First full day in the charming town of Kinsale and we had a good time. I slept until 7:00 in the most comfortable bed and pillow, which may be a record for me. I’m generally an early riser. I know many people think that 7:00 is early but my family knows that if I’m not up well before then they should see if I’m still breathing. We had breakfast and Marie was doing laundry. Finally at about 10:00 Jim and I left to walk around town until it was time for the 11:15 walking tour to start. Marie & JD caught up with us before the Don & Barry’s Historic Stroll. Our tour guide was Dave and he related the very important history of Kinsale in an interesting and humorous way. The history here was pivotal to the history of Ireland. Afterwards we checked out some other places in town before starting the long walk to Charles Fort. We walked, and walked, and stopped to take a lot of pictures. We could see the fort from certain vantage points but it still seemed so far away. We had stopped somewhere for more pictures and a man was sitting in a parked car. He asked where we were from and mentioned his daughter lives in Sacramento. He also informed us that there was a road along the water that we could have taken. 🤦🏼‍♀️

Tour guide Dave explained that Kinsale looked like most other towns until they decided to compete for the title of Tidy Town. According to him, and I don’t know how true this is because he was pretty funny, the woman who owns the paint shop suggested painting the buildings in bright colors. If so it was a genius business move. Either way, they won the title.

After the tour we checked out more of Kinsale, including going higher for a better vantage point.

We wanted to go to Charles Fort and had to decide whether to walk or drive. Why not walk, it should only take about 45 minutes. We looked at the map and all we had to do was follow the water. Easy enough. So we walked, and walked, uphill of course. We stopped a lot to take pictures and got some good ones.

We got back down to town and rewarded our long walk to nowhere with a stop to rest our feet at Sam’s Bar.

We eventually went to the grocery store and bought food to cook dinner tonight. I had leftover fish & chips from the night before and the others had pasta, salad and garlic bread. It started raining just after we returned to the apa

Here are some additional photos from today…