Going Home

From Clifden, we drove back the way we came to Bunratty, which is where we had started our adventure in Ireland. We didn't see much this day that we hadn't seen all the other days, and by this point in our trip we were ready to go home. it was only a couple of hour drive, so we spent most of the day shopping for gifts for fathers' day, my sister's birthday and for our moms (because it's what you do). We got lost in Shannon looking for a town center (all we found was the saddest little mall you've ever seen), and we opted not to pay $45 for a medieval banquet. Just a quiet night.We stayed in a B&B about 1/2 hour from the Shannon Airport and that was just about that. We flew out of Shannon to Boston the next day. This, sadly, is the final Guinness I had in Ireland.

one funny story from the B&B. About 9:30 at night, i had beaten Final Fantasy I on my GBA and was falling asleep. Kim was reading and all of hte sudden i was awoken by the strangest sound. it took me a minute to realize what it was but it was the sounds of some other couple engaged in the things married couples do. and it was coming from the other end of house! this went on for quite a while, and i finally fell back to sleep. the next morning, as we were eating breakfast, all of these older couples kept coming down the stairs looking at kim and I as if we were the people keeping them up all night, when in fact it had been another couple who had left earlier than us. it was quite amusing.

I am King of My Castle

the whole reason we went to Clifden, is because Kim's parents had, as a birthday present, paid for us to spend a night in a luxury castle/hotel. now we thought on wednesday that when we got to Clifden, there'd be plenty to do for 2 days in Ireland. There's a National Park that we could go to and do some hiking and then we thought we could shop or ....well turns out it rained (no hiking) and there isn't much else to do. on a day like this, it's helpful to not be on a tour and to be guiding yourself, because we just started driving North out of Clifden and came to a fascinating place.

A benedicting nunnery (is that the right word? i think not) and girls school nestled in the mountains on this lake in the middle of nowhere. it could not possibly have been any more "storyboard" than it was. the place was beautiful gothic architecture and the surroundings were entirely peaceful and the gray/fogginess of the day made it even more kind of surreal. we spent a couple of hours exploring the grounds and just hanging out, came back to town and had lunch at a little pub and then checked into our hotel.

The hotel was gorgeous. huge. beautiful. i've never stayed in a luxury hotel before. now, there's not much to do, so we went to the local video store and rented movies and just had a night in instead of going out and "doing" something. which was actually really nice and relaxing. We rented Closer which was just flat out awful. not, like, awfully acted or directed. But awful in its subject matter. i don't think people live that way, and if they do i don't want to watch a movie about it. it was hurtful. But then we watched Finding Neverland which was an incredibly good movie. it's not a typical guy movie (although i don't typically like those either), but it's one of those movies i think everyone should see.

Then we slept in our kingsize bed. very very nice. i'm not even sure i knew kim was there the bed was so big ;)

The Hills of Connermara

My favorite traditional Irish song - and this is relative, because it can change - is "The Hills of Connermara" performed by Gaelic Storm. So i was pretty excited when we headed west into the hills of connermara. This is desolate country - and not like a desert desolate, but it's so rocky that making any kind of traditional living here (farming and livestock) would have been very difficult, so it's remained mostly unsettled. there are some houses and small towns (mostly right along the coast and i think they're fishermen) but of the parts of Ireland we visited, this was the least populated. It was gorgeous, though.

Around this part of the trip, really probably on Tuesday, it started to rain pretty much every day. our original plan was to get to Clifden and do some sight seeing and some exploring, and then spend the night. Well, it was raining, and as you can tell from the picture in that link, it's not a very big place. 2 streets big, to be precise. So the people there don't have much to do but drink. so we went to our B&B and met our tied-for-first place favorite B&B owner. This woman called kim 'dearie' and skittered around the house kind of giggling to herself. we had some fun there, and then went to dinner at like 7 pm. now i'm a night person, and i was bored by 8. so we decided to drive what is called the "Sky Road" which is a gorgeous little path out of town to the Atlantic coast of Ireland. it was awesome. And it really summed up Ireland for me - there isn't a terrible lot to do if you don't like music, food, people or beautiful views. Kim and I drove west as far as the road went and sat there and talked for awhile, then went back to our B&B. and all in all, that's about perfect.

The Heart of Celtic Christianity

Tuesday morning, we left Dublin and headed west on our way to Connermara. We had to be there on the night of the 15th, and really that was the only place we had to be for the whole vacation.

Kim had read a bunch of historical fiction about the founding of Ireland, and one of the places she really wanted to see was The Hill of Tara. It was the place where, before the coming of Christanity, the kings of Celtic Ireland and the druids would meet for their important ceremonies. it was really desolate - nothing more than high grass and sheep. It was kind of surreal. For hundreds and hundreds of years this had been a sacred place to thousands and thousands of people. now it was nothing but a hill, and not a remarkable hill out of the thousands of other hills.

from there we headed to the Hill of Slane which is a very cool place. it is the place where St. Patrick lit what was known as a Paschal fire on Easter Sunday when he arrived in Ireland, in direct defiance of the pagan kings, who were meeting on the Hill of Tara that night (which you could see from the Hill of Slane. now patrick didn't know it, but the king had issued an order that night that the first fire to be lit had to be his because he was the source of light in that culture. As Patrick proclaimed the good news of Easter morning, he lit a fire and created a confrontation between himself and the pagan druids. He was summoned to the king who didn't become a christian, but allowed Patrick to evangelize the people of Ireland. it's a cool place, with an abbey (church) a university for monks and a batism well. All of them are now in ruins. and were in ruins before the West was even a thought to Europeans.

leaving ancient Ireland, we headed west. The one other really cool thing we saw was the Trim Castle. it was the site where "Braveheart" was filmed (in part) and was exactly what one would expect from a castle in Ireland. very big and very ruined (after 800 years, that's to be expected), but cool nonetheless.

and i had to include at least one picture of kim making multiple calls trying to book a B&B. everyday about 2 pm, we would call ahead and try to book a place. we never had to call more than 1 or 2 places, but it was still a little stressful on her...

Into the Heart of Dublin

after another phenomenal breakfast in our B&B (i swear I'd never eaten as well as i did with the Irish B&Bs), we got on a bus and headed into Dublin. That one step - that one idea of taking the bus rather than driving saved us more headaches and stress than i can even begin to explain.

our first stop was Trinity College in Dublin. It's a beautiful, ancient place that is cool in and of its own right. It's library was a football field long and looked like the library from Harry Potter or from Star Wars epidsode II (i'm a nerd, back off). But the reason we went to visit was to see the Book of Kells, which was something Kim was very excited about. in the early history of Christian Ireland, there was a large number of people who were illiterate. so monks and scribes would illustrate bibles in insanely intricate ways. it's gorgeous. The book of kells is just the 4 gospels of hte New testament. there are textual errors (imagine if it was your job to hand copy the bible - you can imagine a few written errors happening), but it's not important. these people loved what God said in his word and the literal translation wasn't critical. in my office now, i have a print of the first word of the Gospel of Luke. it is gorgeous.


after that we wandered around Dublin. our first stop was Christ's Cathedral. Awesome. I don't know how else to put it. Here is a church which has been continually in operation for almost 1000 years. 1000! I think CPC is old, at 60 years. 1000 years, this church has stood as a testimony to God's Glory and goodness. it was beautiful. and at the same time sad. it's a historical item, not a living breathing part of Christ's body. it's a museum. as is much of hte church in Ireland, and in Europe beyond. We also go to see St. Patrick's Cathedral and the place where he baptized most of his original converts to Christianity in Ireland (the next day, we would see where Patrick came and started his movement in Ireland - it was very close to Dublin.





we spent the rest of the day just tooling around Dublin. We did some shopping. Actually, and this is really really important. We bought my post precious souvenir in Ireland in Dublin. I had wanted one for along time, and finally found them. A Peterson pipe. Now Europe has gone slightly crazy in its anti smoking campaigns, and for probably 10 years now, smoking in public in Ireland has been illegal. So the number of places where one can buy a pipe has been reduced to this one store in downtown Dublin (and even it was incredibly difficult to find). I bought a pipe for me and for my friends Paul and Jared, who, if i'm going down with another bad habit, i'm taking them with me.

we had dinner at a cool place called "temple bar" - it's the entertainment district in dublin and then we did what was hands down our favorite part of the whole trip (even better than the whiskey tour). we joined onto a "traditional irish music pub crawl" which is exactly what it sounds like. We went bar hopping through the temple bar district to 4 traditional Irish pubs, (I even found a place called "the dubliner" which is the name of my favorite Irish bar here in cincy) and we were led by 2 musicians. One guy played guitar and bodhran (an irish drum) and another guy played fiddle and bodhran. they told stories and then performed the songs their stories were about and in the process showed us some of hte coolest little pubs in dublin (out of the way kinds of places) most of you know that i'm a huge fan of traditional Irish music, so this was a really really cool part of the trip.

St. James' Gate - the Promise Land

From the Whiskey tours we left and spent the night in a little town known as waterford. unless you care about Waterford Crystal (which i dont' and i don't know anyone who does, unless you're an older person in Ireland hten they FLOCK to the place) you can skip Waterford. We couldn't find a place to eat cause the whole town SHUT DOWN at 5 pm. seriously. it was broad daylight in what looked to be a metropolitan kind of town with lots of stuff to do. Nothing. so we moved on after a night in Waterford.

on the 12th we made our way to Dublin, but we found some really cool stuff on the road. probably my favorite place was a ruin called "Abby Glenn."

it is the ruin of an old monastery, that you just get to wander around in. it's obviously a place for some cool photography. with really nothing more than shades of gray (notice even the sky was gray that day) and green, the whole place is really surreal. they had guided tours and historical evidence of the church, but kim and just wandered around taking pictures and being immersed. there's something very cool in being in a place that has been ruined for 500 years. 500 years since it was abandoned. just standing in a place like that is humbling and perspective building. very cool.

after that we finished our drive to Dublin. Here Kim and i came to the closest place we've been to a fight in al ong time, because driving in dublin is incredibly stressful. i mean. crazy stressful. the streets at dublin are thousands of years old and were not designed for cars. that doesn't stop 4 lanes of traffic eaach way filled with people like me, and people who live there, and HUGE busses. we got lost probably 20x.

then we found it. the promised land.

in an instant all traffic direction and all worry about being lost melted away. here was my driving reason to come to Ireland - the Guinness Storehouse at St. James' Gate. Here was the fount from which the blessed beverage flows. And i went nuts.

now the tour was a little disappointing. it was a self guided and self-congratulatory tour where Guinness is convinced it is about the coolest corporation ever and they really would like to have Arthur Guinness (an englishman, not an irishman) nominated for sainthood. don't get me wrong, he brewed a good beer. but i digress.

we did the tour and then spent an ugly amount of money on guinness stuff. shirts, mostly. i have a cool guinness Tshirt, Rugby Shirt and a Polo shirt. i'm such a girl, shopping for clothes like that.

at the end of the tour, we went to the gravity bar and had a really cool lunch. it's called the gravity bar because it's the highest point in dublin where you can go to (all buildings in every city in the country are pretty low) and you get a completely panoramic view of Dublin. That alone is almost worth the price of admission. I had some phenomenal seafood chowder and Kim had chicken fingers. And, as part of your admission you get a free glass of guinness. kim was going to pass it up. i wouldn't let her. she only drank about 1/3 of it. don't worry though. it didn't go to waste. ;)

your admission "ticket" to the factory is a piece of plastic with a drop of guinness in it from the factory that you're suppoed to take home as a good luck piece. this b/w picture of it has become one of my favorite picture we took in Ireland.

after the tour we went to our B&B which was by far our favorite B&B of the trip (tied with the people in Connermara). She was so friendly and so talkative that we almost didn't make it out of the B&B, which would have been ok.....

The Great Whiskey Tour

I should probably finish this no? I'm sure there are people waiting with BAITED breath as to my many adventures in Ireland.

We left Kilarney on June 11th and headed for Dublin. The southern coast of Ireland is gorgeous and we really enjoyed this part of the trip. In fact, or favorite part of the trip was in this part of the country.

about midday we made it to the Old Midleton Distillery in Cork, IE. I'm not big on things like historical tours and such, but this one, although a little pricey (20 euro) was was alot of fun.

we went through the whole process of how whiskey is distilled and made. Whiskey, if you weren't aware, is a national obsession in Ireland. The new Jameson distillery is on the same site as this one (massive, massive place) and 1/2 of their entire production run every year is consumed on the island. that is a RIDICULOUS amount of whiskey.

at the end of our tour, they asked for any of us who wanted to to do a taste testing, and noone volunteered, so i decided to. now a taste testing at a whiskey distillery is similar to that at a wine tasting, where they focus on smell and tastes and sublties and explain to you the difference between types of whiskey. (what kind of water is used, what kind of stone the pathway into the distillery is made of, etc etc). and surprisingly there is a very big difference.

despite the numerous jokes that flow around her about my drinking habits, i'm not a strong drinker and especially not a strong liquor drinker. before this trip and this taste testing, i didn't like whiskey at all, or any liquor for that matter. what they had us do in the taste testing is taste 4 types of Irish Whiskey, and then pick a favorite and then taste our favorite type of whiskey against a scotch and a bourbon (all of these are the same types of alcohol, just slight differences in the distillation process)


so i tasted my whiskeys and bourbon and scotches and definitely came out in favor of the Jameson whiskey. So i bought a bottle of 12 year old Jameson that is only available for purchase in Ireland, at this distillery. i rarely ever drink it, but it's a cool bottle and my friends who like it enjoy it.

funny story from the distillery. everyone who wasn't tastesting got a free glass of jameson 5-7 year whiskey (basic stuff). that means kim got one. when i got done with the taste testing, i found kim and said, where do we go to next (she's the navigator). she got out her trusty Irish road map, looked at it for a second and then put it away. "What's wrong?" I asked. "I think we should eat lunch here," she replied. "I can't read the map." Apparently Irish whiskey is too strong for kim. ;) i took a picture of the exact time of Kim's afternoon drunkenness.