So, I’m sitting here in our little cottage in Finny, overlooking some stunning Irish hillsides and listening to sheep and cows bleeting and mooing in the distance. It’s a typical day at the Madlaw residence. We stayed up until 4 am carving a pumpkin to use as a prop in an upcoming music venture, watching The Woman in Black, or at least the last 45 minutes of it as we didn’t realize it was showing on TV until we’d missed most of it, and then of course spent the rest of the night watching 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown, my new favourite late night raunchy, hilarious tv game show. So, after pushing away worries about my missing cat back home in Texas and assuring myself for the umpteenth time that our cabin isn’t haunted, merely infested with spiders, Chris read me Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince until I fell asleep.

I awoke with a start this morning at 11:30 pulling off my Adventure Time themed sleeping mask confused, as usual to where the hell I am. This has become a bit of a routine for me since we left Holland. Somehow my body still is confused as to how it’s possible that we haven’t been home in 4 months and continues to wake up completely surprised every time at my current surroundings. You’re in Ireland. In a little cottage surrounded by beautiful hills and stifling silence with brief interludes of intense cow and sheep noises. So yeah, after cooking some amazing homesick reducing breakfast tacos (Thanks to an amazing care package received from my best friend Melissa), today, like most days here at the cottage is consumed with pracicing music, working on editing projects, me cleaning and taking a bath (Because I’m freezing pretty much constantly). But I can’t really complain about the cold because according to the locals, this is the best weather they’ve had all year. They keep referring to it as “summer”, as in, “Looks like it’s still summer out, eh? I could certainly be getting used to this type o weather”.

We live in a teensy town, so small that to say there were more sheep than people would be a severe understatement. It pretty much consists of a church, a tea house that seems to never be open, and a store called “Duffy’s” next door to our cottage that is dutifully open every day from 9 to 3 and surprisingly sells gas from the tiniest little vintage gas pump in the parking lot across the street.

To get groceries we have to drive about 15 minutes into the town on Clonbur which is huge when compared to Finny, but in reality only takes up about 2 city blocks. But somehow still houses 3 pubs! Chris and I rate the pubs based on their wifi speed, cheapness of beer, and how much the bartender seems to be annoyed by us nursing a pint while trying to balance our laptop on the bar or have a raucous facetime session with the Wardlaw clan. The internet at our cottage is limited to 10 GB for our entire month, which means, no uploading pictures, or watching internet cat videos. (I know, it’s a sad state of affairs!)

But when you live in between to giant lakes and several towering hills, it’s a modern marvel that we’ve got internet or weird British television at all. The surroundings are so beautiful that it’s hard to really believe that it’s real. You know those fake landscape diaramas you see in train museums that are just made of fake moss and itty bitty plastic farm houses, and sheep are just white dots painted on the hillside? Well, it literally looks just like that. I can’t decide if it’s these hillsides that look fake or that the fake ones I’ve seen my whole life were actually just way more accurate than I ever imagined. My other favourite thing about the landscape here is that the stone walls that have been keeping sheep in their fields for centuries are beyond impressive. Many times they scale all the way up the side of these huge hills up craggy cliffs and beyond. It’s amazing to think of farmers, many generations ago, placing them piece by piece up these landscapes. And even so, despite their best efforts, sheep are escaping left and right. They are all marked with a different colored spray paint on their backs to indicate which heard they’re from. And they’re constantly jumping into or over things or taking a little afternoon nap in the middle of the road. Yesterday Chris and I were driving home just after sunset through a little tiny town up the road and I saw a man in a reflective vest waving his hands from the side of the road. My first thought was, Yeah, its cool, I see you, you’re fine. Before I glanced back to the front to see about 50 sheep come into focus all blocking the entire road. Luckily I skidded to a stop with inches to spare and all of the sheep stared, with their creepy little rectangle pupils into our headlights, backed up a few feet and then, all at once, ran straight for us! Knocking themselves over and into our car before finally filing past us. When we saw the collie dog happily jogging up behind them we realized that we had just driven into a full fledged sheep herding, and the sheep had the instinct to keep running from this dog even if that meant running straight into the front of our little Neissan Micra.

Did we mention that Ireland is one of 6 countries in the world where you can’t get car insurance through your credit card? It was either pay $1500 for insurance for this rental for a month or go without insurance and just hope you don’t get rammed by a herd of sheep. But we got away with no visible damage and just a few smatterings of poor sheep blood on the hood.

Most of our days are taken up with reading, playing music, going on hiking excursions and resisting the urge to surf the internet. It is seriously bizarre living the idle country life after months of traveling and hardly ever spending consecutive nights in the same place.

In order to stretch out our dwindling funds, we eat every meal at home, which means we’ve become best friends with the lady at the grocery store. Yesterday when we went in to buy eggs (side note: You can buy Duck Eggs here! They’re huge! And awesome!), she ran over to me and said “Hello! So good to see yeh. I thought you’d alr’dy gone!”

The cost of living here in Ireland is much higher than anywhere else we’ve stayed thus far. And as beer enthusiasts, this is based mostly on how expensive alcohol is here. Especially for a country arguably the most world renowned for being heavy drinkers, I was surprised that beer and liquor here is by far the most expensive. A six pack of beer at the store (even the huge grocery stores in big towns) are around €10 on average. And a standard bottle of the cheapest whiskey you can find runs €30! At a pub, a pint of any beer is never less than €4. Maybe we’re spoiled from the epically cheap beer of Prague, but I’m disappointed in you, Ireland. The most strange thing is that the cheapest beer sold at the store here is Budweiser & Bud Light! So Strange.

Anyway, that’s all I have for this short, scattered and random update for the moment.

I’m going to work on posting a lot more about our spectacular Holland adventures in the coming week and also continue our adventures in Croatia and on to Slovakia & Poland. Cheers!