Kinsale, whiskey, and coast

The blog only allows us to put a maximum of 5 photos up at once (I know, I know, we can load albums onto facebook etc, but my mom can't access those and I like doing the blog. So we''ll have to figure something else out at some point.
At any rate, I wanted to post a few more photos from today (Sunday). We drove to Kinsale, the prettiest darn town you'll ever see, with adorable streets, houses, and more restaurants than you could eat in, every meal, for a week. It also boasts lots of glitzy-looking tourists, including very glam ones from the continent. Not the kind of place we've been typically skulking about.

The 1st photo above is of the hiking trail--which at this point is still a trail--above the river, and gives a sense of the distance to the bottom of that mountain that you saw in our last blog. The 2nd photo is looking back, down the Nire River Valley. Aren't you proud of me, Nick and Anna?

Today, Sunday, we went to Kinsale, as described in the last post. Here is a photo to give you the sense of what I mean when I describe it as adorable and gorgeous.


And on the way home, we stopped into Middleton, for a tour of the Old Jamison's Distillery. I took lots of photos, but here is one that shows the stages Irish whiskey goes through as it ages in oak casks (those casks have either had sherry, port, or bourbon in them beforehand, which gives the whiskey its flavor). The first cask has straight-out-of-the-distiller "spirits," a colorless liquid. Then there is whiskey that has aged 5 years, then the next has been aged 8, then 12, then 18 years.At each stage, the amount of liquid in the cask shrinks, as it evaporates ("the angels' portion"). You can see that at 18 years, half the whiskey has evaporated, and it is quite dark and rich. That whiskey is VERY expensive.

Don and I both "volunteered" for the taste-testing part. I had hoped that we would get to taste those different stages of whiskey, but no such luck. We got to taste Jamison's vs. a blended Scotch (yech) whiskey ( I really, really like some very good single malt Scottish whiskeys, but the blended stuff smells like caustic bathroom cleaner and tastes pretty bad) vs. Wild Turkey bourbon (again, yech: too sweet, and also smells pretty bad). Of course, we ALL agreed that he Jamisons won--I think it was a bit of a set-up, myself; if it had been against a good, non-peaty single malt from Scotland, such as Balvenie, I'm not sure which would have won out).
At any rate, not only did we get our diplomas as official whiskey taste-testers, but we also met a group of young people on holiday from-----Sweden!!!!! They were the others in the taste-testing group, and they were very helpful. It's a small world, isn't it? Someone should write a song about that.