DAY THIRTY-FOUR: HENS, STAGS, HIKES, POITIN

I forgot to tell you this earlier, but Kilkenny is Ireland's "stag city," not because it's a place where the local deer convene yearly for their annual conference but because weekends here are chaotic riots of "stag" and "hen" parties, roving gangs of bachelors and bachelorettes who flood the city's narrow downtown streets, clad in often ridiculous themed clothing (or just inappropriately tight and revealing clothing) and drink until something bad happens.  Who knew?

Us, about an hour after we sat down for dinner at Matt the Miller's on Saturday night when no fewer than four hen parties descended on our not exactly quiet but not Pantera concert noise levels either dinner.  Within minutes the restaurant's entertainment slate shifted from acoustic trad to sloppy rave as platter after platter of fried food made its way up to the private room upstairs and a gaggle of girls wearing red "Anne's getting hitched" t-shirts took over the dance floor.  When the small rugby team of equally soused young boys joined them (uninvited, it seemed), it was time to go.

Last night -- a Sunday -- seemed a bit tamer, certainly at Dylan's, a whisky bar whose albatross on this night was a group of cheerful and clueless Americans who came in, planted themselves on some bar stools and announced, "We want to try some whisky but we don't know anything about it!"

Even if you're pretending to be a writer,
don't order this stuff. Get the Connemara.

That would be us.  Apologies not to Ireland as a whole but to the long-suffering and occasionally patient bartenders at Dylan's, and thanks for the tip about the Dingle batch one.  I wouldn't put it in my car either.  Wish you'd stopped me before the Writers Tears, too. 

We planned an early night.  One round and we were gone, strolling back toward our hotels and only pausing to see what sort of music was playing at various pubs, not going in -- until we came across a bar so foul and degenerate that I can't even put its name here (also, I forgot it).   And yet the music coming from inside... was... fantastic.  "Come on in," the bouncer beckoned.   

Like Odysseus staring at a bar full of sirens, we went in.  A clean-cut foursome called Drops of Green toiled away on a small stage in front of a sloppy and youthful crowd.  Girls were on the dance floor but they weren't really dancing; they were thrashing around gleefully.  Some of the boys had reached the state of drunkenness that carried with it the twin odors of violence and unpredictability.  

A guy at a nearby table got his beer knocked out of his hand as he carried it back from the bar.  Another young guy, so drunk he could barely sit on his bar stool, leaned into a group of nearby girls until they told him in the most colorful and profane terms to back off.  The bouncer dragged him away.  We later spotted him making out fiercely in the corner with different girl.

And there, in front of all this, was Drops of Green: Were our ears playing tricks on us?  Were the harmonies really that sweet?  The songs were mournful and ecstatic.  They told of lost loves and leaving home.  This was by far the best live music we'd heard in Ireland.  

This crowd didn't deserve them.  

We stayed for an hour and nobody got beat up.  The scraggly crowd eventually grew on us, as they seemed to know all the words to every song.  We don't have that in the U.S.  There is no national song or group of songs, nothing we all have that much in common, though I did once witness an entire bar full of people in Tehachapi sing along to "Friends in Low Places," which was pretty cool.

Cats forever.

We got out of there at 11, eager to go to bed, wake up and begin today's long walk, a temporary reprieve from our growing sense that we're destroying our bodies and may eventually return home as unhealthy, bloated versions of ourselves.  In my case, more unhealthy and bloated than usual.

No bikes today, no cars.  Just our feet.  We left from the base of the Hurling statue (Go Cats!) and followed the River Nore (after much negotiating about which side of the river we should be walking on) and just kept walking, O'Toole and Grace in stylish athleisure, Sandra Bullock and I in our ridiculous hiking pants.

The Kilkenny Trail links Kilkenny with Bennettsbridge, following the river but occasionally veering off along residential streets and actually through farms, where we saw quite a few cows who were just lying around lazily, a good thing because at one point the trail, which had degenerated into a two-foot wide strip

Several lazy cows. One industrious cow.

of slightly flattened grass, came within about 10 feet of a little pack of lounging bovines, along with one who'd taken the initiative to hide out in some ruins and pop his head out as we walked by.   If those cows hadn't been so lazy, that could've turned into our own personal Pamplona.  And me without my red scarf.

The ruins kept coming, even after the cows, until finally we came upon what Sandra Bullock deduced was what remained of a mill ("There's a millstone! You're standing on it!" pointing to a round rock under my feet), a huge and crumbling stone building, once an economic driver for some old 18th or 19th-century community, now a vine-covered photo op.  

It was 11:48 when Princess Grace commented, "What beautiful weather we're getting today," and it was true that at 11:48 the weather was beautiful -- sunny and cool, with beautiful and beautifully threatening cloud formations in the sky.  

Ruins, ruins, ruins. 

After almost eight miles we came to Bennettsbridge, a very small village whose major attraction, per the women we met just after the "AVOID LIVESTOCK" warning sign, who was walking one dog on a leash and one off because one was too tall to easily fit under whoever owned the land's electric fence (we practiced responsible access many times today), was -- you're in luck, Sandra Bullock -- a pottery store, called Nicholas Mosse's.  Signs promised pottery, a cafe and a visitor's center.

At 12:40, it began to rain lightly.  We stopped and switched to our rain coats.  Ten minutes later it stopped raining and the sun came out.  We stubbornly remained in our rain coats because I wanted to make sure I was a ball of sweat by the time we got to Nicholas Mosse's and my raincoat, which does have taped seams but has no vents, is a reliable creator of sweat.  Mosse's was a huge building, a former family-run flour mill where the prodigal son, Nicholas, had the last laugh by saving the family business with his pottery.  Sandra Bullock, being an empathetic and helpful person, did her part for the Mosse family when, facing a decision between two small pottery bowls, decided to just buy both of them.

From there, Michael the cab driver, who warned us that when in Dublin, "whatever you do, stay out of Temple Bar," (thank you fellow members of my party for not mentioning the name of our Dublin hotel) and that the only thing that must be avoided more than Temple Bar is a Scottish woman, took us back to Kilkenny, in time for another cab to take us out to the middle of nowhere for our tour of the Ballykeefe distillery.

"It's not that soda bottle your granddad
would pull out from under the sink"

It's been two years since Morgan Ging, engineer/farmer, grew weary of risking his family's entire livelihood on raising cattle on their chunk of the former Lady Desart estate and burst into the kitchen pronouncing, "Lads, we're doing distilling!"  Since then, Ging's family business, Ballykeefe, has won 12 awards for its gin, vodka and poitin, a modern version of a type of Irish moonshine so risky and underhanded that, according to Morgan's daughter Sarah, who poured us a taste, "If you tell someone Irish that you're drinking poitin, they'll probably think you're mad."

Sarah, who is 20, thinks that when you're in Dublin, you "probably should go to Temple Bar."

We got out of there with two new bottles (neither of them poitin) and our cab driver's life story (moved to Ireland six years ago from Pakistan for a girl, loves Kilkenny, pays 900 EU a month for a two-bedroom place) and no plans to enter a pub or see live music tonight.  I think we had the same plans last night.

At 5:35, the downpour began.

Today's numbers, coming at you like a boss:

3 -- Jim Croce covers played by the weird duo at Dylan's last night.  They had no instruments, just a laptop.

19,433 -- steps, plus about 100 unrecorded since I took my FitBit off and put it on its charger.  It had 17 percent battery life left.

1 -- guy in Bennettsbridge who'd done the "bike out, walk back" option and didn't know how to find the trail back.  He had to ask us.

4 -- times it has begun raining -- hard -- and then stopped, since 5:35.  It is now 7:10 and sunny again.

0 -- members of our traveling party who were satisfied with last night's casual dinner at some burger place whose theme was inexplicably Canadian.

9 -- estimated time, in hours, it's going to take to get that cow smell out of my nose since we got back from the distillery, which still also functions as a cattle farm.  

Time to go see what the Monday night hen and stag party scene looks like in Kilkenny.  We've had no luck getting an explanation as to sources of the small city's iconic hen and stag status, only a blithe, "I guess if you live in Dublin you don't want to have your hen in Dublin" from Sarah at the distillery.  And I hear if you go to Dublin, you should really do your best to stay out of Temple Bar.  It's very expensive and touristy.