With the lavender fields, rolling hills of Provence and daily (hourly) thunderstorms now in the rear view mirror, we were off to spend a few days in the Alps. Nothing really new here, they’re just mountains and in previous trips we’ve pretty well covered this ground here. In the French Alps anyway, anything outside France is still very much unknown territory. We were heading back in the direction of Gorge du Verdon and we’d only be on the road forRead More
Leaving Carcassonne, today’s journey was about 350 km. In the name of it not taking all day (and because we had to be at our destination within an hour of a time I’d set with the property owner), today was going to be very much a motorway day. As luck would have it, this also included my favorite piece of French motorway; The ring around/avoiding Montpellier. I’ve sat baking in the heat waiting for the toll in the past soRead More
So 2014 was shocking. But only in a ‘motivation to blog’ way. Looking back, I can see I’ve got three posts for the entire year. Looking at my Lightroom catalog doesn’t tell an entirely different story. I’ve got maybe two or three sets of photos that are waiting to be processed and yes, it’s entirely likely they never will be. I’ve got two more honeymoon posts to get written and about a third of the photos yet to process. But lookingRead More
All the convenience of getting to France, without the pain in the arse of the 3 hour motorway trip from Dublin. That could be a tag line for Cork tourism and a slogan for Brittany Ferries all in one. Now somewhat freshly married, it was finally time to set off for three whole weeks, touring around the cities & countryside of France on a shiny and almost new motorbike that I somehow managed to sneak into the deal. The firstRead More
It seemed that I’d been missing opportunities to get to Kilruddery Gardens left right and center over the years we lived in Dublin. So in the run up to moving, a list was made. Kilruddery was on it. Thats the entire story really. Needless to say it’s a great place, worthy of another visit when/if I should find myself in Dublin with time to kill at some future date. Less words, more pictures. And so on and so on. Ah,Read More
Well, it’s been a while. Amazing how moving to a different county, getting a new job and oh yeah, getting married, tends to divert attention from blogging and even picking the camera up. After Julie got a tip from Jamie on the location of some bluebells, we added it as a pit stop on a fairly short tour around west Cork last weekend. I’m not keeping it a secret, the forest is at Ballinspittle. That’s just outside Kinsale. Head towardsRead More
Instead of joining the crowd milling around the docklands, I chose the lazy option and photographed the entire FlightFest event from my living room. While I may not have had the best seat in the house, it was certainly the most comfortable 🙂 When I got over the initial fear of seeing a Boeing 737 descending and flying that low over the city, I enjoyed the show quite a bit. That first pass by the Aer Lingus plane was boneRead More
IMMA is and has always been too damn handy. As I have mentioned before, it literally is the neighbours front garden. If it was any closer I wouldn’t have to put my shoes on to walk over there. Quiet neighbours too, never any trouble from them. They have a couple of wild parties every year and a couple of more sedate ones but I’ve never had to go up there and bang on their door to tell them to keepRead More
Or so I thought anyway. Just something to pass off as an update on an otherwise run of the mill ( so far) weekend. About a week ago, I spotted a screaming (i.e. great) deal on B&H for a Canon 60D. Presumably because it’s an old model and due to be replaced by the 70D next month. However, while the 70D will be all the latest gadgets and gizmos, bear in mind that I haven’t bought an SLR since myRead More
After the huge trip to Italy and back (with a lot of detouring in between) last year, holidays this year were going to have to be a little more low key. Don’t get me wrong, I was still all for a week or two in France but wedding savings said no. So instead, we decided on something we’d wanted to do for a long time; go to Cornwall! After all, pasties and cask ale. It sold itself well in advanceRead More
A little over a week ago, something bright and warm appeared in the Dublin sky. When it didn’t disappear within a few hours/days, people began to accept it as the norm. As usual, this sends people out into the world in droves. Every square inch of beach will be occupied (or used as some kind of scalded scobe battle ground), scenic drives will be jam packed with tourists and fair weather cyclists/motorcyclists and ice-cream men begin to form complex battleRead More
I don’t know if I ever have or ever will be able to drive or ride past windy, high tided Garretstown without stopping to take some photos of wind or kite surfers. Maybe that’s the beginning of OCD. Beginning, yes. A previous trip to Garretstown wasn’t quite so windy but I’m including the photo here as something of a technical exercise. As you’ll have noticed from this blog, I’ve owned several cameras over the years. The smaller, more amateur ofRead More
It’s not really that often that I print anything, especially from my iphone. The photos don’t even usually make it as far as the computer at home. They either sit on the phone until such time as I break or sell the phone or they get uploaded to instagram, eyeem or any one of the numerous other photo sharing websites around these days. The whole instagram prints phenomenon pretty much passed me by. My opinion of the majority of theRead More
I thought “I’ll post some photos of a recent trip to Fota Gardens, then link back to previous visits” but I can’t find any previous visits. Well, there’s one, but I would have imagined there should be far more than that on here. Maybe I’ve just been very selective about posting photos of the gardens on here. Yes, selective. That’s the word. Not lazy. Never lazy. The car park at Fota, which I always kind of appreciated for it’s roughRead More
After my first ever abandoned brew day the previous weekend (I had a cold and it was too windy for the propane burner to stay lit) I resolved to do whatever it took to get a brew on the following weekend. Which was last weekend. The cold had subsided somewhat and although the weather was still cold and windy, I made a go of it. See previous posts where I muse on the life of an outdoor brewer. I wasRead More
That would unfortunately make this part three of a European motorcycling trilogy. We were back on the road, heading west toward our next Italian stop not too far from French border; Susa. From what I remember, or rather don’t remember, the road over was pretty uneventful. We had more than our share of motorway miles where the group became disconnected and following anyone was a completely pointless exercise. We had some back roads then some more motorways and well, youRead More
“Europe 2012; Part 2” I suppose. Having dropped the bike at the hotel and received the ‘standard Italian warm welcome’, we retreated to the cool shade of our room. Before I go on, (and I may have brought this up in the last part) I’d never been to Italy before now. To be honest, with so much of France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland to see, I wasn’t really too bothered. Mostly due to (some of) the people. Call me aRead More
Or “Europe 2012; Part 1” if you prefer. Going over and trying to process the many gigabytes of video shot with my pair of drift HD cameras, I’ve entirely neglected the photos. It took me a couple of days to get into the habit of taking photos during our holiday last August and as a result I’ve come away with significantly less photos than the previous years holiday in France. I think a lot of it was down to theRead More
Brew Day on Vimeo. I think I can call this the first brew day of 2013, given that my last brew day was New Years Eve 2012. I decided to try a bit of time lapse video with this one. Nothing too well planned as you can probably tell. Just stuck up a few cameras and took it as an experiment to see what I came up with. As you’ll notice from my furious re-positioning of cameras and tripods, I also shot someRead More
Kegerator – noun (keg-er-a-tor) 1. A device which was one a common refrigerator but is now something entirely different and wonderful. 2. A place to cool kegs of beer in order to serve them (to yourself) Right after I made the decision to get in on the beer keg bulk buy (corny kegs for anyone that wants specifics), I began to think about a kegerator. After all, if you’ve got close to 20 liters of beer in a keg, you’reRead More