Walking Around in Donegal Town

The other day we went to Donegal Town for a few hours. We'd been told about the bank walk--a wooded trail that runs along the bay--and we wanted to walk there. It is a beautiful spot.

The walk starts right next to the library, so before we began we went in and got our library cards. Yay!

On the way back into town, we went over the River Eske.

We stopped and had lunch at a little coffee shop/cafe/bakery sort of place. I had the best caramel square there. Had I known they were so excellent, I would have been scarfing them down all those times we waited right outside for the bus during the month we were moving! I know now and can pop in and get one whenever we are in town. We plan to make regular trips there. We want to see how everything changes with the seasons along the bank walk, use the library, and stop in at Aldi.

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The Beautiful Blooming Gardens

We spent a delightful couple of weeks with a friend who visited from Oregon. The time flew by all too quickly, but we had fun while she was here. Our neighbour played tour guide for us and brought us around to various beautiful scenic spots in this area--we do live in an amazing part of the world! We looked at the magnificence of Mother Nature, stopped in little cafes for tea, coffee and dessert, and sometimes just stayed home and enjoyed chatting. It was a low-key visit and that was just right.

While she was here, our landlord, who tends the lower garden, arrived for a couple of days of work. It looks a whole lot better now and it is much easier to see the blooms!
Some are not quite ready to make an appearance:

Some are already in spectacular bloom:

I think I saw some gooseberries down there, too. The fruit and veg guy who comes to town on Saturdays sells gooseberries. I was so surprised to see them--haven't seen those since Oma used to serve gooseberry pie!

So summer meanders along--people here are kind of waiting for summer to appear because it has been most unsummerlike--in the best possible way! Temperatures have been mostly in the 50s and low 60s. It has been cloudy and rainy a lot. And of course there is always a breeze. Yesterday was so damp and chilly that we had a turf fire! In July! How great is that?!? I love it, but I mostly keep that to myself :-) Looks like the flowers love it too. I could get used to summers like this!

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My 2 Cents

It was announced the other day that Ireland will begin rounding prices up and down for cash transactions. So if we are in a shop and the total of our purchases comes to some number of euro and, say, 21 or 22 cents, the cents would be rounded down to 20. If the total ended in 23 or 24 cents, it would be rounded up to 25. This is voluntary, but there was a trial run a year or two ago in County Wexford (I think) and everyone loved it--shopkeepers and customers alike. It's easy to see why! The one and two cent coins add up quickly and are heavy. There are no one and two dollar bills here--those are coins as well, so there are amounts ranging from 1 cent to 2 euro. We like the one and two euro coins, but of course they don't accumulate quite as quickly :-)

We started removing these and keeping them in a bag from one of Bill's prescriptions. The bank has a receptacle to take them--Change for Charity--so we will dump them in there, though we did keep one of each. We have them with our US penny, our British penny, the old pre-euro Irish penny and some shells we brought home from the beach.

These coins will remain legal tender and anyone who wants to still use them will be able to do so, but I think they are hoping to cut down or eliminate  production of them. It costs more to make each coin than the coin is worth and they had to make a lot more of them than other coins because people do exactly what we do--remove them from their pockets and wallets and stick them in a jar somewhere, thus removing them from circulation. There are some curmudgeons who do not like this idea--we heard one guy crying about his "freedom of choice" being taken from him. Get a grip, dude. So if that guy wants to carry around bagfuls of 1 and 2 cent pieces in his pockets, more power to him. We will keep on weeding out the ones we get and saving them for the receptacle in the bank--we don't have to lug around the coins and the Irish Heart Foundation gets a donation. Works for me! Apparently it works well in 5 other EU states, which are already doing the same thing.

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Odds and Ends

Yesterday I was talking coffee and saying that we were still not used to having a french press instead of a coffee machine. Tim to the rescue! He knocked on the door a bit later, bearing this:

I've never seen one like this before, so I googled it and discovered that it won a design award in 1988. It is great for us because of the shape. We really have no extra counter space, so a deep and/or bulky one would have been in the way. This one fits perfectly there on the wide windowsill and does not take up any counter space! Yay! It was nice to drink non-gritty coffee this morning :-)

It's still fairly cool here--at least for June--even though the sky is bright blue. I love it! Mid-June and I actually had goosebumps today! Even though it's not hot, I made myself a nice salad for lunch today, which I enjoyed very much!

Yesterday we took a walk into town to the "designated casual trading area," where we recycled our bottles and food tins on one side and got some stuff from the fruit and veg man on the other!

The fruit and veg guy is there every Saturday. He had a nice selection so we will make a visit to him part of our Saturday routine from now on!

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Old Coast Guard Station Garden Tour

Up here on the slope of the hill, we have a lot of stuff blooming and planning to bloom! It's very green with more and more colour every day. The gardens are divided into two areas--there are the upper gardens, which are all around the Coast Guard Station itself and out back in pots on the building and sheds, on the stone wall, and scattered around in the grassy area. Then there is the lower garden, which is, at the moment, sadly neglected. The guy who owns the two cottages rented by us and one of our neighbours owns that, too. He prefers to do the work in the lower garden himself, but since he lives in Dublin--a 4 hour drive away--it's not possible for him to do much on a regular basis--especially since we've had pretty wet weather for the past couple of months. As a result, the lower garden is pretty overgrown, but it still smells wonderful down there and it is nice, when I am working in the kitchen, to look out onto the flowers and birds that like to hang out there.

This afternoon I took a walk around the upper and lower gardens just to enjoy the flowers.

Here is some of what is in the lower garden:

And up around the place:

And you can tell Teresa is a professional florist because when you approach her door, you see a couple of lovely arrangements. I love the twigs!

Between our cottage and Jason's (our doors face each other) we have a couple of pots of these plants, which look like they will flower soonish. I love the spiky leaves!

Hope you're having a beautiful and colourful weekend wherever you are!

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