After our fun three days in Dubai and the trying and tiring day to get here, sleeping in was, without a doubt, our first order of business in Ireland. Then bacon. Yup, 4 months without pork products was no doubt great for our health but woeful for morale. We shopped, collected eggs, caught up with our friends down in the mobile home at Cahore beach (and said hello to all the doggies - on 'holiday' at the beach with their owners for the first week of our stay). Back on the homefront we enjoyed our first cold, wet, windy day in a long while - ensconced with a crackling fire and Netflix for amusement (and the company of anywhere between 0 and 9 cats). Fortunately lots of room with the dogs away for the week. In honour of the trip to Iceland scheduled for March next year, we did a bit of hunting around for some hiking boots for James - as he carries essentially no shoes compared to me. And his favourite (nigh on only) pair will last a lot longer if they don't get wet. Found a great pair that are leather, apparently waterproof and don't look like hiking boots. They were also super light and half price - so all good. We are both pretty hard on our travelling gear and require every item to be very versatile and dressy and practical (and light and small) - as we are not really the Heidi/Sven zip-off trouser hiking types... these boots were perfect (but we now own 3 pairs of Birkenstocks... hmmm). We also had one other major priority - pretty much our number 1 priority once we spent our initial week chilling out. Renewing my New Zealand passport. It's a sad fact of life that a passport is never really valid for 10 years (or in my NZ case, 5 years). They're actually valid for precisely 9.5 years / 4.5 years as every country in the world requires at least six months validity beyond your proposed date of departure from their country. As luck would have it, both my NZ and Australian passports were due to expire in May/June 2017 - so it was renewal time to ensure I could actually leave Ireland in December.  NZ passports are wondrous little beasties that are now issued for 10 years and not the original paltry 5. They allow much more freedom of travel in Europe than the Australian version and save a fortune on visa/reciprocity fees in South America and, as it turns out, they can be renewed online! Woo hoo! Fears of having to traipse to the embassy in Dublin were allayed. In fact the only slightly difficult looking bit to the process was getting a suitable digital passport photo taken. We trotted to Wexford town one day and found a pharmacy with a whizz-bang photo centre. We whipped out the iPad with all the specifications and ended up over the course of 30 minutes getting a perfect photo taken. We then connected to the shop wifi and ran the official photo through the "online photo checker" on the website. C'est parfait! Drove home, filled out the online application, uploaded the photo, paid the fee, hit submit and sat back with bated breath. And the very next day, Thursday, we received an email saying the new passport had been dispatched from the London embassy by DHL courier. Wow. That. Is. Efficiency. (Given that to renew my Australian passport would involve printing out the application, actual physical photos, taking it all to the embassy in Dublin, picking it up weeks later and paying exactly twice as much for the privilege of an overseas renewal - A$180 including delivery for the kiwi and A$360 for the Australian - plus the travel/parking/hassle of getting up to Dublin. Of course, the show's not over till the portly woman warbles, so we hoped delivery wouldn't prove difficult. Afterall, the Irish mail service gets mail here with the vaguest of address details. Turns out DHL needs a bit more than "The Doctor's House, Little Hamlet, Near the Big Town, Co. Wexford, Ireland". Sad individuals. So it didn't arrive on Monday as scheduled, but it did turn up on Tuesday with a phone call and extra directions... go to the pottery, near the bridge... look across the road, black, painted gates... Great celebrations were had to have brand new passport in hands less than a week after submitting the application. Kudos to NZ and apparently Ireland's considering the online route in the near future. Now while this miracle was occurring, we weren't just sitting about cooking egg recipes (though the ladies are producing six a day), we were off exploring our next housesit. About an hour and a half north lies our next lodgings (so much, much closer to the Dublin big smoke). We drove up on Thursday to meet our new owners and their 11 cats. though to be fair only 9 like coming indoors and of the 9, we only saw about 4 during the afternoon we visited. Now they actually run an amazing cattery where the guests (definitely not inmates) can have a private room or share with a friend if they're from the same household. Actually if the rooms were about 3 feet bigger they'd be on par with some of the single rooms I stayed in on my Scandinavian trip a couple of years ago. Except these are cosier. Well the cattery will be closed for the month of November and we'll be in charge of a colourful and snuggly house with central heating (a novelty in itself) and cat flaps - we're looking forward to it. The icing on the cake of our visit was of course the three course lunch our hostess put together - so we were feeling thoroughly spoiled by the time we piled in the car and headed home in the evening. Last Friday saw our current owners head off on their overseas adventure so we spent a few hours at the mobile home and had a massive cooked breakfast at the local lunch joint. Seriously - the leftovers lasted us 3 days - and then had a joyful drive home with the 7 doggies. Can't say the cats were impressed to be honest. We spent a few hours in Kilkenny (pictured) on Saturday (it's kind of a rule - blue skies and sunshine... might as well drive somewhere). We ended up visited the craft studios and galleries in the old Castle stables. All good fun and as our first 2 weeks in Ireland draws to a close, we wonder exactly where the time has gone. Next week? Castles. Definitely castles.