Sitting on Top of The World

Someone must come the the aid of Ireland's sheep! Throughout this country, a person or persons unknown has been tagging innocent sheep with graffiti. Now, I often find graffiti interesting and perhaps even artistic in urban settings, but it has no business on living creatures. Many of the sheep we see are marked with red or green paint, no doubt marking the animal as being the turf of "T-Bonz" or "MacCool." Shameful. Pity the poor rural farmer who will need to sandblast his livestock..

Day six took us up to the northern coast of Ireland, a vantage point from which you can see Scotland. Here, we toured the Giant's Causeway and, more to the point, the Bushmill's Distillery. Bushmill's is a nice contrast to the Old Jameson tour, as where Jameson's tour focused on the old ways of doing things, Bushmill's is a modern 24-hour factory, pumping out the aqua vitae as you tour. The smells were fantastic, particularly in the mash stage, when the steam emitted smells like warmed Grape Nuts cereal. I plan to start distilling Grape Nuts tout suite.

We stayed the night in Donegal town, where one pub we visited (Caffarti's) was attended by an 87-year-old barman, a third-generation owner-operator of the pub. (Al speculated that he was probably reticent to turn the place over to his 62-year-old son because "kids today think they know everything.")

Round Round-Up, Part Sex!

• 1 at the Bushmill's Distillery
• 1 at Dom's in Donegal Town
• 1 at the Scotsman
• 1 at S. Mac Caffarti's Tircohaill Bar
• 1 at Donelly O'Dowds, where we enthusiastically rooted for Ireland in a junior world cup game agains England until a fellow patron kindly pointed out to us that this was a rebroadcast
• 2 at the Olde Castle Bar

Frequent visitors to this site may notice that productivity was low on Day 6. We can blame this in part on the concentration and strength of our imbibing the night before in Belfast, but as I've developed a very minor throat-tickle, I worry that I may not be able to match the quotas established in our first few days. We hope to run our enginges at a moderate speed on Day 7 so that we will have full power in the boilers for our Friday and Saturday in Galway.

Mike'll have your pictures, then.