Left Dublin and headed to Kinsale Ireland. It’s a harbor town in the southwest of the country. I played my first round of Ireland golf, which was as I expected. Stunningly beautiful, but with winds upwards of 900 MPH, a driving rain, and getting paired with a Dutchman named Orkra.

Sunday was the all-Ireland hurling final. If you don’t know what hurling is, dont worry, no one does. It’s on Wikipedia though, so you can look it up while watching the superbowl of hurling and pretend to understand it. Basically, it’s a cross between football, baseball, field hockey, and Killing people. During the game we watched, someone hit the referee with a club in his face. He was bleeding out of his eyes. They patched him up and game on. I don’t even think there was a penalty for that. In other words, it’s the greatest sport of all time.

The scoring of hurling involves goals and something else, points or field goals or something. The goals are worth 3 and the other things worth 1. The score is like 1-7 to 0-4. Meaning the first team has 1 goal and 7 other things and the other team has 0 goals and 4 other things. It involves too much math for me.

Midway through the second half, the scoreboard read: KIK: 2-9y.? TIP: 1-7€!.32@. An old irishman walked to the door of the pub we were in. There were about fifteen people watching the game, but we were closest to the door. He said to anne, “who’s winning?”. At this moment, I put the odds of a correct response at 1 in 22. Anne said “Kilkenny” I was floored. I could see Anne’s eyes saying “please leave, please no more questions.” he nodded and looked back, “by how much?” I was panicked. She was definitely going to blow this. She looked at the TV turned back, nodded calmly, and said “seven.” the old man gave a confirmatory nod and walked out the door. I am still in shock. I’ve been to baseball games with anne before where there is an enormous jumbo tron in our section that will say: YANKEES 1 RED SOX 0 and she will have no idea what the score is. It must be the Irish in her blood.