Fools! To Cork With Ye!

June 7th, 2010- The Fool's left Athlone late Monday afternoon to head to Cork. County Cork is the largest County in the Country and some Corkonians often consider their fair city the real capital of the country. Cork is just several hours south of Athlone and is reminiscent of Seattle for Ann and Austin and San Francisco to Laura. However, before we even made it to Cork we stopped off in Cashel for dinner. Entering the city was amazing. Coming around corner Cashel Castle loomed over us in a dramatic fashion. Stunning.

(Photos left to right- Ann humoring Lou by taking a photo next to a bar with her namesake on it. Apparently Flynn is a fairly common name in this country. Austin and Laura in Cashel.)


After dinner in a charming, yet empty restaurant, the Fool's continued onto Cork. We stayed in cramped conditions at Shelia's Hostel in the northern part of the city. Not ideal, but a place to rest for the official part of tour. The Fool's dropped off their gear and headed out to explore the city a bit.

(Photos left to right- Sheila's Hostel. A bridge in Cork city.)

If you haven't noticed this already, there are a lot of pubs in Ireland. At the end of the day, that is where many folks end up. The Fool's are no exception. We stumbled (by stumbled, Lou found it) into The Long Valley. Laura then made friends with some local poets were having a poetry slam in the bar upstairs. The Fool's entered the Five Word Challenge. The rules are that anyone can enter into the contest as long as they write a poem in 15 minutes using five words given by the audience. Our words were: free, stone, blazing, mule, and coffin. This is what we came up with, Exquisite corpse style- (The order of lines written were Rita, Austin, Ann, Lou and Laura).

Coffins of stone Blazing through the night
Lone mule wanders thru the field
The last free wo-man in Syracuse has met her end.
Coffins of stone- Coffins of stone- The mule sees our light
Free me she cries Free me this night.

We know, we know, it is simply too awesome to imagine that we also can WRITE POETRY! To make things even better, to enter you must perform your poem. We nominated Austin to use his best Texas gentlemen accent. Very nice. Alas, we did not win. Actually they were very talented. You can check out the website of the people who run the event, here!