| Monday May 11- We (Barb, John, Fred and Carol) left home about 2 PM for a leisurely drive to Chicago. We stopped outside Rockford at an Arby's for supper and got to the Quality Inn O'Hare around 7:30. This was a great "sleep, park and fly" deal - very convenient with a quick, easy shuttle to and from the airport and far less cost than paying to park at O'Hare! The breakfast was actually quite good as motel breakfasts go - it included eggs, sausage, hashed browns as well as cereals, toast, waffles, etc.  Tuesday morning
we got to the airport around 9:30; check in and
security were
easy and we had plenty of time to grab sandwiches for
lunch. (First picture of the trip was our airport wait taken
by Fred.)
The
Continental flight left at 11:30 AM and we were even served a snack of
sorts -
small sandwiches on buns, bag of carrots and cookie. We connected through Newark - we usually try hard not to have multiple flights but the cost on this was so low, we couldn't resist. It was okay. There is a nice food court there - we had tons of time to read, walk around, have supper.  The Dublin
flight left
promptly.
They served dinner but it was so late that I was really glad
I
had already eaten! I probably dozed for 2-3 hours which
wasn't
enough but better than nothing! Wednesday May 13: Our first glimpse of the west coast of Ireland from the air! Shortly after that, we arrived in Dublin. Customs was easy - fill in a landing card, lines went pretty quickly, they stamped us in and no customs at all - just exit into the arrivals hall. We stopped at the Dublin Tourism desk and bought a 3 day Freedom pass for Dublin City Bus (€25) - it included the AirLink, the Tour Bus as well as all other city routes. Definitely a "best buy" if you aren't going to be walking everywhere. We decided to take the Air Coach into town anyway (€14 round trip) because it took us right to the hotel instead of to the central bus station. It seemed a good place to splurge a little since we had luggage, walking is tricky for some of us and we were all quite tired.  The O'Callaghan Mont
Clare Hotel (northwest corner of Merrion Square)
was a wonderful pick for us. It's very convenient to most of
the
places we wanted to visit, bus stops right across the street and it was
extremely reasonable. They have a convenient lift, though we
used
the stairs except when dealing with luggage. The front desk
people couldn't have been nicer - they were quite helpful the whole
time we were there. And they even had
rooms available for us to check in early at 11 AM - very
nice. Rooms included a flat
screen TV, in-room safe, electric kettle w/ coffee and tea.
The internet works well but is not free. After settling in a bit, we wandered down Nassau St in search of lunch. At Café Crepe, two of us had a crepe wrap, a melt and drinks for €16. Our experience from previous trips is that we need to keep moving the first afternoon (after little or no sleep). So we set off walking through Archbishop Ryan Park which is the name of the Merrion Square park (laid out in 1762). We saw lots of garden, magpies (top center below), a veteran's memorial (lower left), bust of Michael Collins (who we learned more about later in the week), a 'chair' sculpture in memory of actor Dermot Michael (lower center)and some HUGE sea gulls. We posed with the famous Oscar Wilde statue (lower right). We only covered about a quarter of the park but it was a nice sample. It drizzled all afternoon but never got heavy. This actually was the weather we experienced our entire four days in Dublin, even though May is supposed to be the "sunny" month.    
We made plans to meet Thursday morning and went to our rooms around
4:30. John took a bath while I emailed to let everyone know
we arrived safely; we had snacks and soup and
went to bed before dark! Thursday
May 14 - the first REAL day. We were up early since
we went
to bed early. John ate at the hotel buffet; I just went to
Café
Sol and grabbed some yogurt and a scone for €3.80.
Then the
two of us
wandered down to Grafton St - a well-known pedestrian shopping area.
(Picture on left was taken later in the week - it was pretty
empty early in the morning!) I bought a telephone SIM card at
one
of the Vodafone stores
for
€9.95 that
included €11 call credit. It worked perfectly in my
quad
band RAZR phone, turning it into an Irish mobile. Wonderful
invention. I called Katie this
afternoon to give her our phone number - for 5.5 min it cost me
only 80 cents! We checked out the Marks and Spencer food hall
which is
awesome... I could easily eat all my meals from
there. We bought postcards, took pictures of the Molly Malone
statue (right) and
then went back to meet Fred and Carol at 10 AM. It rained
lightly
all
day but I was okay with just
my rain jacket and hood - I had my umbrella but haven't actually opened
it yet.We went to the National Gallery this morning - right across the street from the hotel - and spent a couple of very enjoyable hours there. The special exhibit was works of Thomas Roberts who I was not familiar with but I came to like very much. Many of his paintings are very crisp and detailed - almost photographic. They were mostly landscapes, but his use of people and animals (typically very small or incidental rather than the focus) is striking.  We had
lunch down Nassau St. at Kilkenny's - they have sandwiches for
€5, panini for €8 and
various salads and full meals - a complete lunch with a main course and
two sides was €14. Very yummy. We got
there just in time as a huge tour group came in just after we had been
through the line. After
lunch we grabbed the bus and went down to Dublin
Castle. Wandered the immaculate gardens (mostly a large lawn
with intricate paths and hedges, shrubs all around and some interesting
art
work - picture at right). We bought
Heritage Cards that were good for admission
to the castle and many other historical sites operated by the Office of
Public Works. The interior of Dublin Castle was reminiscent
of Versailles
- very ornate, painted
ceilings, elaborate chandeliers, tapestries. The castle was
mostly burned in 1684 - only one tower of the original 13th century
building is still
standing. (picture at left) The throne room (left below) was
renovated in 1740.
The fancy rooms are used now for state events. After the tour
of
the decorated castle, we went down to where newer excavations are going
on - they have uncovered, among other things, stairs build by Vikings
(right below) probably in the early 900's - the "grout" has been
analyzed and is said to contain blood, horsehair and egg.    We spent
some time in the Chester
Beatty Library, just off of the
Dublin Castle garden. When Alfred
Chester Beatty died in 1968, he bequeathed
most of his collection to Ireland. It
was absolutely remarkable to me that one
person collected SO MUCH! Although his collection
was far-reaching, I was enthralled by the
old bible pages, and the earliest known
copies of the gospels and some of the Biblical letters (c 150-200
AD).
We made a short stop in City
Hall (built 1769-1779) to see the rotunda (at the right - featured in
"On Becoming
Jane" and other films.) We were tired out after all of that and hitched a bus ride back (the bus pass came in handy several times)! We had dinner at the Blarney Inn on Nassau St. just down the street from the hotel. It was very good and actually quite reasonable - €82 for all 4. We had chowder, Irish stew, and fish and chips, Guinness for all but me. Fred pretty much ate fish and chips every evening! We called it an early night, hoping to do the Botanical Gardens tomorrow morning.  Friday
morning we left about 8:30 AM and took a
#4 bus to within a block of the entrance to the National
Botanical Gardens; buses #13 or 19 would
have taken us right to the
entrance, but we took the first one that came by and the one block walk
was fine.  We
got there just as it opened at 9 AM and
we saw only 3 or 4 other
people all morning. It was overcast, but not actively
raining. We enjoyed the visit very much
-
see sample pictures below! (Lots more garden pictures in the
"pictures only" section - here.) Quite a variation
among the styles
of gardens and types of plants; water (streams and
ponds, some small falls), a rock area, arboretum, several greenhouses,
organic vegetable area, Chinese gardens. We did LOTS of
walking. Stopped in the cafe for snack (in hindsight we
should have had lunch even though it was only 11:30 AM). King
Protea, National flower of South Africa at right. Below,
left to right, are Bomarea from South America, a 76
foot wide copper beech and one of the greenhouses in the Botanic Garden.    We caught
a bus back to O'Connell St. When the sun came out briefly, I
took pictures of shadows to prove it (to the right)!  We took some
pictures
of the horse patrol, street sweeper, spire, etc. then caught the Hop On
Hop Off bus
and separated. John and Fred went to the Museum of Modern
Art and then Hugh Lane
gallery); Carol and I went to Kilmainham Gaol. It was very
interesting and I got a much better sense of history but it was not as
great as I had been led to believe by some of the reviews I
read. The old registers running from
1799-1910 paint a clear picture of how crime related to poverty:
stealing a
loaf of bread, e.g. Children were punished as
adults.  We saw the
progression from early days (the gaol opened in 1796)
- dark tiny cells, no windows, one peephole - up to the more
modern
looking 1850's wing with lots of glass and open area (picture on left -
as seen in "Michael Collins" and other films). The
main thing that I felt here was the history - particularly the 1916
independence uprising and
the men/women who were subsequently executed for their part in it.
 (Memorial
in the execution yard to the right.) The executions stirred
public
resentment and were a large factor in the continued violence of the
War of Independence resulting in the compromise of 1922. I
understand a lot more now about the origins of the IRA and the
continuing
battles between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Kilmainham
finally closed in
1924. After
that we grabbed a bus and got off across the river
from Christ Church Cathedral (picture to the left). Our
timing was lousy since it was pouring
at that point! But we walked over the river, took a
picture of the James Joyce bridge in the rain, passed the
Brazen
Head then had afternoon tea in Café
Irie on Thomas St. We were to meet
John and Fred at Christ Church at
5... they were half an hour late. We
chatted with the priest a bit when he came out to close up the church.
He assured us that the men were off in a
warm dry pub while we were standing in the rain waiting for
them!  He also said
we should come to services Sunday morning because he was going to
preach an anti-homophobic
sermon that would "Stir things up." The
guys finally showed up with a story about bus drivers not
stopping for them... we didn't ask them which pub they were at!
LOL! It was too late to see the church so
we walked on up to the Brazen Head - the oldest pub in Dublin - for
drinks before
dinner.  Dinner tonight
was Food,
Folklore and Fairies with storyteller Johnny
Daly (at the Brazen Head). He
is a good storyteller and it was fun, though overpriced (€44
each). The dinner was very good
though: 3 courses with
several choices for each. There were only 12
people there that night which made it a bit more intimate and we had a
chance to talk with him before dinner. He knew of Iowa
because of friends who had ridden RAGBRAI!It was 10 PM and cold and raining when we got finished so we took a cab back - I think we were ripped off since it sure seemed we went the long way around... but I don't have a direct comparison so I won't worry about it. We got back safely and dry!  Saturday morning was
raining. Again. But Fred,
Carol and I set out to see the Book of Kells at
Trinity College. John had already been there, done that (40
years ago), and
wanted to do different things. Trinity (one campus picture
left) is a sister college to
Oxford and
Cambridge with about 15000 students (12,000 full time). The Book of
Kells is
a copy of the four gospels written in Latin on calf skin (vellum).
It is suspected to be the work of monks on the island of Iona
circa 800 AD. They would have worked mostly by
candlelight; it's really quite
impressive when one considers the time and skills that
went into writing those gospels. Each
of the pages is illustrated with very elaborate drawings - it's amazing
that the
colors are still so vibrant after so many years.
Some of the bright blue is said to be from lapis lazuli,
green from
copper and red from a specific red beetle. I
imagine there have been thousands of
doctoral theses on the Book of Kells. - so much
interpretation
and analysis! We also walked through the Long Room
of
the library with an exhibit of
the history of detective stories. It surprised me, though I
probably knew it in high school, that Edgar Allen Poe was the first
detective writer. Then
we hopped back on the bus and got off at St. Stephens Green
because
it was SUNNY. How exciting. What a lovely park - originally
enclosed in 1664. We took
pictures of the swans, ponds, fountains (I am posing with one to the
right), Famine Memorial,
etc. Next, we jumped back on the bus to St.
Patrick's Cathedral (image left).  It is said to
have originally been a
wooden chapel built beside a sacred well
where St. Patrick is said to have baptized converts around AD 450.
In 1192
the church was rebuilt in stone. It was not so inspiring as
the continental European cathedrals - even contrasted with Christ
Church Cathedral it seems not so elaborate. St. Patrick's is
known as the "people's church"
- there was not much money forthcoming to support it. We did
see some
nice stained glass, a couple of tombs, lots of sculpture and a few
small chapels but it pales in comparison to the ones in Florence,
e.g. Jonathan Swift was Dean here at St.
Patrick's and his tomb is one of the attractions (below). After that, I left Fred and Carol, walked up to the river, along the Quays: saw the Ha'penny Bridge (so named for the toll charged to walk across it until 1919 - picture below left). It opened originally in 1816 and was known as the Wellington Bridge; now officially named Liffey Bridge and also sometimes called the Metal Bridge but really is mostly referred to by its Ha'penny nickname. I went back to O'Connell St., down Pearse and to Westland Row, stopped at the Centra for some yogurt and back to the hotel to eat lunch. An apple, yogurt and rest of yesterday's chicken wrap.  After lunch, I went to the Archaeological Museum on Kildare St, just around the corner. It was nicely laid out - designed for the purpose of display. One of the highlights was the "bog men" and many old wood carvings dated to 5000 BC!! Then I just walked around the area a bit - took pictures of some of the different doors on the old Georgian homes in the area and walked through the Merrion Square park again. Below, left to right, are pictures of the Museum, a door with the candle holder still intact (see it on the window above the door - it was the "front porch" light) and another door that was unusual in that it was elaborately painted, not just a solid color.  
 Remember John was doing "other things" that afternoon? He also visited the Archaeological Museum, but mostly he wandered, bought some music and enjoyed the buskers out on this sunny afternoon. Pictures below are his - the flower stall and a couple of buskers.    We had dinner at the Ginger Man pub just up the street - nice people, good food €63 for all 4 of us so it was even a little more moderate than the Blarney Inn. I am surprised at the many people who advised us to skip Dublin, or just spend a day or two there. There are really many more things I would have liked to see or do. The rest of the country is lovely - I don't regret leaving when we did in order to drive around and see some of the more rural areas. But I did enjoy the city as well.  Sunday
May 17 became known as "the day from hell."
But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Besides that
it was raining again, it started out okay. We got out to the
Air Coach stop before 9 AM and got to the airport by 10 AM to pickup
our rental car.. We found the Dan Dooley desk, got the
paperwork done, easy peasy. Then we took the shuttle out to
pick up the car and found out they had assigned us a Ford
Focus. Ummm, nope. We were not going to fit into that and it
was a lower class car than I had reserved - and paid for.
They were very nice about it and got out a Renault Laguna wagon (in
Ireland and UK that's called an "estate") that had just been returned.
We had to wait about 15 minutes while they cleaned it out but that was
okay. So far so good. Of course it was pouring down
rain by then - it will pour, then stop, sun comes out, then it
pours again. I spent some time figuring out how the controls
worked and John walked around the car and said it was fine.
We thought
we were thorough. This vehicle
has a "key card" that slides into a slot. With
the card in the slot you press the START/STOP button and the car turns
on or off. Pretty slick. So we set off in the rain,
me driving because I had the keys with the GPS (we
named it Jerome) and map to Powerscourt. That worked pretty
well - I missed one turn but the GPS turned us around nicely.
 Powerscourt
is a lovely place (€8 to
get in) - we had lunch at the cafe there which
was pricey but not astronomical and the view over the gardens into the
Wicklow Mountains was wonderful (picture above left). The
house (picture at right) was built in 1731
and the ornamental gardens (left) were completed in the
mid-1800's. The house was
gutted by fire in 1974, however, and only the
lower floors have been renovated for the tearoom, gift shop and so on.
It was only drizzling as we walked about the beautiful Japanese
gardens, walled garden, sculpted garden, arboretum. Lots of
pictures, lots of fun. But then we got back to the car and found a tire that was low.  Not
flat, just low. And the car wouldn't
unlock. There are no keys to this car - no keyhole.
Just the remote clicker on the "key card.". After trying
about 4 directions it finally clicked open and everyone made fun of me
for not knowing how to open the car. We went off to a gas
station (oops, petrol station) to put air in the tire (or rather
tyre). Then on to Glendalough which is not too far
away but
is a historical site, not a town, so the GPS had a little trouble
locating it.  Fortunately it
was signed pretty well.
(Which was NOT the general rule in Ireland - we had trouble
finding even some major sites due to lack of signage.)
Glendalough was founded by St. Kevin (born in 498AD) and
eventually included seven churches and became a major pilgrimage
destination in Ireland. The Visitor Center video (free with
the Heritage Card) and the displays were interesting but it would have
been more fun if it hadn't been raining or if we had more time to
explore the area. But we saw the big round stone
tower (30 m high - picture right) and ruins of a couple other
buildings, including the
cathedral (picture left) which is the largest ruin and dates to the
12th
century. It is known for the only surviving example of a
gateway into a monastic enclosure. It was interesting and
really deserved more time - and better weather. But then,
back at the car, the tire was quite flat.  And when I tried to
unlock it to get into the back, it wouldn't open. Again.
John took the key card, pushed on it and it opened.
So again I was ridiculed for not being able to open the car.
Sigh. We emptied out the back (fortunately it
wasn't pouring then) got out the spare and set about changing the tire
- only to discover there was no lug wrench (wheel brace).
Several people stopped and offered us theirs but they didn't
fit. Apparently Renault wheels are different than
others. We tried calling the car rental folks
but they weren't interested in helping us. We WERE
admittedly far away from Dublin but they didn't offer to dispatch AA or
any other assistance either. The ladies in the visitor shop were VERY kind - they gave us the phone number of a garage nearby (this is Sunday afternoon remember) and after trying 2 "emergency" numbers from his phone machine, we reached him and he said he could be there in half an hour. Yes, I took a picture of the dead tire, the spare, tools, luggage and Fred acting out our frustration! Johnny Price arrived as promised and had it done in moments. He also wrote us a detailed receipt including documenting the "equipment deficiency" of the rental car.  Fortunately, finding Kilbora
B&B (bucolic picture to the left was taken Monday
morning) just north of Fern wasn't hard
- the combination of the GPS and the maps got us there. Our
hostess, Anne Marie Hobbs, was a lovely person with very
stereotypical Irish kids (even though she grew up in New England) -
redheaded and freckled (we met two of them: Maggie and Patrick)
The rooms were
very nice with awesome "power showers" - made by Triton.
(Note to self: see if we can get them in the US). They raise
sheep and had just bought a new brown ewe with a black lamb that Maggie
has claimed as "hers." Anne Marie told us about a nice pub/restaurant
in town and where we could get the tyre repaired in the
morning. So we went and had dinner in the "library" of the
Courtyard Pub and Restaurant in the metropolis of Ferns. It
was set
up with nice tables, leather chairs with some stuffed chairs and sofas;
walls lined with books. Very pleasant.And when we came out in the rain to the car, it wouldn't open. This was a deal-breaker. I was not going to drive around Ireland for 9 more days in a car that we couldn't lock. After about 15 minutes, Fred hit the miraculous spot to make it open and we swore we would never lock it again. (Easy to say out on a sheep farm!) Monday morning at breakfast we met an Italian couple from Bologna also staying there. They say our next trip should be to the Amalfi Coast. Sounds good to me! John called the Dan Dooley folks; it was Monday now and they were much more cooperative. A very helpful lady worked it out for us to drop off our "lemon" at the Cork Airport (which was not very much out of our way) and they sent down a replacement Laguna from the head office in Limerick that would get there about when we did. That worked perfectly. And we now not only have a car that has all the appropriate emergency parts but it also locks and unlocks, AND the nice man showed us the secret hidden key (inside the "keycard") and the secret hidden keyhole (in the driver's door handle) in case something like that happened again. Who knew?? He said "Didn't they show you that?" Ummm, nope. The good news is that we didn't have any more car trouble after that!  |