This guy was feeling the heat at the Cork City Marathon this year.  This was out at Dunkettle only about 6 or 7 miles in with a long way to go.  I hope this doesn’t happen to me tomorrow at the Lough Ine Triathlon but it looks like tomorrow is going to be wet and windy.  Yikes!

The wonderful Mr. Toons gets up close and personal with his balloon act at the recent SPWC festival in Cork.  As with the Piano Juggler, I thoroughly enjoyed his show.  Here’s hoping we get more great festivals like this in Cork.

In June, Cork was lucky enough to sample the delights of the Street Performance World Championships.  This fella, unsurprisingly called The Piano Juggler, was one of the acts I really wanted to see having seen him perform on the final Late Late Show with Pat Kenny.  He didn’t disappoint on the day; the act was thoroughly enjoyable in spite of the threat of rain which isn’t good for his piano apparently!

This was also the first time I used my Pix.ie account where you can see all the photos I took and all the best photos of all the Irish SPWC on Pix.ie by various photographers.  Kudos to the strategy Pix.ie use to get photographers onto their site which allows you upload to a pre-defined group for the event.  They seem to be doing this for other events which is very clever.  And it’s quite a nice site too.  So the problem now is, do I stick with Flickr or move onto Pix.ie?

I took a bunch of photos at the recent marathon in Cork all of which can be seen in the full set on Flickr.  I’ll post a few of them here from time to time but I’ll have to come up with a more imaginative title than this one!

A friend recently fulfilled a lifelong ambition (well, one of them I’m sure!) to roast a pig on a spit.  The pig was cooking all day and I’m glad to say I’m still around after tucking in.  It was oh so good but I’d never have the patience to actually go to the bother of this.

Final photo from the day trip down to Guagán Barra.

One more photo from the picturesque Guagán.  If you’re visiting Cork and it’s not actually raining, this is a lovely place to visit.

Another shot down at Guagán Barra.  Let’s just hope we get some of that fine weather back again.

We took a little walk up one of the many paths at Guagán Barra a few weeks ago.  It was a glorious sunny day so the going was tough but the views when we got up there were well worth it.

The oft-photographed little church at Guagán Barra a few miles on from Béal Atha an Ghaorthaidh.  This is the starting point of the River Lee which runs all the way to Cork City.

The church here is tiny with just enough room for one person to go up the aisle.  I played the uilleann pipes at a wedding here when I was barely a teenager for my neighbour who was teaching me the violin at the time.  Brave move (for her!) but I thoroughly enjoyed it and I still play some of the tunes I learned for that wedding to this day.  I no longer play the violin though!