Nancy: Waterford

Last Saturday Kacie, Danielle, Caitlin, and I set off on a day trip to Waterford. Our primary reason for visiting this city was to go to the Waterford Crystal factory and see how it's made. It was about a 2.5 hour bus ride there and when we arrived we discovered that the factory closed down last January. Needless to say, we were pretty bummed. Because other than the factory, there isn't really a ton to do in this city. There is still a visitor center and exhibits with the crystal, so we walked around there for a little bit and checked out the way too expensive gift shop of all the different crystal items you can purchase. It was still neat to see all the different items, but it would have been really cool to tour the factory.

There was a cafe in the visitor center, so we sat down, had a snack, and tried to figure out something else to do since we just spent 19 euro and 2.5 hours to get there. I had brought along my travel book, so according to Rick Steve's the only "enjoyable" thing to do in Waterford is the historic walking tour, so we decided to check that out. It was cheaper to take a taxi into the city instead of the bus, so the nice lady at the front counter called us a cab. Wish I would have known this would be the most enjoyable part of our day because the cab ride was hilarious. Danielle had a pretty lengthy discussion with our driver about the differences in speed bumps, Caitlin had a spider fall on her, and we drove by an area of town where a man had been beaten the night before where police were still standing by, but the driver said it's relatively safe! The taxi driver said we ranked in his top 5 favorite passengers and even gave us his card to call him later in the day in case we needed another ride.

Little did we know that we should have just stayed in the cab and had the taxi driver show us around the city and get our money worth because man, was the walking tour sooo boring! I guess we should have reconsidered when the word "historic" was put into the title of the tour. Apparently the tour guide has won awards, but I never really did find out why. We were the only 4 people on the tour, so I had to act like I was actually paying attention which was pretty hard to do at this point. The man was really nice though, but I guess I could have just cared less about the history of this town-it was not exciting in the least.

So anyway, after touring around the city for one hour, we grabbed a bite to eat, and headed back to Cork. The day wasn't a total bust-I laughed pretty much all day by how ridiculous everything was, and we got to get out of Cork for the day.

Really didn't take too many pictures on this trip, but here are a few...