Ireland Part Two--alone at last!

 

After bidding goodbye to all my fellow travelers from the first week, I took a cab to the main train station in Dublin and attempted to figure out how to buy a ticket.  Good thing I allowed myself plenty of time!  Turns out you have to buy them from vending machine-looking things located in the main part of the station.  I watched a few people buy tickets and wasn’t sure I understood it, so I approached an older teenager who had just bought hers and asked if she could help me.  As was absolutely everyone I came into contact with in Ireland, she was very sweet and gracious and happy to help.  Ticket purchased and directions given for how to tell where and when my train would depart from, I headed for the platform for the train that would take me to Galway.

What I didn’t know until later was that the trains issue specific seats to people who make reservations ahead of time, and the rest of us have to try to find a seat that doesn’t have someone’s name above the seat on the little electronic reader board.  I wasn’t sure how it was all supposed to work, so I followed an older couple that had big bags onto the train to see what they did.  Turns out they were from Alabama? Tennesee? Georgia?  Anyway the American deep south, and they didn’t know about the reservation thing either.  So they took one side of a table and I took the other where a young man had just left, and then a woman across the aisle told them that they had her seat, but that was OK she’d just sit where she was.  Then the young man came back and told me I was in his seat, but that the one next to him didn’t appear to be reserved.  So we four had a jolly time chatting, turns out he was from South Africa and had moved to Ireland for work about a year prior.  No one came to kick any of us out of our seats, fortunately, and it was a pleasant trip to Galway.

At the station in Galway I asked directions to the bus station, having seen on the map that it was close by, and headed out on foot and glad I had packed light—a backpack and a small roller bag.  Turns out the bus station I’d been directed to was the wrong one; it was the commuter bus station.  But a kind person working there told me I just needed to go down the block and I’d be at the right place.  Turns out one pays the driver of the bus when one gets on, and it’s best if it’s in cash.  I had called the B and B I had reservations for in Doolin for two nights and they told me to get off the bus at the Hotel Doolin and then text and they’d come and get me.

I stayed at the Twin Peaks Bed and Breakfast, which was named for the twin peaks of the house, not the old TV show. 

It was off the main road and up a hill, surrounded by a couple of other houses and lots of fields with cattle and horses in them.  And an old castle ruin in the back yard.  These ancient things are literally everywhere! 

I stayed two nights there and reveled in the quiet and solitude after 7 straight days of cities and driving and people.  I had dinner at the famous Gus O’Connor’s pub and that’s where I had my first Guinness, although I ordered a non-alcoholic version.  O’Connor’s pub is famous for, at one time, being a center of Irish music in County Clare, which is known for it’s musicians.  Apparently, according to the locals, it’s become more of a touristy thing now, but they still do have live music many nights.  I was going to come back for the music but another guest at my B and B told me that there was to be a wedding reception in there that night so I decided that I didn’t want to squeeze in with that many people, especially since Covid was still circulating to some degree.

The next day I bought some lovely Irish smoked cheese that was a lot like mozzarella called scamoose and finally got to taste a sausage roll, which are always talked about in all the Irish detective novels I’ve read.  I hiked out to the ferry terminal and spent time taking pictures on the Burren land there. 

There are lots of plants found in abundance there that aren’t found in very many other places; the locals told me that the cattle were all much more muscular and bigger there too because of the high limestone content in the rocky soil. 

I have to say that the cattle WERE very stocky and well-muscled; many had Charolais blood in them which was the breed that we raised and showed at the University of Idaho lo so many years ago.  They certainly did produce very fine steaks and Guinness beef stew!  That night I had the BEST seafood chowder I have ever had, even taking into account what I’ve eaten in Alaska.  And then on to O’Connor’s pub where I nursed a glass of Guinness for about three hours and only actually drank about 1/3 of it.  I met two young women there who had grown up in the area, and one was a musician herself (played the accordion) and had sat in on the session there before.  She knew everyone and was really feisty and funny!  She told me that 3 or 4 of the musicians there were paid by the pub, and the rest were just sitting in.  It was wonderful music—fiddle, mandola, banjo (which was the first time I’d seen how they play it with a flat pick like a mandolin instead of like in bluegrass), Ullian pipes, flute, guitar.  The place was packed, and I felt lucky to even have a place to stand up at the bar across from where the musicians were playing.

The next morning my hostess drove me to the ferry in the pouring rain, and I set off for the Aran Islands.  They are on the west coast of Ireland, part of what’s known as the Gaeltacht which is the part of Ireland where most people still speak Irish in addition to the English that the whole country speaks.  I thought it was interesting that all the official signs (road signs, etc.) were in both English and Irish even though it’s a small number of people who actually speak it fluently and regularly.   

There’s some groundswell to promote and teach the language more widely, just like with the Alaska Native languages, although almost all school kids go to Irish language summer school for a couple of weeks every year.  In the Aran Islands though, Irish is the first language and they all speak it to each other when they aren’t talking with someone who only speaks English.  I noticed on the Islands that all the signage was in Irish, and not necessarily in English at all.

I got off the ferry at the island closest to the mainland and the smallest of three islands, Inis Oirr (anglicized spelling is more or less phonetic:  Inishear) meaning small island.  It was still pouring down rain and by the time I dragged my luggage the three blocks to the little hotel, I was dripping from all surfaces.  I had a good set of Goretex rain pants and jacket and hiking shoes, but water was streaming down my face and neck and I was quite bedraggled. But by the time I had lunch in the pub that was part of the hotel, the sun had emerged and I went out for a walk.  Not many people live on Inis Oirr; and as many rock walls as there are enclosing medium to very small pastures, I’m not sure there’s room to build any more houses. 

There is, of course, a set of ancient ruined castles on a hill top, but I didn’t get up there as I went in search of the promised well (that I never found) on the other side of the island and probably walked a good 5 or more miles.

The rock walls are incredible!  They are all drystone stacked walls, and many of them have the upper course of stones turned sideways so that nothing except a small bird could sit on top of them, or climb over easily which is probably the real point. 

Some are clearly VERY old, but people are still keeping them up.  I was told that the looser, dry stacked walls don’t get blown over as easily as the walls with mortar.  And that they began less as demarcations of property but more just to get them out of the way so that they could build soil by hauling and layering seaweed and sand.  The soil is still pretty thin, but what a massive undertaking that must have been!

This little hotel had the distinction of having the most bizarre shower plumbing of my entire trip; you will, I’m sure, remember my almost-rant about the Irish plumbing and electrical systems from part 1.  This contraption was, I’m sure, intended to be the apex of luxury and style, but it failed miserably in my book.  First, when I tried to turn on the hot water, the thing shot water out into the room via six oddly placed nozzles that pointed straight outward.  Slamming the shower door, I reached my arm in just enough to twist a few more levers and handles, and eventually got hot water coming out of the top nozzle.  Things were fine until I finished and tried to turn it off and again the horizontal nozzles shot ice cold water out, but this time hitting my body instead of the floor.  Glad I only had to use it one night.  The village and the island were charming though, and I wouldn’t have minded spending more time there.  Just not in the shower!

After breakfast I walked back down to the ferry dock and waited for the ferry to take me to Inis Mor, the big island.  The dock crew and deck hands were all speaking Irish to each other, which has a lovely sound.  I could only catch one or two words, but it was nice just to hear it.  I got to sit outside the inside area on top of a cabinet of some sort that the roof extended over and shielded from the wind by the inner area, facing the stern.  It was sunny but windy and a little cold, and the views were spectacular of the mainland across Galway Bay.  We skirted the middle island, Inis Meain, which was the one I really wanted to go to since it is the least touristy of the three islands, but my travel agent was talked out of it by the ferry operators who said they can’t reliably get in and out of the harbor there.

I was to stay at a bed and breakfast on Inis Mor, and I could see on a map that it was a bit of a hike from the ferry dock, and steeply uphill, so I asked one of the sight-seeing bus drivers, Bertie Mullins it was, if I could take his tour around the island and have him drop me off at my B and B.  He agreed to do that and it was a good tour, him being born and bred on the island, if a bit nutty.  Inis Mor is substantially bigger than the small island but still has a lot of stacked stone walls and ancient ruins and churches and ruined churches just like everywhere I went in Ireland.  They had two woolen goods stores there, the Aran Islands being famous for their knitted goods, and I bought a few things and had them shipped home since space and weight were at a premium in my luggage.

Being as it was downhill to the ferry dock and the morning was grand, I walked down to get the ferry back to Doolin.  The ferry was about an hour and a half late, and I feared that my ride might not be able to wait for me, and I had no way to contact him.  But he was there, a very nice gentleman named Richard, who often drives people around to and from places that don’t have good public transportation.  He was a bit older than me, very gentlemanly, and had lived on Inis Meain for some years in his 30’s.  He told me that I really should come back and go there, because it was the best of three islands!  We chatted non-stop all the way to the little town of Kenmare, where the actual owner of the car service, Johnny Finegan, took over the driving to take me on the last leg of that day’s journey to the tip of the Beara Peninsula.

I stayed two nights in a nice little B and B there just outside the small village of Alihies. 

They have a wonderful museum there that is all about the copper mining history of the area.  Above the town is the old mine which not only was mined extensively in modern times (until it played out) but there are very old prehistoric digs where people were digging up the copper and presumably using it somehow.  It turns out that when the copper played out, nearly all of the miners from there went over to Buktte, Montana to work in the Anaconda mine.  I had heard that Butte had a big Irish popuIation but I didn’t know why or the extent of it. I hiked up to the mine which is surrounded by a chain link fence, but you can get right up close to what’s left of the main building and see where the shafts started.

There is a great network of hiking trails on the Beara Peninsula that traverse along the coast as well as up and over the middle of the peninsula; there is even a “National Bridle Trail.”  The trails traipse across the landscape, with easily-spotted trail markers and well built steel stiles for climbing over the many fences.  I actually heard cuckoos there!  They do sound like the clocks!

Johnny came back to fetch me after two nights and took me to the train station in Kilarney, where I picked up the ticket that I had reserved online and ended up chatting the whole way with a woman a bit older than me who had a lot to say and said it so quaintly that it was a pleasure just to listen to her.  When I got back to Dublin I took a cab to my hotel which was in the area of Fleet St., famous for it’s shopping and nightlife.  I had already made an online appointment for a rapid Covid test, which I needed in order to board the plane the next day, but it took me over an hour to find the place, addresses being another unfathomable system to me.  Fortunately, the test was negative and the results came in via email.     

The Dublin airport was such a nightmare—four hours of standing in lines just to check in and go through customs.  You also had to upload your Covid test results and two other forms for US Customs into your phone, fill them out, and be able to show them to various people along the way.  It’s a darn good thing I hadn’t had any coffee yet and was a little dehydrated, because the first line took over 2 hours to get through.  By the time I got to my gate I figured I was never going to leave the country again if it was this hard to get back!

All in all, I had a wonderful time.  It really was the trip of a lifetime.  I don’t know if I will ever have an opportunity to go back, but I would go again in a heartbeat. But I would spend my time on the west coast and chasing music, not in the cities.  Only maybe fly in and out of Shannon airport instead of Dublin!

Adventures in Ireland Part One

 

 

Ireland—Week One

Going to Ireland was one of the things that I always said that I MUST do before I die, and I did (Which is not to say that I'm ready to die now!).  It truly is as green as it’s reputation, and the Irish are all, in my experience, very friendly and helpful, although sometimes translating from Irish English to American English was a little dicey.  It was mostly the accent, although there are a few things that are called something different than what I was used to.  For instance, at the first place we stopped to get something to eat, I ordered a water and the lad said, “Stale or sparkling?”  I was perplexed, and asked him to repeat, whereupon he said the exact same thing.  I finally said,”Just a plain water with no sparkle, please.”  I wondered who on earth would order stale water?  When I got my bottle of water, it plainly said on the front, “STILL”.  As opposed to sparkling.  But in Irish English, and with my peculiar hearing deficit, I could have sworn he said stale.  

 

I left Spokane around noon, and flew to San Francisco where we only had just enough time to get to the international terminal for our Aer Lingus flight to Ireland.  We landed in Dublin at 1130 AM Irish time, which was about 3:30 AM Idaho time, after not sleeping for the entire 10 hour flight.  It was raining when we got to our lovely, old hotel, and we weren’t able to check in yet, so a group of us women got on the Hop On-Hop Off tour of Dublin bus, and we were so tired and it was so wet that we never hopped off at all.  But we had a wonderful dinner in the pub next to our hotel which was called something like the Bleeding Horse, or the Dying Horse (the pub, not the hotel).

The first week of my trip was spent on a whirlwind tour of Ireland by bus with 21 other women, most of whom had some connection to Sandpoint, Idaho.  It was a great bunch of middle aged and older women and I enjoyed their company.  At the last minute someone had had to cancel and so my friend Julie Bunker from Spokane (newly retired) jumped in and went with us.  We traveled through most of the Republic of Ireland in 6 days! 

The first day we got on the bus with our charming driver and guide, Luke Shanahan, who looked to be in his late 60’s or so and was retired from something else, but now is a tour guide.  He was pretty funny and certainly knew his history of Ireland!  That was impressive to me—that they all think of even their ancient history as present and important—they talk about things that happened in 1079 as though it was just a couple of years ago.

We drove south through the Wicklow Mountains to a place called Glendalough.  Glen means valley, da is two and lough (pronounced “lock”; sort of; with a kind of hawking sound), so this was the valley of two lakes.  This is the site where St. Kevin founded a monastery in the 6^th century that became quite a center of Christianity and learning.  There are still quite a few stone buildings still standing, and gravestones that are so old that they are worn smooth and crumbling.  The stone work is truly amazing!

   

          

After some time in Glendalough, we set off for the Rock of Cashel, which is where the ancient kings and queens of Ireland held court before Christianity came to Ireland.  It too has some impressive old stone buildings still standing, at least in part.  The yellow flowered shrub is gorse, which is a helacious, thorny, invasive native that takes over anyplace that isn’t being grazed regularly.  It puts Devil’s Club to shame!

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We stayed that night in Cork City (so many of the towns have the same name as the county they are in that people always tack on “City” to differentiate it from the county).  We stayed at a nice hotel right on the River Lee that runs through the city.  Julie and I set out to explore the city and explore it we did—and got a little turned around.  We finally found our way to the river with the help of the compass on my phone and Google maps, but then soon realized we were going the wrong way on the river.  By then it had started to rain (it really does rain just about every day, just not ALL day), and by the time we got back to the hotel we were literally dripping as though we’d fallen into the river.

     

    

  We left Cork City the next morning and took a side trip to the coast to the little port of Cobh (pronounced “Cove”).  This was the last port of call for the Titanic, and there is a memorial there and an office of the steamship line.  It is also where many of the bodies washed up from the Lusitania, the American ship that was torpedoed by the Germans in WWII.  There is a memorial there for them too.  You can see the typical brightly painted houses that are seen in all the smaller villages.  I have never seen a place so tidy and well-kept as Ireland!

    

 

 Our next stop was a famous cooking school called Ballymaloe School of Cookery (sidebar:  “bally” means village, so there are a lot of placenames containing the word bally), which is situated on a large estate that contains vegetable gardens, orchards, berries, herbs and chickens that supply the school with their raw materials.  It was a Sunday, so the school itself wasn’t in session, but we got to tour the grounds.

   

  

  

 

The founder of the school, and owner of the estate had built a little “room” entirely out of shells!  It took over a year to do it, and it is unlike anything I have ever seen!

     

  

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Even the chandelier was made of shells!

 After a gourmet lunch at a nearby restaurant that was loosely associated with the cooking school, we pressed on to an old estate, now open to the public to tour, called Muckross House.  It was an interesting display of wealth from the early 1900s, with all the furniture and cooking utensils, etc. still in their original states.

Next, Blarney Castle and the famous Blarney Stone!  No one is entirely sure of the origin of the Blarney Stone; there are a couple of stories involving bringing the stone from elsewhere and about the origin of the belief that kissing the stone endows one with the gift of eloquence.  There is another widely circulated myth that the locals pee on the stone, but we were assured that THAT wasn’t true.  Going up the 127 steps to the stone that is situated at the top of the castle was pretty scary!  It is a spiral set of stairs, very steep and narrow, with the castle wall on one side and NOTHING on the other.  I was actually hyperventilating a bit by the time we got to the top!  So the stone is offset from the castle wall by a few inches, and there is a gap between the bottom of the stone and the side of the castle that looks all the way down to the ground, very far down there.  There are two men there to help you because you have to sit down on the stone parapet and lean back, holding on to two iron bars set into the stone, and then kiss the stone while you are upside down.  I couldn’t reach it, and had such vertigo that I just blew it a kiss and got the heck out of there!  Here is a very flattering picture of me attempting to kiss the stone: 

After that ordeal I concluded that I was already sufficiently eloquent, and Julie and I set out to see the rest of the grounds, which were quite lovely.  They had various collections of plants—for instance the Poison Garden.

  

 I was exhausted when we got to our hotel in Killarney!  Fortunately we stayed in Killarney for two nights, so we didn’t have to get up early and pack up all our stuff the next morning. 

Day four we set off in the bus to drive what’s known as the Ring of Kerry, which is a circular route that takes one through some really beautiful country.  Along the way, in the middle of nowhere, there was an old man on the side of the road with a table set up, a bucket of water with reeds in it, and a bunch of crosses made from the reeds, known as St. Bridget’s cross.  She was devoted to the poor, and taught them to make these crosses out of the materials they had at hand since they had no money for crosses made of silver or gold, or even wood.  

We passed through the little village of Kilorglin whose claim to fame is a legend that the wild goats had come down out of the hills fleeing some attackers and warned the people that they were about to be invaded, thus saving the village.  They have a festival called the King Puck festival every year, where they go out and capture a wild billy goat, crown him King Puck, and put him in a cage in the middle of town that is elevated high above the street, and feed him delicacies and generally pay homage by subjecting the poor goat to a weekend of revelry before letting him go.  I’m sure he has some stories to tell when he gets home!  I wonder if they have ever captured the same goat twice?

We ended up back at our hotel in Killarney for the night.  I had some wonderful food—things like blood sausage, bangers and mash (sausages and mashed potatoes), mushy peas (a side dish of, well, mushed up peas and mint) and even drank some Guiness though I don’t drink and don’t like dark beer.  You can’t go to Ireland and not drink a Guiness.  The Guiness brewery covers 65 acres in downtown Dublin!

 

 Twice I had the BEST beef stew I have ever had, which was made with Guiness and good Irish beef.  The one disappointment was bacon.  I ordered cabbage and bacon with mash for lunch in a little pub in the village of Lisdoonvarna, and it was really good except for that the bacon was actually ham.  I don’t like ham.  I asked if they ever served the strips of bacon (called rashers, I thought) and I was told that those were called “streaky bacon”, and that it was served, but not that often.  So I was overjoyed to see streaky bacon on the breakfast menu of one of the hotels we stayed at and I ordered it.  When the plate came, the bacon looked like bacon but it didn’t appear to be cooked at all.  It seemed vaguely warm, but I couldn’t eat it!  I gave up on bacon until I got home.

Day five we set out northwest to the coast and the famous Cliffs of Moher.  They are spectacularly tall, and there is a wonderful visitor’s center there, and then you can hike out to the cliffs and climb up in the old castle and get an incredible view of the ocean.  When our bus pulled in, a young man that worked at the visitor center stepped on to the bus to give us some directions, and I told him that his accent sounded American.  He appeared to be a little insulted by that and said that he was from TIPPERARY!  He did admit to having gone to school in the US, which explains the corruption of his pure Tipperary accent.  It was sunny the day we were there and we got some great pictures. 

  Julie at cliff's edge--braver than me!

On the way to Galway City we drove through a unique landscape called the Burren, which is formed of limestone and looks as though someone installed variably sized pavers over miles of ground.  It is a World Heritage Site and there are some plants growing there that don’t grow anywhere else.

    

 From Galway City the next morning we drove through Connemara (famous for their sturdy ponies), which is rocky and thin soiled, and where many people who were thrown off their land by the English were exiled to.  The saying was that they were going “to Hell or Connaught (Connemara)”.  It was quite a contrast to the midlands that have deep, productive soil, and rolling low hills.

    

 Our main stop that day was at Kylemore Abby, which was a rich man’s estate and now it is a working abby.  The nuns run the tours of the mansion (which I skipped), and make candy for sale in the lavish gift shop.  Julie and I opted for hiking out to the huge gardens instead of touring the house.  It was still a bit early, so many plants were not yet in bloom, but it was an amazing display for plant enthusiasts.  There were entire hedges of fuchsias, which grow wild over there!

    

Our last day together we left Galway and stopped at Clonmacnoise, which was another ancient site with very old churches, and a stone tower upon which grew a beautiful purple wildflower that I didn’t identify.  I think one of the things that struck me the most about Ireland was just how present the past was; everywhere were the remains of building from many centuries ago, still standing and still being used in some cases.  The juxtaposition of the ancient with the modern was really striking.  And the Irish know their history well and it seems like a living thing to them; everyone I asked assured me that eventually, not in their lifetime maybe, Ireland would be one country again—a united republic.  Of course we didn’t go to northern Ireland!  They probably have a different opinion.

In Dublin the last night, we went out to a little lot that had several food trucks and benches and a bonfire.  One of Marcia’s friends who was part of the enterprise there arranged for a young Irish traditional storyteller to entertain us.  The next morning most of the women on the tour headed out to the airport, and I headed to the train station to embark on the next part of my Irish adventure—stand by for Week 2!