Here's the church, here's the steeple...

Yesterday it was supposed to rain all day. It ended up being sunny instead, which was quite a treat, and aided in facilitating a much more pleasant version of our excursion to Fota House and its adjoining gardens. After a perfect breakfast from our B&B host, he offered to take us to Barryscourt Castle (which turned out to be closed until June) and then on to Fota, where the house, gardens, and resort stand. He dropped us off, and we wandered through the gardens for a while until we came upon the house, just in time for the guided tour. It was a nice estate that they're trying to bring back to its former glory; they're well on their way.

After a nice lunch at the house's café, we ran to catch a train to Cobh, but missed it by a few minutes. Rather than wait around another hour, we decided to head back to center city and see in good weather and daylight what we'd tried to see the night before in dark and wet. [There was no ticket booth at the Fota station, and no one collected tickets on the train, so free ride. Wü hü!]

We basically hit a bunch of churches and cathedrals, and they were lovely. Photos below.

After a long nap in the evening, we headed out to forage for dinner, and settled on a little kabob place that gave us way too much food for way too little money.

I checked email on my phone, only to discover some very sad news that a friend of mine from my rowing club, now working for the State Department, suffered severe injuries from a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan while she was trying to distribute books to school children. Kelly Hunt is an amazing woman who was trying to make a positive difference in a place where positive things don't seem to happen very often. She's an adventurer and an athlete and so much more. I'm not a praying man, but I'm sending as much good energy as I can muster to her as she tries to heal in Germany before returning to Walter Reed.

After finishing dinner, I needed to clear my head, and we both needed to walk off some of that huge meal, so we walked for another hour or so up streets and down alleys, until we finally reached home base, caught up on email, and hit the sack.