Fall Colors Along the Danube

melk staircase

A beautiful staircase inside Melk Abbey, oddly enough, located in Melk, Austria.

Many visitors to the Melk Abbey are anxious to see the vast library of over 100,000 books or the castle like structure with 365 windows, one for each day of the year.  Many came to see the golden Fall colors along the Danube.  I came only to see the ornate spiral staircase.  Our tour guide immediately proclaimed photos were not allowed throughout the Abbey, so I was quite worried the entire tour.  It turns out, the staircase is seen after the tour, so photos were thankfully not a problem.

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Kenmare, Ireland

Castletownbere, IrelandKenmare, Ireland is a small town in southern Ireland that serves as a very good base for exploring the peninsula via the well-traveled 110 mile Ring of Kerry and the smaller peninsula to the south, the Ring of Beara.  Wonderful views of the North Atlantic,  great stone walls where sheep graze waiting for their next sheering and vast fields of vivid shades of green await the travelers to this area.  Miles and miles of thick, solid stone walls are a striking and common sight.  No mortar binds these rocks.  What backbreaking work it must be to first dig these rocks out of the fields where the sheep graze, then carry them to the wall and sort through them for the right shape to fit with the adjacent rocks.  At least they had cool weather and great views during their efforts. Even more picturesque is the adjacent Ring of Beara, which we circumnavigated twice.
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