Ireland thoughts (long)
I've been back in the States for about a week now, better get these trip thoughts finished and posted.
This is long - 14 pages in Word, though I have a lot of indented lines. So I am going to use multiple cuts.
General categories:
The one section I'm not really done with. I'll write some more on this later but it's kinda weird to distill down your interactions with people to a few sentences.
- Jimmie:
- The Americans from Chico:
- The kid with the tin whistle:
- The couple at McGann’s:
- The Germans
- Julie and her friends in Galway:
- Galwegian people at the silent disco:
- Richard:
- Trim tour guide:
- Drunk Irish guy in alley (Richard II):
- Awesome Dublin bartender:
Driving Ah, driving. One of the things that I was most nervous about for the trip, as it happens. And .. with pretty good reason. Driving in Ireland is terrifying especially at first. It’s not just driving on the left. It’s not even the round-abouts. It is the accumulation of those things, along with driving an unfamiliar stickshift for the first time in years, one some of the most winding and steep roads I’ve ever seen. Also narrow. It did get better but the first few days were a bit rough. It didn’t help that County Cork, where we spent the second and third nights and which we had to drive through, in order to get to Doolin, has some of the most steep and winding roads in a country full of them. And while I learned to drive stickshift, I learned in Illinois where most hills are very gentle - if you can find them at all. So getting the car going on 30-40 degree inclines wasn’t much fun at first. I didn’t even try to drive in Dublin proper and used public transit.
There were places that were worth the scary drives - like the Connemara and the Burren - but in county Cork there were just trees and the occasional field. Oh! And signs that read “120 people have been killed on this road in the last year - DRIVE SAFELY.” I didn’t get a picture since I was driving, but that really instills confidence. I hate to say, but I can see why - in a country full of frightening roads, Cork has the worst of them.
Cats and to some extent dogs - people in Europe just let their pets wander around outside. Jill took pictures of many of them, and petted a blind but very friendly old cat living by a church. Weirdly, all the outdoor animals don’t really seem to be a problem, and most of the animals we saw were very calm. We saw quite a few horses, cows, and …
Sheep in the road - we were warned about this ahead of time. We did see some when driving in the Connemara, but they were actually very good about getting out of the road promptly. Many of them were even going in the right direction for the lane they were in. There were no big herds of sheep that we had to wait for in comical irritation.
More driving fun There was, however, a time when a tour bus and a trailer were trying to squeeze past each other on a terribly narrow Burren road. They had maybe two inches between the vehicles but weren’t willing to scratch the paint. I am, of course, the first car behind the trailer for this particular impasse. The trailer starts to back up - I can’t tell if they can see me and tap the horn. They keep coming back and back past me, into the right lane so they are in front of the tour bus in the same lane. I did hit the horn a couple more times during that backing up, because they didn’t tell me what the hell they were doing and I’m in a rental car that I’d rather not have smashed up. (At one point the co-pilot opened her door and called me a pig, I think, for the extremely reasonable amount of honking that I was doing.)
By that point there were 10-15 cars behind me, so it wasn’t like I could put the car in reverse and give them more space - and they came really close (less than 4 inches) of scraping across the front of our car. I do not know how the situation was resolved - once I had space, I scooted through and left the tour bus and the RV to their poorly planned predicament.
(That’s a situation where I think you should maybe get out of the RV - which is larger than a single Irish road lane in the country - and explain to the people behind you how you are going to start backing up suddenly.)
The whole thing would've been a lot more funny if I hadn't been the first car behind them..
Places: Add city descriptions later?
Sights: We tried to avoid the most tourist-y things when possible. Still, we ended up seeing a fair bit.
- The pier in Dun Laoghire: on the first night, we were so tired and a bit overwhelmed. We just walked around the town and eventually wandered out on a pier with a lighthouse and looked out at the ocean. The pier was amazingly long, it seemed like it stretched a half mile into the ocean.
- The old fort in Kinsale: We walked along a “bog path” but it was a very small bog. Then we went past a bunch of super expensive looking houses. Then we saw the fort, built by the English to keep other countries from using Ireland as a base to attack the UK. The fort worked well for that, but it was very vulnerable from the land side. There was a brief overview sort of tour and some good historical exhibits inside. Then we walked around the ruined portions of the fort and Jill found a snail to play with.
- Wandering the streets in Kinsale: Jimmy had a lot of suggestions on things to see and places to wander. We wandered up and down the streets in Kinsale, which were very steep even on foot. From the town, you can easily see several old churches and both old forts, one on each side of the harbor. We also went to several pubs, but the first one mostly had covers of American songs. Don’t get me wrong, they were good covers - I am always okay with listening to Ziggy Stardust - but they weren’t exactly Irish music. We did hear a very good, very sad song I’d like to look up in one of the other pubs, but that was after people requested Neil Diamond.. bleh..
- The hike in Doolin one of the highlights of the trip, for sure. Unfortunately, we got lost for well over an hour, maybe more like two - in this tiny little town that hardly had any buildings. But the tourism map they give you is incredibly poor - worse than no map at all, because it’s so confusing. And the woman at the tourism office gave us wrong directions. We did not get off to a very good start, basically. Then we finally found the trail and wandered through a bunch of rocky, hilly countryside. It was reminiscent of Act I from Diablo II, with all the stone fences and grassy hills. We got to this gate that blocked off the trail, because it was “under construction: very dangerous do not enter.” So we turned back.
- No, we didn’t. Especially since we had such a hard time finding the trail, we weren’t turning back that easily. We followed the trail and quickly found ourselves on a narrow track that wound along a Cliffside. There was a fence - on the left - while the drop-off was on the right. Being somewhat afraid of heights, I was nervous about it, but we were careful and made it without incident. And we got to see a lot of really amazing views. Eventually we came across an Irish family, who offered to give us some children. We declined, but they still gave us directions to get to the Cliffs - the trail we were on was about to end, and you had to cut through a cow field and follow the stone wall up to the road. Did that, got followed by a whole herd of cows on our way to the road. But they were on the other side of the fence. Then we hiked just a bit more along the road and got to the Cliffs themselves.
There was a cool looking museum/visitor center there, but we didn’t feel like going in. We had a snack of trail mix and soda bread and cheese, which was incredibly delicious after the hike. Then we looked at the cliffs - there was both a safe area and an “enter at your own risk” kind of area. We walked around the safe area and went a little ways along the “DANGER DO NOT ENTER” area, too. We got someone else to take our picture with us only about a foot from the edge. The edge of a 650 foot drop straight to seawater, that is. Pictures don’t do it justice and words don’t either. The mind reels from that kind of distance when it’s straight down - you see these little white dots on the opposite side of the cliffs and realize that they’re birds, but they look incredibly tiny. And, given the distance, how huge the waves crashing against the cliffs must be.
There were a lot of people who were more fearless than us, just skipping across the cliffs within 6 inches of the edge. It made me nervous just to be there and to watch, but at the same time, it was amazing.
On the way back, we took the road. It was a longer path and a less interesting one, but we did see some friendly horses on the way. This was another beef I had with the Doolin tourist office, by the way - this was marked as a “trail” but in fact it is just about following the road - the very Irish, narrow road - for about 9 km. It’s narrow enough that you generally wanted to step off the road into the tall grass or thistles or ditch if a car was coming. And there was no way for two cars to pass each other if someone was trying to walk along the road. That is not a hiking trail, that is taking your chances on the road.
- Music in Doolin After our hike - roughly 9 km each way - we were ravenous and went to the pubs. We got fish and chips and chicken kiev and just devoured it, along with an Irish coffee which was incredibly delicious. There weren’t that many seats in the pub, so we were at a table with a French couple and an Irish couple from near Dublin. (Jill: How are you? French couple: French. Jill: … ah.)
The Dublin-area couple talked to us through the meal, and were just really fun to talk to. They even warned us that two nights might be a bit much in Cashel, which was not wrong. It was a nice start to the evening and I think that made it easier to talk to other people. We relocated to another pub after eating to find music, and Jill struck up a conversation with a couple Germans there on vacation - they were a bit younger than me, probably the same age as Jill. We talked to them for quite a while and they painted a wonderful picture of life in Germany. Later in the evening some other Americans joined us and we chatted for a bit. The music was pretty good, but again - no singing, and no particular song leaps out at me. But there was the fun of having the whole pub clapping or tapping their feet in time to the beat. Overall, it was just a really great day.
- Doolin Cave Jill said she’d never been in a cave before! And this one was pretty much on our way out of Doolin and to Galway. We got to see one of the largest free-hanging stalactites and the surprising amount of mud in the cave. Most caves don’t have so much mud. They also let you touch some of the stalagmites - something that is very much discouraged in American caves. It’s composed mostly of calcium carbonate, the primary component of bone - and it feels lighter than most rocks. Caves really are the bones of the earth. We got to see some weird rock formations and a fossil fish just sticking out of the wall, too. The guide mentioned that sometimes the wind blows through the caves, sounding like an old woman singing. Creepy. The cave system itself hasn’t been fully explored - it’s apparently pretty massive under that part of Ireland.
- The Burren Based on advice from the Doolin Cave shop, we took the coastal route to Galway. This let us see the rocky plains of the Burren (which means, imaginatively enough, “rocky place”). True enough, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many rocks. They were just scattered everywhere, from pebbles to boulders. We stopped to explore a rocky beach - which was covered in seaweed and full of incredibly smelly tidepools. Really, they smelled like old cheese. For animals, all we saw were snails and some other shellfish. The rest of the drive took us along the seaside on a rare brilliantly sunny day.
- Galway city center We were tired our first night in Galway, but we wandered out long enough to get fish and chips and absorb a bit of the city center. Found some nice paintings for Jill’s mom and got a pint, but then retreated to the B&B to recharge a bit.
- The Connemara The next day we did a driving tour of the Connemara. The Connemara is another nature-y region - where the Burren is all rocks and sky, the Connemara is all hills, bogs, and grass. And sheep. When we were there, it was a foggy, somewhat drizzly day, but it really seemed to fit the area.
- The hike in Cong One of our first stops in the Connemara. This hike actually reminded me a bit of the Pacific Northwest and of Japanese forests. Everything was so incredibly green - the trees all had green moss growing on them. The whole forest was extremely verdant. We walked through the forest for a bit, along a large river, until we got to a restored castle which is now a nice resort. If we’d had unlimited time and money, maybe we would have stayed there - it was very impressive from the outside, anyways. But the forest was more fun to tromp around in. We saw a tiny woodmouse there, which dove into its burrow before we could get a picture. If we’d had more time here, I would’ve really liked to do the whole trail.
- Kylemore Abbey is a castle type household from the 1800s, I think. We pulled in, looked around the grounds, but declined to pay 12 euros each for a one-hour tour. Again, it looked nice from the outside, but there were other things to see.
- Connemara national park: This was both cool and free. There was a visitor center that talked about bogs and had these weird bog creatures with eyes to explain parts of the exhibit. I liked them. And I learned a lot about bogs that I had not known, like how portions of it were dug up and used to fuel fires. The bogs themselves were at least partially caused by ancient humans burning the area and saturating the soil with carbon - which then changed the ecosystem and led to the formation of the bogs. We went and hiked along one of the paths and jumped up and down on one of the boggy areas. The views were great, and again, if we’d had more time, I would’ve liked to do a longer hike. The only downside was the bugs - these horrible little swampflies that caught up with you if you held still for too long at all. They also had a pretty cool playground that we shamelessly took over for a bit.
- Night out in Galway After getting back from the Connemara, we were ready to tackle Galway. We got a great meal at Sunny’s then found some of the bars that were supposed to be best for Irish music. In fact, we ended up wandering between a couple because there was no music going or it was hard to hear, but eventually we settled in at one pub. There we were talked at for a while by an older, drunker Irish guy. There was music playing by then, at least - but not much singing. Then Jill ran into Julie (whose family had stayed in the same B&B in Doolin) and they chatted for a while. It turned out that she knew a lot of people in the Irish music scene, including some of the people playing at that bar. After the pub we were in closed, we went to another one, called the Silent Disco with an outdoor balcony, where we talked to some Galwegians as well. After we were fairly well inebriated we left there, but it was a fun evening.
- The Rock of Cashel We didn’t have the best first impression of Cashel, I have to say. We had to drive about a quarter of the way across the country to get there, Jill wanted McDonald’s and I couldn’t find one, and we had to divert through the outskirts of Limerick at one point due to construction. Limerick is an ugly city, at least judging from the outskirts. So by the time we got to Cashel we were tired, hungry, and cranky. We tracked down some food, took a nap, and left the Rock of Cashel to the next morning. When, of course, it was raining. Raining pretty hard, as it turned out. Joan lent us an umbrella, and we went to see the Rock. The Rock was REALLY highly recommended in our Rick Steves tourbook - but there actually wasn’t much to see. It’s pretty much all ruin - which is fine. A good chunk of it is closed off for restoration, so you can’t get in and you can’t even get a good idea what the ruin looks like. It would’ve been incredibly helpful if they’d had some dioramas to show what the Rock originally looked like and how it changed over time.
As far as I could gather, it spent most of its time as a massive cathedral, not as a castle - but this wasn’t clear from the exhibits. Nor was it clear how many times it was attacked or what the structure looked like before it was converted into a cathedral. I don’t need a three hour audio tour, but this is pretty basic stuff and it was extremely hard to enjoy the site without knowing any of it. There was a video you could watch, but it was about religious strongholds across all of Ireland rather than giving the specific history of the Rock. So - it was a cool structure, but overall I was a little disappointed by the Rock. Especially since it had been built up so much - it’s one of very few “must-see” sites listed in R. Steves’ book, and I just don’t agree.
- The other city stuff in Cashel We saw the Bru Boru music center, which is near the Rock and better organized in many ways. It’s about Ireland’s history of music and poetry, which was very cool. There were some questionable choices in the layout - like putting two sets of speakers relating different information right across from one another - but overall it was an interesting and worthwhile little museum. Much easier to follow than the Rock itself. We also saw the tourist information center in the middle of Cashel, which has both formal write-ups and a bunch of grade and high-school reports on the Rock and medieval life. There is a model of the Rock and the town there, but it’s still a little hard to picture what it looked like when it was complete.
We also took a scenic walk the previous night to check out an old hotel where the first hops for Guinness were planted. Supposedly the hop plants are still there, but I couldn’t find them. There was also a little “Cashel Folk Village” set-up, showing what medieval life was like in the town, but it looked very tiny and was fairly expensive. We looked at the old churches and the old city wall instead. At one of the churches we found a whole mess of cats, including a friendly blind one and several kittens.
- Killkenny - Cathedral, Killkenny castle and Design Center honestly, I wish we had spent a little more time in Killkenny. It had more going on than Cashel did - though the authentic medieval roads weren’t much fun to drive, it was no Kinsale. The real hassle was finding a place to park. The one we did find was somewhat far from the city center and most of the sights. We managed to wander down an alley behind a bunch of people’s houses and freak out a couple teenagers who were furtively smoking something. We also got there later in the day - we decided to see Cashel first, and it was further to Killkenny than I’d thought.
By the time we got to the Castle in Killkenny, it was only going to be open for about 20 more minutes. The guard at the door nervously told us to look around for a few minutes but that the till was closed anyways. So we kind of dashed through a couple floors, looking around very quickly. We ran into another guard and had the following conversation:
Guard: Are you lost?
Me: A little. Is this the way out?
Guard: (very definitively) This is the way in. (pause) But you could go out through it, I guess.
We looked at the ground a bit after that and then cleared out. We went across the street and saw the Killkenny design center, which was full of art type pieces and fancy clothes. It also had a few exhibits - one on Waterford crystal and another on a specific type of tweed. Neither tweed nor crystal are really things I’m that interested in, normally, but the exhibits were fascinating and a bit sad. “Waterford” crystal is now mostly made in Poland, and there are knock-offs of that type of tweed as well. Sadly we didn’t get to see much else there, because they closed soon after we got there. If I did it again, I’d definitely devote more time to Killkenny.
- Trim Castle: When we got to Trim, it was raining. Like, a lot. We skipped the Japanese garden on the way because it was raining so much. The guy at the gas station on the way (who had to help because I couldn’t figure out the pump) said that the weather had been bad, even for Ireland - that normally they got a summer.
When we got to the B&B, the owner told us how to get to the castle - and then warned us not to go that way, because it was so wet. So we went inside, chilled out for a bit, and then went walking. Without an umbrella. In the fairly pouring rain.
We walked one way, decided it wasn’t leading to the castle, and turned around to go the way that the B&B owner originally told us not to go. It was across a large field (the green) and we could see the castle the whole way. Once we got close to the castle, we circled the wrong way around the whole thing, taking the longest possible route to the ticket office. So, quite sodden, we got to the castle gate and got a tour. We even got the student rate, so it was like 2 euros each.
Then we got one of the best tours I’ve been on, despite the terrible weather. The tour took us to the outside of the castle and then to a partially restored interior. Fortunately, most of the insides were capped with plastic roofing. Once inside, our guide filled us in on the history of the castle and showed us three large models of the castle. The models depicted the original construction and the gradual addition of new levels and defenses to the castle itself. (That room had Ikea flooring instead of the more authentic wooden beams, much to the chagrin of the guide.) This was also the castle where certain scenes of Braveheart were filmed, it turned out. I was more interested in the Castle itself than Braveheart anecdotes, with one exception. Apparently Mel Gibson was none too kind towards most of his crew and extras. So for the scene at the end of the movie where he is pelted with vegetables, they used extras from the town. But they keep putting off the shoot, and each time the extras would go to the pubs and drink for a bit, all through the day. So when the light was finally right, and they do the shot, many of the locals are a bit tipsy. And, there’s a shot where Gibson gets hit in the junk with a cabbage thrown by a little girl and doubles over. That’s real - the girl was one of the locals and Gibson (after spending some time recovering in his hotel room) went through the footage and kicked her off the movie. But they left it in because the pain looks (and is) genuine.
- Newgrange - cultural center and solstice mound: This one was a little ways from Trim. It was a bit tricky to get to - we fully overshot and had to go back, and go through this frankly bizarre section of road that was 1 way at a time, controlled by a stop light. And first the trucks would go, then the cars. And then the trucks from the other direction, and so on. Anyways, we eventually found it, even without the help of the GPS. It’s set up so you can visit the museum and then a couple of the burial mounds - either a site with several smaller ones, or the large famous one, or both. We opted to see the big famous one.
The museum was, in fact, really well done. We watched a short 7 minute video that still did a great job explaining the significance of the site and why the position of the sun was so important to the people there. And it makes sense - when agriculture is your whole life and the average lifespan is in the twenties, each year is a struggle. This structure that catches the sunlight on the shortest day of each year is a really powerful symbol and calendar. I’ll admit that I didn’t entirely see what the fuss was about before visiting the museum, but that it did a great job with the explanations.
- The mound itself: was pretty cool. We got a brief tour - mostly a quick explanation from the outside, then going inside the surprisingly small interior. There was a simulation of the sun coming in on the solstice and how it would have looked and an explanation of how several bodies were found in the floor. Very interestingly, the shape of the chamber is cross-shaped - three shorter arms and a longer passageway leading in. Some of the designs are still quite visible and most of the structure is still the original - though it had been shored up in a few places with modern supports. In fact, after the site was abandoned the mound of dirt had collapsed over the entrance, preserving and hiding it very well until road workers found it again. Overall, the site was quite a bit cooler than I expected.
- Dun Laoghire farmer’s market Driving in Dun Laoghire still sucked even after the practice of the rest of the trip. But, once we finally found the B&B and parked, we wandered around and found this cool farmer’s market. It’s better than the one in Champaign and up there with any I saw on the west coast. There was fresh bread and cheese right at the entrance, and then other foods scattered around and a few craft-y tents. We got onion bread and goat cheese to eat later, which were good. We got falafel in pitas to eat right away - we were getting pretty tired of fried meat by then, but fried vegetables? Delicious! (It was really good and still had more vegetables than most of our other meals.) The people there were mostly locals and the atmosphere was so different from the tourist-y stuff we’d been doing.
In my opinion, a lot of tourist sites have this vaguely grim cast to the people’s faces. The tourists are asking themselves: Am I being most efficient with my vacation time? Am I fully absorbing the culture here? Do I have enough photographs to show the people back home? The farmer’s market was a nice break, just people out on a beautiful day to get some food and hang out in the park.
- Trinity College in Dublin: I don’t have quite as much to say on this - it was just cool to see an European college, and this one goes back about 500 years. The newer buildings are scattered all over Dublin, of course. The whole thing has a very Harry Potter-esque vibe, at least to me. The buildings were very cool, but then, our guide was very keen on architecture, so she was good at talking about them. There was a very interesting fusion of the old and the modern when it came to the buildings. And I guess the cafeteria kept falling down until the architect died, and they gave the job to someone else. The only weird thing - you couldn’t walk on any of the grass, which was kept as neat and short as a golf course. What’s the point of that? It looks nice but no one can enjoy it..
- The Book of Kells Another really excellent presentation, the exhibit explained a lot about how the books were made, how the inks were made, what the ornamentation meant, and who made them. Also about how often monks had their monasteries burned down or raided. The book itself was still pretty amazing - the level of detail that they managed with quill pens and no magnifying lens is incredible. The inks are still vivid after more than 1000 years - you can imagine how amazing this would have been to the average person of the time, though they'd be lucky to see it.
Upstairs from the book was this massive, incredible library. The roof was a giant arch with wooden slats like a barrel, and the shelves reach to the ceiling. The books are all these massive, in-depth leatherbound volumes about (I assume) philosophy, religion, and other classical topics. They had some of the collection out for display in glass cases, but it was only a tiny fraction of what the library had. Since I like libraries a lot, it was pretty amazing to see and almost as good as the Book of Kells. And it's still in use - you could see the librarians moving around, checking books and reshelving them.
Food: Food was hearty, to say the least. We had fish and chips a lot, sometimes with the amazing invention known as curry sauce. (To me it tastes like a Japanese curry powder mixed with some kind of oil?) I enjoyed the food a lot for most of the trip, but towards the end, became very tired of chips in particular. There are chips served with virtually everything, in huge quantities. I saw a little girl get an entire plate of chips for dinner one night. The portions in general were huge - while prices were a bit high by my standards, there was always a ton of food.
I tried to get all the Irish staples while we were there. There’s no corned beef because, sure enough, they don’t eat it there. More of a New York Irish thing, I think.
- Fish and chips: had this a lot of places. I think the best was in a pub called McGann’s in Doolin. Other places were a bit less crispy, but theirs was light, crispy, and perfect after a day of hiking.
- Shepherd’s pie: had this in Galway. Much better than any version I’ve had in the states. Handful of root vegetables mixed in with the minced lamb. Potatoes and cheese on top. Good, stick to your ribs type food.
- Seafood: I tried to eat a lot of seafood, especially at the start. We got mussels, oysters, and crab from a place called Fishy Fishy in Kinsale. The mussels were amazing. The oysters were good - I think the quality of the oysters themselves was as good as what I got in France. But the garnish (shallots and red wine vinegar) was better in France, as was the wine we had there. Wine was expensive enough that we never got any. I had a salmon pasta dish in Trim that was very, very good - both fresh salmon and smoked salmon. At the Ophira House B&B I had a smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfast that was excellent.
- Cabbage and bacon: Bacon is different in Ireland - more like thin slices of ham, I guess. A bit more like my homemade bacon, but not as fatty. By this point I was craving something green as well. I actually really enjoyed this; it was one of my favorite meals of the trip. Not complicated, just hearty and good.
- Salad: I got a salad. Of course, it came with fried chicken breast glazed with honey on top. Still, it was good and something of a break from the meat, meat, meat of the previous days. This was in Cashel, at Feehans.
- Seafood chowder: deserves a mention on its own. There was a really delicious, unusual seafood chowder at Fishy Fishy - it had tomato, caraway, and maybe anise as flavors? The first bite reminded me of Chinese food almost. We had another excellent chowder at McDermott’s in Doolin which had a crab claw in it.
- Beef stew: The Irish are very proud of their beef. I only had beef stew once (at McDermott’s in Doolin) and it was great, some of the best stew I’ve ever had. The beef was tender, the potatoes were well cooked, it was garnished with parsley and even the carrots were pretty good. The stock was awesome, probably rich enough on its own to make a decent meal.
- Breakfasts: generally we ate only one meal besides breakfasts. Part of the reason was that the breakfasts tended to be massive. A full Irish breakfast includes porridge, at least one egg, sausage, bacon, black pudding, white pudding, toast. Often a tomato and maybe mushrooms or beans. Sometimes brown bread with butter as well as toast. It is a LOT of food and we quickly started asking for less than the full Irish. The puddings were one of my favorites - they’re like sausage, but with ground rice and seasonings mixed in. Then they’re cut into slices and crisped up. I loved them and I don’t think you can get anything quite like them in the states. And yes, black pudding is black because of the blood in it, but it’s not like the stuff is red and oozing as you’re eating. In general: the breakfasts were excellent.
- Indian: Some of the best Indian food I ever had was in England, so I was eager to try it here. Was not disappointed - went to a place called Khan’s spices in Trim. The place smelled like incense and had very fancy chairs. We got a chicken in sauce dish and a lamb balti - lamb chunks in spicy sauce. And a fried onion appetizer. Everything was excellent - some of the best Indian food I’ve had. The flavors were extremely intense and the restaurant itself was cool.
- Japanese: In Ireland? Yeah. This was in Dublin at the end of the trip, by which time we were fairly tired of the traditional fare. We went to Yamamori Noodles twice - it was actually one of the cheapest places in the city and near the Trinity College. The first time we got squid sushi, Jill got pork ramen, and I got duck ramen. That time was really good - the stocks were tasty and we devoured everything. The duck ramen was not traditional, but it was still very good and the rendered duck fat was delicious. The second time we got salmon sushi (still very good), I got seafood ramen, and Jill got yaki soba with chicken. To be fair, I wasn’t feeling as well that day, but I think the food also wasn’t quite as good. They used a LOT of dashi in the stock for the seafood ramen rather than making a proper seafood stock, and we realized the slight sweetness in the broth from the previous day’s ramen was dashi.
It’s not like it ruined the soups, but it was a bit disappointing - real ramen uses seaweed and tons of animal fat and protein in the stock for flavor, not dashi. My seafood ramen still had a ton of squid, salmon, chicken, and veggies in it, so I was full but feeling a bit pedantic. The first time we went there I would’ve given them 5 stars - the second, more like 4, maybe 3.5. Still worth a stop though, for sure.
- Last meal/snack: Jill and I stopped in to a pub to watch some more soccer and there was a free snack at half time. Fries and sausages, of course. Very fitting.
- Snack food: we didn’t do too much of this. There were some thai chili pepper potato chips, which were good because they tasted like thai basil, too. And some cheese flavored Pringles, which were not. Yuck.
- Things even I wouldn’t try: fried sausages. They were cheap but at no point could I muster up the desire to order one. By this I mean fully breaded and deep fried sausages.
- The bad meal: there’s always one, right? We got to Cashel late, were tired, and the good places were closing up between lunch and dinner. So we duck into this dinky little bar that happens to have food. I get the worst chicken curry I’ve ever had and Jill gets half (!) a can of cream of mushroom soup. Absolutely, insultingly terrible. It wasn’t just us - someone else was eating there too, and got the same chicken curry. Though why anyone in town would go there is beyond me.
- Overall I somehow lost weight on the trip. Not much, but a little bit. Or since coming back - I am writing this after being home for almost a week, but without dieting in particular.
Beer: This is going to sound weird. But beer was very disappointing in Ireland on the whole. In most places your choices are basically this: black, brown, or yellow. Black = Guinness; Brown = Smithwicks; Yellow = Heineken or Carlsberg. And sometimes cider as well. There was Guinness virtually everywhere, of course. And yes, it does taste better in Ireland - but not so much better that it was all I wanted to drink for the whole trip.
There are a couple other Irish stouts (Murphys and Beamish) available, but they’re not that different. In stores, it was a little better - we found some O’Haras and some Irish microbrews. Finally, in Dublin, we found a pub called the Brew Dock with an awesome bartender that had a whole line-up of microbrews and American beers. We saw Blue Moon marketed as American Craft beer, which was a bit painful. But the Irish (and Scottish) beers we tried were quite good - it was just disappointing that most places, there were so few choices. And we did drink quite a bit of beer on the trip - it’s part of the culture in the pubs, for sure.
I didn’t drink much whiskey straight, but we did get Irish coffees several times. Those were good, especially after a day tromping around in the cold and the damp.
Souvenirs I hate shopping for souvenirs. Hate it. I didn’t get anything to bring back for myself - the memories and the pictures are the main souvenir for me. So most people got shot glasses or bottle openers. Anything else (art, wool, etc) was seriously expensive, and souvenirs were one of our biggest expenditures besides lodging and food on the trip as it was...
B&Bs:
We noticed a trend where people with easy to remember passwords (rather than 34657hj8931lksb) tended to be much more relaxed overall.
- Ophira House: located near Dublin, in a suburb called Dun Laoghire (pronounced Dun Leary, of course.) This one was one of our favorites. It was on a quiet street, was a big room, and was very reasonably priced. Free wi-fi and charming owners. One of the softest beds ever. After our very long first day and stressful time driving, it was amazing to have such a nice place to recover. We liked it enough to go back for our time in Dublin, where it was about 25 minutes by train away from the center of the city. Nice all around; highly recommended and cheap for Dublin area.
- San Antonio B&B: in Kinsale. Another favorite. The owner, Jimmie, was a charming guy who plays mandolin and always had a word of advice on what to do or where to go. Gave us the best room in the place, with a view of Kinsale and right next to the wifi box. The biggest breakfasts of the trip - porridge, egg, two pieces bacon, 2+ sausages, tomato, toast, and puddings. Very good, too. Highly recommended; also reasonably priced.
- Half Door Lodge, Doolin: This one was okay. A fairly small, modern kind of building. Kind of felt like a dorm room, down to the linked bathrooms. The owner was nice enough, made us tea and brought out fruitcake and butter when we arrived on a rainy day. The food was also good but overall it wasn’t nearly as cozy as some others. We were in the front hallway and all noise carried right into our room.
- Asgard House, Galway. Yeah, I picked this one for its name. A more cozy place and one of the more expensive ones of the trip. The breakfasts were good - the owners were nice, but this was another place where sound carried through the whole building. As a result, we didn’t sleep so well. 5 minutes walk from Galway activities though, which was nice.
- Joy’s Rockside Inn, Cashel: Ah, Cashel. This was kind of an odd one. The owner, Joan, was very nice to us - sometimes almost suffocatingly so. She tried to have the other guests sing to us since we were the honeymooners. The place was full of little notes that seemed vaguely disapproving that you were staying there - WINDOWS FOR EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY, PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE LIGHT ON TO PREVENT FIRE, and so on. We had a view of the Rock of Cashel, but the place is being restored at the moment so you can’t see so much. It was quiet, though, and we were able to rest up a lot after Galway. This is a place that I’m sure would be lovely for some people but wasn’t quite on our wavelength..
- The White Lodge Inn, Trim: Another favorite. Though I never could figure out how to work the shower to get proper hot water. Very, very cozy rooms and cool owners who talked with us a bit one night. Ron gave me some Irish whiskey, which is not a bad way to win me over if the comfy rooms and awesome location (it’s across the road from a field leading to a castle) hadn’t been enough to do so. Also highly recommended.
- Premiere Inn, Dublin: near the airport. We stayed there because they had a shuttle right to the airport and we thought it’d be easier. Not a B&B. Soul-crushing place, where everything incurred an extra fee. Like staying in a DLC hotel - there were charges for the internet, for weighing your luggage, for using a credit card. The only things that seemed to come with the room were the hot water, the TV, and the bed. Not recommended.
Down time:
In any trip, there is some downtime. It’s inevitable. Some of it is waiting in lines; other times, it’s when you are just exhausted from getting from one place to another or walking all day. Some nights we stayed in for this reason. We watched The IT Crowd, which is really funny and was occasionally relevant to us - there’s an episode about real men and soccer we saw before watching a soccer match. I got back into playing some FF Tactics.
I finished reading the Johannes Cabal series (Necromancer, Detective, and Fear Institute) which I can highly recommend for anyone who has precisely the same tastes and interests in necromancers and Lovecraft that I do. Anyone else might still like them - they’re written in kind of a light, breezy style but still deliver moments with genuine punch to them. To our frustration, you can’t stream The Legend of Korra in the UK or Ireland.
We spent some time on the internet thanks to the wi-fi but tried to limit that, somewhat, and use it more for trip related purposes.
I guess E3 was while we were gone - I checked a couple articles about it, but there wasn’t much that interested me besides the 3DS Castlevania. (And I’m not crazy about the style they’re taking for that.) I wish they would hurry up and announce the 3DSLite or whatever version 2 will be. It’s going to be much harder to resist getting one once Paper Mario, Castlevania, and Animal Crossing are out.
Sports We ended up watching a bit of soccer in Dublin. There was a giant display on one of the quays set up, with two massive TVs, food, and beer. There were a LOT of Irish people there - we were some of the last people to get in at the start. Then the game (it was versus Croatia) started. And we couldn’t see much, even with a massive (at least 20 feet I think?) TV displaying the game.
It was fun to see the spectacle but not that much fun to be there. There were some pretty trashy people around. I mean really trashy, like being completely drunk and chain smoking in between tooting a vuvuelza while ignoring children younger than 5. Jill said one woman was taking pictures of her children in the toilet stalls. There were just so many people there - and only a handful of Garda to nominally keep order. After about 30 minutes of the game we got tired of it and tried to get out - and you couldn’t. There were so many people outside the gates they were worried about a groups shoving their way in. We actually couldn’t leave until the halftime point, even as we watched clearly underage people climbing over buildings to get in, while holding plastic 1 liter bottles full of beer. Yeah, it was something. We finally did get out once it was halftime and went to the craft beer pub we’d found down the street, which was a bit more actually fun. I saw later on youtube that people got bored with the game and started jumping into the water of the quay to splash around.
The game itself ended up 3 Croatia vs. 1 Ireland. (We were at the quay for the 1 that Ireland scored - lots of shouting and clapping but a bit less than you’d expect because many people weren’t paying that much attention.) When Ireland lost, no one seemed especially upset or surprised - the Croatian team was really good. We also caught part of a game between Greece and the Czech republic (which was a rough, dirty game - in the end the Czechs won) and about half of one between Poland and Russia. We debated for a while about which side to cheer on for that one. In the end it was a tie. Watching soccer is surprisingly fun, especially with a beer or two. It’s up there with my other favorite sport to actually watch, which is basketball. Both soccer and basketball actually have things happening most of the time as opposed to seemingly constant downs and pauses and strategic time-outs in football, which make it hard for me to get too interested in the game.
Successes:
- Curry sauce!
- Seafood in Kinsale
- Hike to the Cliffs of Moher
- Music in Doolin
- Killkenny, though I wish we’d spent more time there and less in Cashel
- Exploring in Trim
- Trinity College
- Beer in Dublin
- Talking to people in pubs
Failures (also venting):
- Not seeing the Ring of Kerry. I would redistribute some of the nights for sure based on how appealing the different towns were..
- Weekends in cities. That is, we had almost no weekends in big cities and we missed every festival or event except a small weekly farmer’s market in Dun Laoghire.
- Getting around in Dublin. We ended up doing so in such a convoluted way. I turned in the rental car which meant that we had to take the buses back and pay the fare (5 euros). Then we had to stop in at the train station and buy a train/bus card (23 euros each). That worked fine for the next couple days, but then we moved from the B&B to the airport hotel. For that we took the train to the main station, then caught a bus to the airport. The only thing was, that particular bus had a 6 euro charge (each) on top of our already purchased train/bus card. So that was really irritating. More irritating is the fact that if you take a different bus, it wouldn’t have cost anything - we could have used the card we already had.
- Worse than that? Once we got to the airport we had to take a shuttle that cost 1 euro each. But, once we knew exactly where the hotel was (not as trivial as it sounds - some of the businesses are kinda lackadaisical about addresses) we discovered that the busline went within 500 feet of the hotel. Yeah. We could’ve taken a different bus, paid nothing extra, and gone straight to the hotel without messing with the airport. Total cost of underestimating the buses: 14 euros.
- This doesn’t change the fact that I think it’s shitty of the Dublin bus company to run one bus straight to the airport and charge extra - and not mention that fact, or that there’s another bus that doesn’t cost extra on their website. The only place you can find out this little detail is on the back of your train/bus card - which you won’t see until you’ve already purchased it.
- At the same time, not spending more time in Dublin was a mistake. Dublin is a really cool city, where a lot of cultures come together in an Irish environment. I had seen from a couple sources that you “shouldn’t get stuck in Dublin, it’s so tourist-y”. This is stupid, terrible advice. Dublin is as tourist-y as you make it - if you only go to the Guinness storehouse and the Jameson distillery and the Viking tour, then yes, it will be touristy. If you go to the college and find the college pubs and restaurants and just walk around the city, it will be its own thing.
- The order of the cities was not efficient. Going from Dublin to Kinsale to Doolin to Cashel to Trim to Dublin requires backtracking and doesn’t take you along some of the scenic coasts. It also makes for some uneven driving days, for sure.
- Missed the Ring of Kerry and the Ring of Dingle.
- The weather was a bit of a failure - we had about 4 days straight of cold rain. We made the best of it but it was pretty miserable there for a while.
- My suitcases. Ugh, bad planning all over. My roller suitcase had a broken handle so I had to just carry it. I didn’t have enough shirts packed. And I had two bags with straps, so I could carry them with one over each shoulder but it absolutely destroyed my neck muscles. Carrying all that across Dublin and then across the airport the next day was painful.
Not sure where else to put this: some American tourists on the bus behind us complaining that their bus ride took 30 minutes instead of 15 and how "They have a different concept of time here." I don't think they do, they just told you the bus ride was about 15 minutes so you'd stop bugging them..
I don't want to end on the note of the failures/venting. Overall it was a really good trip - relaxed most of the time, but looking at the list, we actually did quite a few things. The natural settings (cliffs, Burren, Connemara) were some of our very favorites, but the castles and college were pretty awesome as well. I really enjoyed the food for most of the time - it's really not as bad as people say.
The Irish are a lot more friendly than the French, even accounting for the language barrier. Also, they don't seem to mind the tourism. (Except maybe Cashel.) When we were in Galway, the guys who worked at some of the tourist shops were really encouraging us to check them out - they thought Kylemore abbey and the castles were genuinely cool and they wanted people to see them. I guess I expected a bit more of an undercurrent of cynicism, but no, they liked getting to show off some of their country's treasures. And it is an incredibly beautiful country - so much of it looks like a painting you can wander around in.
Driving was stressful but it was generally worth it because of the freedom it gave us. The cities and countryside were so different from anywhere I've been in the US. (Even if some of the roads remind me of Indiana.) Someday, I'd like to go back and see some of the things we missed and maybe do more hiking - I think a back-packing tour of at least part of the country would be amazing.
I have a lot of pictures to get uploaded too, but pictures don't fade the same way memories do, so I wanted to get this written up fairly quickly.
This is long - 14 pages in Word, though I have a lot of indented lines. So I am going to use multiple cuts.
General categories:
The one section I'm not really done with. I'll write some more on this later but it's kinda weird to distill down your interactions with people to a few sentences.
- Jimmie:
- The Americans from Chico:
- The kid with the tin whistle:
- The couple at McGann’s:
- The Germans
- Julie and her friends in Galway:
- Galwegian people at the silent disco:
- Richard:
- Trim tour guide:
- Drunk Irish guy in alley (Richard II):
- Awesome Dublin bartender:
Driving Ah, driving. One of the things that I was most nervous about for the trip, as it happens. And .. with pretty good reason. Driving in Ireland is terrifying especially at first. It’s not just driving on the left. It’s not even the round-abouts. It is the accumulation of those things, along with driving an unfamiliar stickshift for the first time in years, one some of the most winding and steep roads I’ve ever seen. Also narrow. It did get better but the first few days were a bit rough. It didn’t help that County Cork, where we spent the second and third nights and which we had to drive through, in order to get to Doolin, has some of the most steep and winding roads in a country full of them. And while I learned to drive stickshift, I learned in Illinois where most hills are very gentle - if you can find them at all. So getting the car going on 30-40 degree inclines wasn’t much fun at first. I didn’t even try to drive in Dublin proper and used public transit.
There were places that were worth the scary drives - like the Connemara and the Burren - but in county Cork there were just trees and the occasional field. Oh! And signs that read “120 people have been killed on this road in the last year - DRIVE SAFELY.” I didn’t get a picture since I was driving, but that really instills confidence. I hate to say, but I can see why - in a country full of frightening roads, Cork has the worst of them.
Cats and to some extent dogs - people in Europe just let their pets wander around outside. Jill took pictures of many of them, and petted a blind but very friendly old cat living by a church. Weirdly, all the outdoor animals don’t really seem to be a problem, and most of the animals we saw were very calm. We saw quite a few horses, cows, and …
Sheep in the road - we were warned about this ahead of time. We did see some when driving in the Connemara, but they were actually very good about getting out of the road promptly. Many of them were even going in the right direction for the lane they were in. There were no big herds of sheep that we had to wait for in comical irritation.
More driving fun There was, however, a time when a tour bus and a trailer were trying to squeeze past each other on a terribly narrow Burren road. They had maybe two inches between the vehicles but weren’t willing to scratch the paint. I am, of course, the first car behind the trailer for this particular impasse. The trailer starts to back up - I can’t tell if they can see me and tap the horn. They keep coming back and back past me, into the right lane so they are in front of the tour bus in the same lane. I did hit the horn a couple more times during that backing up, because they didn’t tell me what the hell they were doing and I’m in a rental car that I’d rather not have smashed up. (At one point the co-pilot opened her door and called me a pig, I think, for the extremely reasonable amount of honking that I was doing.)
By that point there were 10-15 cars behind me, so it wasn’t like I could put the car in reverse and give them more space - and they came really close (less than 4 inches) of scraping across the front of our car. I do not know how the situation was resolved - once I had space, I scooted through and left the tour bus and the RV to their poorly planned predicament.
(That’s a situation where I think you should maybe get out of the RV - which is larger than a single Irish road lane in the country - and explain to the people behind you how you are going to start backing up suddenly.)
The whole thing would've been a lot more funny if I hadn't been the first car behind them..
Places: Add city descriptions later?
Sights: We tried to avoid the most tourist-y things when possible. Still, we ended up seeing a fair bit.
- The pier in Dun Laoghire: on the first night, we were so tired and a bit overwhelmed. We just walked around the town and eventually wandered out on a pier with a lighthouse and looked out at the ocean. The pier was amazingly long, it seemed like it stretched a half mile into the ocean.
- The old fort in Kinsale: We walked along a “bog path” but it was a very small bog. Then we went past a bunch of super expensive looking houses. Then we saw the fort, built by the English to keep other countries from using Ireland as a base to attack the UK. The fort worked well for that, but it was very vulnerable from the land side. There was a brief overview sort of tour and some good historical exhibits inside. Then we walked around the ruined portions of the fort and Jill found a snail to play with.
- Wandering the streets in Kinsale: Jimmy had a lot of suggestions on things to see and places to wander. We wandered up and down the streets in Kinsale, which were very steep even on foot. From the town, you can easily see several old churches and both old forts, one on each side of the harbor. We also went to several pubs, but the first one mostly had covers of American songs. Don’t get me wrong, they were good covers - I am always okay with listening to Ziggy Stardust - but they weren’t exactly Irish music. We did hear a very good, very sad song I’d like to look up in one of the other pubs, but that was after people requested Neil Diamond.. bleh..
- The hike in Doolin one of the highlights of the trip, for sure. Unfortunately, we got lost for well over an hour, maybe more like two - in this tiny little town that hardly had any buildings. But the tourism map they give you is incredibly poor - worse than no map at all, because it’s so confusing. And the woman at the tourism office gave us wrong directions. We did not get off to a very good start, basically. Then we finally found the trail and wandered through a bunch of rocky, hilly countryside. It was reminiscent of Act I from Diablo II, with all the stone fences and grassy hills. We got to this gate that blocked off the trail, because it was “under construction: very dangerous do not enter.” So we turned back.
- No, we didn’t. Especially since we had such a hard time finding the trail, we weren’t turning back that easily. We followed the trail and quickly found ourselves on a narrow track that wound along a Cliffside. There was a fence - on the left - while the drop-off was on the right. Being somewhat afraid of heights, I was nervous about it, but we were careful and made it without incident. And we got to see a lot of really amazing views. Eventually we came across an Irish family, who offered to give us some children. We declined, but they still gave us directions to get to the Cliffs - the trail we were on was about to end, and you had to cut through a cow field and follow the stone wall up to the road. Did that, got followed by a whole herd of cows on our way to the road. But they were on the other side of the fence. Then we hiked just a bit more along the road and got to the Cliffs themselves.
There was a cool looking museum/visitor center there, but we didn’t feel like going in. We had a snack of trail mix and soda bread and cheese, which was incredibly delicious after the hike. Then we looked at the cliffs - there was both a safe area and an “enter at your own risk” kind of area. We walked around the safe area and went a little ways along the “DANGER DO NOT ENTER” area, too. We got someone else to take our picture with us only about a foot from the edge. The edge of a 650 foot drop straight to seawater, that is. Pictures don’t do it justice and words don’t either. The mind reels from that kind of distance when it’s straight down - you see these little white dots on the opposite side of the cliffs and realize that they’re birds, but they look incredibly tiny. And, given the distance, how huge the waves crashing against the cliffs must be.
There were a lot of people who were more fearless than us, just skipping across the cliffs within 6 inches of the edge. It made me nervous just to be there and to watch, but at the same time, it was amazing.
On the way back, we took the road. It was a longer path and a less interesting one, but we did see some friendly horses on the way. This was another beef I had with the Doolin tourist office, by the way - this was marked as a “trail” but in fact it is just about following the road - the very Irish, narrow road - for about 9 km. It’s narrow enough that you generally wanted to step off the road into the tall grass or thistles or ditch if a car was coming. And there was no way for two cars to pass each other if someone was trying to walk along the road. That is not a hiking trail, that is taking your chances on the road.
- Music in Doolin After our hike - roughly 9 km each way - we were ravenous and went to the pubs. We got fish and chips and chicken kiev and just devoured it, along with an Irish coffee which was incredibly delicious. There weren’t that many seats in the pub, so we were at a table with a French couple and an Irish couple from near Dublin. (Jill: How are you? French couple: French. Jill: … ah.)
The Dublin-area couple talked to us through the meal, and were just really fun to talk to. They even warned us that two nights might be a bit much in Cashel, which was not wrong. It was a nice start to the evening and I think that made it easier to talk to other people. We relocated to another pub after eating to find music, and Jill struck up a conversation with a couple Germans there on vacation - they were a bit younger than me, probably the same age as Jill. We talked to them for quite a while and they painted a wonderful picture of life in Germany. Later in the evening some other Americans joined us and we chatted for a bit. The music was pretty good, but again - no singing, and no particular song leaps out at me. But there was the fun of having the whole pub clapping or tapping their feet in time to the beat. Overall, it was just a really great day.
- Doolin Cave Jill said she’d never been in a cave before! And this one was pretty much on our way out of Doolin and to Galway. We got to see one of the largest free-hanging stalactites and the surprising amount of mud in the cave. Most caves don’t have so much mud. They also let you touch some of the stalagmites - something that is very much discouraged in American caves. It’s composed mostly of calcium carbonate, the primary component of bone - and it feels lighter than most rocks. Caves really are the bones of the earth. We got to see some weird rock formations and a fossil fish just sticking out of the wall, too. The guide mentioned that sometimes the wind blows through the caves, sounding like an old woman singing. Creepy. The cave system itself hasn’t been fully explored - it’s apparently pretty massive under that part of Ireland.
- The Burren Based on advice from the Doolin Cave shop, we took the coastal route to Galway. This let us see the rocky plains of the Burren (which means, imaginatively enough, “rocky place”). True enough, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many rocks. They were just scattered everywhere, from pebbles to boulders. We stopped to explore a rocky beach - which was covered in seaweed and full of incredibly smelly tidepools. Really, they smelled like old cheese. For animals, all we saw were snails and some other shellfish. The rest of the drive took us along the seaside on a rare brilliantly sunny day.
- Galway city center We were tired our first night in Galway, but we wandered out long enough to get fish and chips and absorb a bit of the city center. Found some nice paintings for Jill’s mom and got a pint, but then retreated to the B&B to recharge a bit.
- The Connemara The next day we did a driving tour of the Connemara. The Connemara is another nature-y region - where the Burren is all rocks and sky, the Connemara is all hills, bogs, and grass. And sheep. When we were there, it was a foggy, somewhat drizzly day, but it really seemed to fit the area.
- The hike in Cong One of our first stops in the Connemara. This hike actually reminded me a bit of the Pacific Northwest and of Japanese forests. Everything was so incredibly green - the trees all had green moss growing on them. The whole forest was extremely verdant. We walked through the forest for a bit, along a large river, until we got to a restored castle which is now a nice resort. If we’d had unlimited time and money, maybe we would have stayed there - it was very impressive from the outside, anyways. But the forest was more fun to tromp around in. We saw a tiny woodmouse there, which dove into its burrow before we could get a picture. If we’d had more time here, I would’ve really liked to do the whole trail.
- Kylemore Abbey is a castle type household from the 1800s, I think. We pulled in, looked around the grounds, but declined to pay 12 euros each for a one-hour tour. Again, it looked nice from the outside, but there were other things to see.
- Connemara national park: This was both cool and free. There was a visitor center that talked about bogs and had these weird bog creatures with eyes to explain parts of the exhibit. I liked them. And I learned a lot about bogs that I had not known, like how portions of it were dug up and used to fuel fires. The bogs themselves were at least partially caused by ancient humans burning the area and saturating the soil with carbon - which then changed the ecosystem and led to the formation of the bogs. We went and hiked along one of the paths and jumped up and down on one of the boggy areas. The views were great, and again, if we’d had more time, I would’ve liked to do a longer hike. The only downside was the bugs - these horrible little swampflies that caught up with you if you held still for too long at all. They also had a pretty cool playground that we shamelessly took over for a bit.
- Night out in Galway After getting back from the Connemara, we were ready to tackle Galway. We got a great meal at Sunny’s then found some of the bars that were supposed to be best for Irish music. In fact, we ended up wandering between a couple because there was no music going or it was hard to hear, but eventually we settled in at one pub. There we were talked at for a while by an older, drunker Irish guy. There was music playing by then, at least - but not much singing. Then Jill ran into Julie (whose family had stayed in the same B&B in Doolin) and they chatted for a while. It turned out that she knew a lot of people in the Irish music scene, including some of the people playing at that bar. After the pub we were in closed, we went to another one, called the Silent Disco with an outdoor balcony, where we talked to some Galwegians as well. After we were fairly well inebriated we left there, but it was a fun evening.
- The Rock of Cashel We didn’t have the best first impression of Cashel, I have to say. We had to drive about a quarter of the way across the country to get there, Jill wanted McDonald’s and I couldn’t find one, and we had to divert through the outskirts of Limerick at one point due to construction. Limerick is an ugly city, at least judging from the outskirts. So by the time we got to Cashel we were tired, hungry, and cranky. We tracked down some food, took a nap, and left the Rock of Cashel to the next morning. When, of course, it was raining. Raining pretty hard, as it turned out. Joan lent us an umbrella, and we went to see the Rock. The Rock was REALLY highly recommended in our Rick Steves tourbook - but there actually wasn’t much to see. It’s pretty much all ruin - which is fine. A good chunk of it is closed off for restoration, so you can’t get in and you can’t even get a good idea what the ruin looks like. It would’ve been incredibly helpful if they’d had some dioramas to show what the Rock originally looked like and how it changed over time.
As far as I could gather, it spent most of its time as a massive cathedral, not as a castle - but this wasn’t clear from the exhibits. Nor was it clear how many times it was attacked or what the structure looked like before it was converted into a cathedral. I don’t need a three hour audio tour, but this is pretty basic stuff and it was extremely hard to enjoy the site without knowing any of it. There was a video you could watch, but it was about religious strongholds across all of Ireland rather than giving the specific history of the Rock. So - it was a cool structure, but overall I was a little disappointed by the Rock. Especially since it had been built up so much - it’s one of very few “must-see” sites listed in R. Steves’ book, and I just don’t agree.
- The other city stuff in Cashel We saw the Bru Boru music center, which is near the Rock and better organized in many ways. It’s about Ireland’s history of music and poetry, which was very cool. There were some questionable choices in the layout - like putting two sets of speakers relating different information right across from one another - but overall it was an interesting and worthwhile little museum. Much easier to follow than the Rock itself. We also saw the tourist information center in the middle of Cashel, which has both formal write-ups and a bunch of grade and high-school reports on the Rock and medieval life. There is a model of the Rock and the town there, but it’s still a little hard to picture what it looked like when it was complete.
We also took a scenic walk the previous night to check out an old hotel where the first hops for Guinness were planted. Supposedly the hop plants are still there, but I couldn’t find them. There was also a little “Cashel Folk Village” set-up, showing what medieval life was like in the town, but it looked very tiny and was fairly expensive. We looked at the old churches and the old city wall instead. At one of the churches we found a whole mess of cats, including a friendly blind one and several kittens.
- Killkenny - Cathedral, Killkenny castle and Design Center honestly, I wish we had spent a little more time in Killkenny. It had more going on than Cashel did - though the authentic medieval roads weren’t much fun to drive, it was no Kinsale. The real hassle was finding a place to park. The one we did find was somewhat far from the city center and most of the sights. We managed to wander down an alley behind a bunch of people’s houses and freak out a couple teenagers who were furtively smoking something. We also got there later in the day - we decided to see Cashel first, and it was further to Killkenny than I’d thought.
By the time we got to the Castle in Killkenny, it was only going to be open for about 20 more minutes. The guard at the door nervously told us to look around for a few minutes but that the till was closed anyways. So we kind of dashed through a couple floors, looking around very quickly. We ran into another guard and had the following conversation:
Guard: Are you lost?
Me: A little. Is this the way out?
Guard: (very definitively) This is the way in. (pause) But you could go out through it, I guess.
We looked at the ground a bit after that and then cleared out. We went across the street and saw the Killkenny design center, which was full of art type pieces and fancy clothes. It also had a few exhibits - one on Waterford crystal and another on a specific type of tweed. Neither tweed nor crystal are really things I’m that interested in, normally, but the exhibits were fascinating and a bit sad. “Waterford” crystal is now mostly made in Poland, and there are knock-offs of that type of tweed as well. Sadly we didn’t get to see much else there, because they closed soon after we got there. If I did it again, I’d definitely devote more time to Killkenny.
- Trim Castle: When we got to Trim, it was raining. Like, a lot. We skipped the Japanese garden on the way because it was raining so much. The guy at the gas station on the way (who had to help because I couldn’t figure out the pump) said that the weather had been bad, even for Ireland - that normally they got a summer.
When we got to the B&B, the owner told us how to get to the castle - and then warned us not to go that way, because it was so wet. So we went inside, chilled out for a bit, and then went walking. Without an umbrella. In the fairly pouring rain.
We walked one way, decided it wasn’t leading to the castle, and turned around to go the way that the B&B owner originally told us not to go. It was across a large field (the green) and we could see the castle the whole way. Once we got close to the castle, we circled the wrong way around the whole thing, taking the longest possible route to the ticket office. So, quite sodden, we got to the castle gate and got a tour. We even got the student rate, so it was like 2 euros each.
Then we got one of the best tours I’ve been on, despite the terrible weather. The tour took us to the outside of the castle and then to a partially restored interior. Fortunately, most of the insides were capped with plastic roofing. Once inside, our guide filled us in on the history of the castle and showed us three large models of the castle. The models depicted the original construction and the gradual addition of new levels and defenses to the castle itself. (That room had Ikea flooring instead of the more authentic wooden beams, much to the chagrin of the guide.) This was also the castle where certain scenes of Braveheart were filmed, it turned out. I was more interested in the Castle itself than Braveheart anecdotes, with one exception. Apparently Mel Gibson was none too kind towards most of his crew and extras. So for the scene at the end of the movie where he is pelted with vegetables, they used extras from the town. But they keep putting off the shoot, and each time the extras would go to the pubs and drink for a bit, all through the day. So when the light was finally right, and they do the shot, many of the locals are a bit tipsy. And, there’s a shot where Gibson gets hit in the junk with a cabbage thrown by a little girl and doubles over. That’s real - the girl was one of the locals and Gibson (after spending some time recovering in his hotel room) went through the footage and kicked her off the movie. But they left it in because the pain looks (and is) genuine.
- Newgrange - cultural center and solstice mound: This one was a little ways from Trim. It was a bit tricky to get to - we fully overshot and had to go back, and go through this frankly bizarre section of road that was 1 way at a time, controlled by a stop light. And first the trucks would go, then the cars. And then the trucks from the other direction, and so on. Anyways, we eventually found it, even without the help of the GPS. It’s set up so you can visit the museum and then a couple of the burial mounds - either a site with several smaller ones, or the large famous one, or both. We opted to see the big famous one.
The museum was, in fact, really well done. We watched a short 7 minute video that still did a great job explaining the significance of the site and why the position of the sun was so important to the people there. And it makes sense - when agriculture is your whole life and the average lifespan is in the twenties, each year is a struggle. This structure that catches the sunlight on the shortest day of each year is a really powerful symbol and calendar. I’ll admit that I didn’t entirely see what the fuss was about before visiting the museum, but that it did a great job with the explanations.
- The mound itself: was pretty cool. We got a brief tour - mostly a quick explanation from the outside, then going inside the surprisingly small interior. There was a simulation of the sun coming in on the solstice and how it would have looked and an explanation of how several bodies were found in the floor. Very interestingly, the shape of the chamber is cross-shaped - three shorter arms and a longer passageway leading in. Some of the designs are still quite visible and most of the structure is still the original - though it had been shored up in a few places with modern supports. In fact, after the site was abandoned the mound of dirt had collapsed over the entrance, preserving and hiding it very well until road workers found it again. Overall, the site was quite a bit cooler than I expected.
- Dun Laoghire farmer’s market Driving in Dun Laoghire still sucked even after the practice of the rest of the trip. But, once we finally found the B&B and parked, we wandered around and found this cool farmer’s market. It’s better than the one in Champaign and up there with any I saw on the west coast. There was fresh bread and cheese right at the entrance, and then other foods scattered around and a few craft-y tents. We got onion bread and goat cheese to eat later, which were good. We got falafel in pitas to eat right away - we were getting pretty tired of fried meat by then, but fried vegetables? Delicious! (It was really good and still had more vegetables than most of our other meals.) The people there were mostly locals and the atmosphere was so different from the tourist-y stuff we’d been doing.
In my opinion, a lot of tourist sites have this vaguely grim cast to the people’s faces. The tourists are asking themselves: Am I being most efficient with my vacation time? Am I fully absorbing the culture here? Do I have enough photographs to show the people back home? The farmer’s market was a nice break, just people out on a beautiful day to get some food and hang out in the park.
- Trinity College in Dublin: I don’t have quite as much to say on this - it was just cool to see an European college, and this one goes back about 500 years. The newer buildings are scattered all over Dublin, of course. The whole thing has a very Harry Potter-esque vibe, at least to me. The buildings were very cool, but then, our guide was very keen on architecture, so she was good at talking about them. There was a very interesting fusion of the old and the modern when it came to the buildings. And I guess the cafeteria kept falling down until the architect died, and they gave the job to someone else. The only weird thing - you couldn’t walk on any of the grass, which was kept as neat and short as a golf course. What’s the point of that? It looks nice but no one can enjoy it..
- The Book of Kells Another really excellent presentation, the exhibit explained a lot about how the books were made, how the inks were made, what the ornamentation meant, and who made them. Also about how often monks had their monasteries burned down or raided. The book itself was still pretty amazing - the level of detail that they managed with quill pens and no magnifying lens is incredible. The inks are still vivid after more than 1000 years - you can imagine how amazing this would have been to the average person of the time, though they'd be lucky to see it.
Upstairs from the book was this massive, incredible library. The roof was a giant arch with wooden slats like a barrel, and the shelves reach to the ceiling. The books are all these massive, in-depth leatherbound volumes about (I assume) philosophy, religion, and other classical topics. They had some of the collection out for display in glass cases, but it was only a tiny fraction of what the library had. Since I like libraries a lot, it was pretty amazing to see and almost as good as the Book of Kells. And it's still in use - you could see the librarians moving around, checking books and reshelving them.
Food: Food was hearty, to say the least. We had fish and chips a lot, sometimes with the amazing invention known as curry sauce. (To me it tastes like a Japanese curry powder mixed with some kind of oil?) I enjoyed the food a lot for most of the trip, but towards the end, became very tired of chips in particular. There are chips served with virtually everything, in huge quantities. I saw a little girl get an entire plate of chips for dinner one night. The portions in general were huge - while prices were a bit high by my standards, there was always a ton of food.
I tried to get all the Irish staples while we were there. There’s no corned beef because, sure enough, they don’t eat it there. More of a New York Irish thing, I think.
- Fish and chips: had this a lot of places. I think the best was in a pub called McGann’s in Doolin. Other places were a bit less crispy, but theirs was light, crispy, and perfect after a day of hiking.
- Shepherd’s pie: had this in Galway. Much better than any version I’ve had in the states. Handful of root vegetables mixed in with the minced lamb. Potatoes and cheese on top. Good, stick to your ribs type food.
- Seafood: I tried to eat a lot of seafood, especially at the start. We got mussels, oysters, and crab from a place called Fishy Fishy in Kinsale. The mussels were amazing. The oysters were good - I think the quality of the oysters themselves was as good as what I got in France. But the garnish (shallots and red wine vinegar) was better in France, as was the wine we had there. Wine was expensive enough that we never got any. I had a salmon pasta dish in Trim that was very, very good - both fresh salmon and smoked salmon. At the Ophira House B&B I had a smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfast that was excellent.
- Cabbage and bacon: Bacon is different in Ireland - more like thin slices of ham, I guess. A bit more like my homemade bacon, but not as fatty. By this point I was craving something green as well. I actually really enjoyed this; it was one of my favorite meals of the trip. Not complicated, just hearty and good.
- Salad: I got a salad. Of course, it came with fried chicken breast glazed with honey on top. Still, it was good and something of a break from the meat, meat, meat of the previous days. This was in Cashel, at Feehans.
- Seafood chowder: deserves a mention on its own. There was a really delicious, unusual seafood chowder at Fishy Fishy - it had tomato, caraway, and maybe anise as flavors? The first bite reminded me of Chinese food almost. We had another excellent chowder at McDermott’s in Doolin which had a crab claw in it.
- Beef stew: The Irish are very proud of their beef. I only had beef stew once (at McDermott’s in Doolin) and it was great, some of the best stew I’ve ever had. The beef was tender, the potatoes were well cooked, it was garnished with parsley and even the carrots were pretty good. The stock was awesome, probably rich enough on its own to make a decent meal.
- Breakfasts: generally we ate only one meal besides breakfasts. Part of the reason was that the breakfasts tended to be massive. A full Irish breakfast includes porridge, at least one egg, sausage, bacon, black pudding, white pudding, toast. Often a tomato and maybe mushrooms or beans. Sometimes brown bread with butter as well as toast. It is a LOT of food and we quickly started asking for less than the full Irish. The puddings were one of my favorites - they’re like sausage, but with ground rice and seasonings mixed in. Then they’re cut into slices and crisped up. I loved them and I don’t think you can get anything quite like them in the states. And yes, black pudding is black because of the blood in it, but it’s not like the stuff is red and oozing as you’re eating. In general: the breakfasts were excellent.
- Indian: Some of the best Indian food I ever had was in England, so I was eager to try it here. Was not disappointed - went to a place called Khan’s spices in Trim. The place smelled like incense and had very fancy chairs. We got a chicken in sauce dish and a lamb balti - lamb chunks in spicy sauce. And a fried onion appetizer. Everything was excellent - some of the best Indian food I’ve had. The flavors were extremely intense and the restaurant itself was cool.
- Japanese: In Ireland? Yeah. This was in Dublin at the end of the trip, by which time we were fairly tired of the traditional fare. We went to Yamamori Noodles twice - it was actually one of the cheapest places in the city and near the Trinity College. The first time we got squid sushi, Jill got pork ramen, and I got duck ramen. That time was really good - the stocks were tasty and we devoured everything. The duck ramen was not traditional, but it was still very good and the rendered duck fat was delicious. The second time we got salmon sushi (still very good), I got seafood ramen, and Jill got yaki soba with chicken. To be fair, I wasn’t feeling as well that day, but I think the food also wasn’t quite as good. They used a LOT of dashi in the stock for the seafood ramen rather than making a proper seafood stock, and we realized the slight sweetness in the broth from the previous day’s ramen was dashi.
It’s not like it ruined the soups, but it was a bit disappointing - real ramen uses seaweed and tons of animal fat and protein in the stock for flavor, not dashi. My seafood ramen still had a ton of squid, salmon, chicken, and veggies in it, so I was full but feeling a bit pedantic. The first time we went there I would’ve given them 5 stars - the second, more like 4, maybe 3.5. Still worth a stop though, for sure.
- Last meal/snack: Jill and I stopped in to a pub to watch some more soccer and there was a free snack at half time. Fries and sausages, of course. Very fitting.
- Snack food: we didn’t do too much of this. There were some thai chili pepper potato chips, which were good because they tasted like thai basil, too. And some cheese flavored Pringles, which were not. Yuck.
- Things even I wouldn’t try: fried sausages. They were cheap but at no point could I muster up the desire to order one. By this I mean fully breaded and deep fried sausages.
- The bad meal: there’s always one, right? We got to Cashel late, were tired, and the good places were closing up between lunch and dinner. So we duck into this dinky little bar that happens to have food. I get the worst chicken curry I’ve ever had and Jill gets half (!) a can of cream of mushroom soup. Absolutely, insultingly terrible. It wasn’t just us - someone else was eating there too, and got the same chicken curry. Though why anyone in town would go there is beyond me.
- Overall I somehow lost weight on the trip. Not much, but a little bit. Or since coming back - I am writing this after being home for almost a week, but without dieting in particular.
Beer: This is going to sound weird. But beer was very disappointing in Ireland on the whole. In most places your choices are basically this: black, brown, or yellow. Black = Guinness; Brown = Smithwicks; Yellow = Heineken or Carlsberg. And sometimes cider as well. There was Guinness virtually everywhere, of course. And yes, it does taste better in Ireland - but not so much better that it was all I wanted to drink for the whole trip.
There are a couple other Irish stouts (Murphys and Beamish) available, but they’re not that different. In stores, it was a little better - we found some O’Haras and some Irish microbrews. Finally, in Dublin, we found a pub called the Brew Dock with an awesome bartender that had a whole line-up of microbrews and American beers. We saw Blue Moon marketed as American Craft beer, which was a bit painful. But the Irish (and Scottish) beers we tried were quite good - it was just disappointing that most places, there were so few choices. And we did drink quite a bit of beer on the trip - it’s part of the culture in the pubs, for sure.
I didn’t drink much whiskey straight, but we did get Irish coffees several times. Those were good, especially after a day tromping around in the cold and the damp.
Souvenirs I hate shopping for souvenirs. Hate it. I didn’t get anything to bring back for myself - the memories and the pictures are the main souvenir for me. So most people got shot glasses or bottle openers. Anything else (art, wool, etc) was seriously expensive, and souvenirs were one of our biggest expenditures besides lodging and food on the trip as it was...
B&Bs:
We noticed a trend where people with easy to remember passwords (rather than 34657hj8931lksb) tended to be much more relaxed overall.
- Ophira House: located near Dublin, in a suburb called Dun Laoghire (pronounced Dun Leary, of course.) This one was one of our favorites. It was on a quiet street, was a big room, and was very reasonably priced. Free wi-fi and charming owners. One of the softest beds ever. After our very long first day and stressful time driving, it was amazing to have such a nice place to recover. We liked it enough to go back for our time in Dublin, where it was about 25 minutes by train away from the center of the city. Nice all around; highly recommended and cheap for Dublin area.
- San Antonio B&B: in Kinsale. Another favorite. The owner, Jimmie, was a charming guy who plays mandolin and always had a word of advice on what to do or where to go. Gave us the best room in the place, with a view of Kinsale and right next to the wifi box. The biggest breakfasts of the trip - porridge, egg, two pieces bacon, 2+ sausages, tomato, toast, and puddings. Very good, too. Highly recommended; also reasonably priced.
- Half Door Lodge, Doolin: This one was okay. A fairly small, modern kind of building. Kind of felt like a dorm room, down to the linked bathrooms. The owner was nice enough, made us tea and brought out fruitcake and butter when we arrived on a rainy day. The food was also good but overall it wasn’t nearly as cozy as some others. We were in the front hallway and all noise carried right into our room.
- Asgard House, Galway. Yeah, I picked this one for its name. A more cozy place and one of the more expensive ones of the trip. The breakfasts were good - the owners were nice, but this was another place where sound carried through the whole building. As a result, we didn’t sleep so well. 5 minutes walk from Galway activities though, which was nice.
- Joy’s Rockside Inn, Cashel: Ah, Cashel. This was kind of an odd one. The owner, Joan, was very nice to us - sometimes almost suffocatingly so. She tried to have the other guests sing to us since we were the honeymooners. The place was full of little notes that seemed vaguely disapproving that you were staying there - WINDOWS FOR EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY, PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE LIGHT ON TO PREVENT FIRE, and so on. We had a view of the Rock of Cashel, but the place is being restored at the moment so you can’t see so much. It was quiet, though, and we were able to rest up a lot after Galway. This is a place that I’m sure would be lovely for some people but wasn’t quite on our wavelength..
- The White Lodge Inn, Trim: Another favorite. Though I never could figure out how to work the shower to get proper hot water. Very, very cozy rooms and cool owners who talked with us a bit one night. Ron gave me some Irish whiskey, which is not a bad way to win me over if the comfy rooms and awesome location (it’s across the road from a field leading to a castle) hadn’t been enough to do so. Also highly recommended.
- Premiere Inn, Dublin: near the airport. We stayed there because they had a shuttle right to the airport and we thought it’d be easier. Not a B&B. Soul-crushing place, where everything incurred an extra fee. Like staying in a DLC hotel - there were charges for the internet, for weighing your luggage, for using a credit card. The only things that seemed to come with the room were the hot water, the TV, and the bed. Not recommended.
Down time:
In any trip, there is some downtime. It’s inevitable. Some of it is waiting in lines; other times, it’s when you are just exhausted from getting from one place to another or walking all day. Some nights we stayed in for this reason. We watched The IT Crowd, which is really funny and was occasionally relevant to us - there’s an episode about real men and soccer we saw before watching a soccer match. I got back into playing some FF Tactics.
I finished reading the Johannes Cabal series (Necromancer, Detective, and Fear Institute) which I can highly recommend for anyone who has precisely the same tastes and interests in necromancers and Lovecraft that I do. Anyone else might still like them - they’re written in kind of a light, breezy style but still deliver moments with genuine punch to them. To our frustration, you can’t stream The Legend of Korra in the UK or Ireland.
We spent some time on the internet thanks to the wi-fi but tried to limit that, somewhat, and use it more for trip related purposes.
I guess E3 was while we were gone - I checked a couple articles about it, but there wasn’t much that interested me besides the 3DS Castlevania. (And I’m not crazy about the style they’re taking for that.) I wish they would hurry up and announce the 3DSLite or whatever version 2 will be. It’s going to be much harder to resist getting one once Paper Mario, Castlevania, and Animal Crossing are out.
Sports We ended up watching a bit of soccer in Dublin. There was a giant display on one of the quays set up, with two massive TVs, food, and beer. There were a LOT of Irish people there - we were some of the last people to get in at the start. Then the game (it was versus Croatia) started. And we couldn’t see much, even with a massive (at least 20 feet I think?) TV displaying the game.
It was fun to see the spectacle but not that much fun to be there. There were some pretty trashy people around. I mean really trashy, like being completely drunk and chain smoking in between tooting a vuvuelza while ignoring children younger than 5. Jill said one woman was taking pictures of her children in the toilet stalls. There were just so many people there - and only a handful of Garda to nominally keep order. After about 30 minutes of the game we got tired of it and tried to get out - and you couldn’t. There were so many people outside the gates they were worried about a groups shoving their way in. We actually couldn’t leave until the halftime point, even as we watched clearly underage people climbing over buildings to get in, while holding plastic 1 liter bottles full of beer. Yeah, it was something. We finally did get out once it was halftime and went to the craft beer pub we’d found down the street, which was a bit more actually fun. I saw later on youtube that people got bored with the game and started jumping into the water of the quay to splash around.
The game itself ended up 3 Croatia vs. 1 Ireland. (We were at the quay for the 1 that Ireland scored - lots of shouting and clapping but a bit less than you’d expect because many people weren’t paying that much attention.) When Ireland lost, no one seemed especially upset or surprised - the Croatian team was really good. We also caught part of a game between Greece and the Czech republic (which was a rough, dirty game - in the end the Czechs won) and about half of one between Poland and Russia. We debated for a while about which side to cheer on for that one. In the end it was a tie. Watching soccer is surprisingly fun, especially with a beer or two. It’s up there with my other favorite sport to actually watch, which is basketball. Both soccer and basketball actually have things happening most of the time as opposed to seemingly constant downs and pauses and strategic time-outs in football, which make it hard for me to get too interested in the game.
Successes:
- Curry sauce!
- Seafood in Kinsale
- Hike to the Cliffs of Moher
- Music in Doolin
- Killkenny, though I wish we’d spent more time there and less in Cashel
- Exploring in Trim
- Trinity College
- Beer in Dublin
- Talking to people in pubs
Failures (also venting):
- Not seeing the Ring of Kerry. I would redistribute some of the nights for sure based on how appealing the different towns were..
- Weekends in cities. That is, we had almost no weekends in big cities and we missed every festival or event except a small weekly farmer’s market in Dun Laoghire.
- Getting around in Dublin. We ended up doing so in such a convoluted way. I turned in the rental car which meant that we had to take the buses back and pay the fare (5 euros). Then we had to stop in at the train station and buy a train/bus card (23 euros each). That worked fine for the next couple days, but then we moved from the B&B to the airport hotel. For that we took the train to the main station, then caught a bus to the airport. The only thing was, that particular bus had a 6 euro charge (each) on top of our already purchased train/bus card. So that was really irritating. More irritating is the fact that if you take a different bus, it wouldn’t have cost anything - we could have used the card we already had.
- Worse than that? Once we got to the airport we had to take a shuttle that cost 1 euro each. But, once we knew exactly where the hotel was (not as trivial as it sounds - some of the businesses are kinda lackadaisical about addresses) we discovered that the busline went within 500 feet of the hotel. Yeah. We could’ve taken a different bus, paid nothing extra, and gone straight to the hotel without messing with the airport. Total cost of underestimating the buses: 14 euros.
- This doesn’t change the fact that I think it’s shitty of the Dublin bus company to run one bus straight to the airport and charge extra - and not mention that fact, or that there’s another bus that doesn’t cost extra on their website. The only place you can find out this little detail is on the back of your train/bus card - which you won’t see until you’ve already purchased it.
- At the same time, not spending more time in Dublin was a mistake. Dublin is a really cool city, where a lot of cultures come together in an Irish environment. I had seen from a couple sources that you “shouldn’t get stuck in Dublin, it’s so tourist-y”. This is stupid, terrible advice. Dublin is as tourist-y as you make it - if you only go to the Guinness storehouse and the Jameson distillery and the Viking tour, then yes, it will be touristy. If you go to the college and find the college pubs and restaurants and just walk around the city, it will be its own thing.
- The order of the cities was not efficient. Going from Dublin to Kinsale to Doolin to Cashel to Trim to Dublin requires backtracking and doesn’t take you along some of the scenic coasts. It also makes for some uneven driving days, for sure.
- Missed the Ring of Kerry and the Ring of Dingle.
- The weather was a bit of a failure - we had about 4 days straight of cold rain. We made the best of it but it was pretty miserable there for a while.
- My suitcases. Ugh, bad planning all over. My roller suitcase had a broken handle so I had to just carry it. I didn’t have enough shirts packed. And I had two bags with straps, so I could carry them with one over each shoulder but it absolutely destroyed my neck muscles. Carrying all that across Dublin and then across the airport the next day was painful.
Not sure where else to put this: some American tourists on the bus behind us complaining that their bus ride took 30 minutes instead of 15 and how "They have a different concept of time here." I don't think they do, they just told you the bus ride was about 15 minutes so you'd stop bugging them..
I don't want to end on the note of the failures/venting. Overall it was a really good trip - relaxed most of the time, but looking at the list, we actually did quite a few things. The natural settings (cliffs, Burren, Connemara) were some of our very favorites, but the castles and college were pretty awesome as well. I really enjoyed the food for most of the time - it's really not as bad as people say.
The Irish are a lot more friendly than the French, even accounting for the language barrier. Also, they don't seem to mind the tourism. (Except maybe Cashel.) When we were in Galway, the guys who worked at some of the tourist shops were really encouraging us to check them out - they thought Kylemore abbey and the castles were genuinely cool and they wanted people to see them. I guess I expected a bit more of an undercurrent of cynicism, but no, they liked getting to show off some of their country's treasures. And it is an incredibly beautiful country - so much of it looks like a painting you can wander around in.
Driving was stressful but it was generally worth it because of the freedom it gave us. The cities and countryside were so different from anywhere I've been in the US. (Even if some of the roads remind me of Indiana.) Someday, I'd like to go back and see some of the things we missed and maybe do more hiking - I think a back-packing tour of at least part of the country would be amazing.
I have a lot of pictures to get uploaded too, but pictures don't fade the same way memories do, so I wanted to get this written up fairly quickly.