. The castle today has a nice large park behind it which I was able to walk through and snap some pictures of the landscape.

Also went to mass at Black Abbey today in the afternoon, which was also a neat experience. I was the youngest one in there by 30 or 40 years, everyone else a devoted Irish Catholic. The picture here is of another church here in town..St. Catherine's I think.

Some of the old building are just surreal, and they are the type of things you only see in pictures. To see them here in real life has been incredible. I am looking to take a bus to Killarney, the county of our ancestors...specifically Michael O'Donoghue, likely on Wednesday if I don't decide to stay here until Friday. Really have enjoyed today the most of any of my days so far, even though the weather is like Wisconsin. Luckily, the locals say it has never been this bad, so the temperate 40 degree weather should come back soon. Right now it's about 20 degrees...max.