Nenagh Castle

Today we needed to get back across the country to hand our car in at the hire place, ready to fly tomorrow morning.

Our first stop was at Nenagh Castle.  This made a change as it was a round tower - we've been used to seeing square ones all week.  We climbed to the top and I broke out the circular fisheye lens, taking a shot straight up from the middle (first extra) whilst running out of the way to avoid getting in the shot myself.

We stopped for lunch at Barack Obama Plaza (second extra).  This is a service station on the motorway which was visited by Barack just after he became president. Apparently his ancestors can be traced to a local village.  They have a room upstairs dedicated to him and others that claim Irish descent, including Che Guavara.  There was a large photograph on the stairs (third extra) of a local woman waiting for Obama's visit, with a rather large stars and stripes flag.

Our final visit of the day was to Emo Court House.  We had planned a wander around the gardens here but it was throwing it down with rain, so we had tea and cake in the cafe then went into the house.  Access is only by guided tour which were all booked out (an entire coach full of people turned up as we left!) but we were able to have access to some exhibitions.

There were two of these - the first was photographs from Father Browne, whose famous photographs are those from the Titanic voyage just before it left for the fateful trip to America.  The second was an art exhibition and we had fun critiquing the images.  We even got chatting to the young woman looking after the art - we were obviously paying more attention to it that most people did!

We then drove the final hour through to Dublin to return the car and check into our hotel ready for our flight home tomorrow morning.