A good night’s sleep is essential when one walks all day! Yesterday my iWatch reported 16,200 steps, the most we’ve done in a day so far on this vacation. Both of us slept pretty well, but started the day with the expectation of not walking as much as the day before.

Hah!

The plan was to take the Metro to the Eiffel Tower stop, change to the train and take it to the St. Michael’s stop, then walk over to Notre Dame. It turns out that the train sometimes goes only to the Invalides stop and other times goes to the end of the line. I managed to get us on the train that went to Invalides with no way to get over to the track where the other train would go. There were security folks everywhere. We later learned that the former French president and former prime minister Jacques Chirac had died and would be taken to the Presidential Palace at Invalides today to lie in state. A private funeral will happen tomorrow. I remember Mr. Chirac as the Prime Minister who refused to get involved with Iraq in defiance of President Bush II.

After asking a couple of people, we figured out a route on the Metro that would get us to Notre Dame. We’d have to change twice, but would not have far to walk. Not far on a map is not necessarily not far in reality. But we got there.

The whole area is blocked off and not open to the public while renovations due to the fire are being carried out. We could only stand behind the fence and take pictures. We needed some cash to we walked up the road towards an ATM but took a detour into a Catholic Church where a high mass was underway. The organ was fabulous and filled the whole church with music. So we did get some “church” in us today.

After getting some cash, we walked to the Metro station for the train that would take us to the Louvre. That was quite a walk. We took the Metro for one stop and got off at the Louvre and had lunch in a small pasta / pizza shop across from the Metro stop. That’s where we learned about the activities going on for Jacques Chirac. The big screen TV in the cafe was showing the funeral procession making its way to the Invalides Palace.

We stood in line for an hour and fifteen minutes before getting into the Louvre. They let people enter in batches every 20 minutes or so. Lesson: check into buying tickets for popular venues, such as the Louvre, online and in advance. Folks who had previously purchased tickets showed up at the time on the ticket, were batched up with other people ticketed for the same time, and then let through security as a group on the hour and on the half hour. By the time I checked it out we would be already in the museum before the next available on-line time slot.

There is so much to see in the museum that several days would be required to do it justice. We just had a couple of hours before the museum closed for the night.

That big pyramid thing in the center of the courtyard is copywrited … it’s illegal to take pictures of it lit up at night (you can take personal pictures but can’t pass them along to anyone else, paid or unpaid).

We spent some time on the top floor and the middle floor looking at the paintings and some of the sculptures.

The Temptation of Christ.

Naomi and Ruth

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. This was part of a pretty sordid chapter in French religious history when the Catholics became enraged when the king’s heir became wedded to a prominent Protestant Princess of Navarre. The uprising assassinated her in her bed as being depicted in this painting. I’d not heard of these religious wars in France, but apparently they went on for almost a half-century between the Catholics and the Protestants.

The last gallery we walked through had a number of paintings from early Christianity. These were often of Mary with the infant Jesus along with other saints and martyrs even though everyone in the picture couldn’t have been there at the same time. This is an example:

This is a painting of Mary and Jesus in the company of two female saints who didn’t live until 200 years after Christ’s death. Most of these paintings include guardian angels.

We took the Metro back to the stop by our hotel.

We had dinner and then checked out a Boulangerie where I’ll probably buy a baguette tomorrow morning.

We’re now in our room chilling out. I’m coming down with a cold so I’ll look for a pharmacy tomorrow morning to get some cold medicine.

We walked 17,040 steps today.

We both tried to sleep in this morning. Nina was up first, probably around 6am. I managed another half hour after that. We had breakfast (part of the room cost), packed up as lightly as possible, and made our way to Versailles.

The route was on the Metro, about a 2 minute walk from the hotel, to the stop for the Eiffel Tower and then we transferred to the railroad to go out to Versailles. The total trip was about a half hour or so.

We bought our tickets to the palace at the information booth as we exited the train station and walked the 5 minutes up to the palace.

See all the people inside the fence? That was the serpentine line for entrance into the palace. We stood in line for just under an hour before admittance. There’s a beautiful optical illusion painted on one of the buildings associated with the palace:

The painted building is actually round but the painting looks like it goes in rather than out. Nina is taking a selfie trying to get the illusion into the picture.

The Palace.Is.Beautiful. And huge. And crowded with people. There were probably 10,000 souls in the building with us making the tour. In some of the rooms it was difficult to even move. I can’t imagine what it would be like in July or August when all the tourists are there along with the sweltering heat.

There are probably a thousand paintings in the building. Most of them are portraits of people, but there are quite a few scenes, some quite dramatic:

Like this one relating to the crusades and crossing the Bosphorus in Istanbul (or, in those days, Constantinople). The ceilings were also beautiful.

The “Hall of Mirrors” was definitely the highlight.

You can begin to get an idea of how many people were there with us. This long hall has mirrors on the left and several dozen chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Absolutely stunning. One can almost imagine attending a formal ball in this room.

We had lunch at one of the restaurants in the castle, bought a couple of souvenirs, and headed outside to the gardens.

The people were all gathered around waiting for the barely-visible fountain to come to life with classical stereo music accompanying. The fountains came on about 5 minutes later at 2:30pm.

We did a tour around the upper part of the gardens and then got a text from our daughter Heather telling us we should rent a golf cart for the gardens. Just then one drove by. I hadn’t seen them before and we were almost to the end of our visit. There was about an hour-long line waiting for a cart to become available. The price was 34 Euros (about $38) for one hour. Nina observed that we should do a better job of scoping out all the options when we’re traveling to someplace like this.

Then we reversed the route back to the hotel, unloaded, and went out for dinner. We’ve got back to the room just before 9pm and we’re right ready to call it a day!

The closest English-speaking church service is about an hour away. We’ll do church like we did last week … probably at Notre Dame Cathedral followed by the Louvre.

During breakfast on Thursday morning I called EuropCar about a possible replacement car. I was quite directly told that because the problem with the car was customer negligence, I would be responsible for any damages to the vehicle. Further, EuropCar had a policy that when a customer negligence issue occurs, there is a 24-hour “cooling off” period before they’ll issue a replacement vehicle. Bluntly, we were on our own for getting to the Dublin airport.

Turns out that wasn’t difficult or very expensive. There is an airport express bus that leaves Belfast regularly during the day which goes to the Dublin airport. The cost was 17 pounds Sterling per person (about $15) and takes about two hours. We took our goodbyes from our hostess (a very delightful woman) and took a 6 pound Sterling cab to the bus terminal. By 1:45pm we were at the Dublin Airport for a 7:25pm flight. Plenty of time, but we needed most of it.

I went to the EuropCar desk to verify that they knew I wasn’t going to be returning a car. The fellow read the notes from the roadside assistance call and told me that their management was going to have to take a look at how badly we were treated. I’m hoping that means they’ll disregard any possible charges for damages….

RyanAir out of Dublin is definitely not very high on my favorite airlines list. We weighed our suitcases and each of us were 4 kilograms over weight. RyanAir charges 11 Euros for each kilo over 20 kg. In our case it would be 88 Euros, or about $97. We needed to lighten up.

We moved as much as we could from the suitcases to backpacks. Nina got down to exactly 20 kg (but with what must have been a 10 pound backpack, not pleasant at all). I couldn’t get any lower than 23kg, so we opted to pay the additional 33 Euros. RyanAir also requires passengers to check in online rather than at the terminal (and charges 55 Euros if you do check in at the counter and haven’t gotten your boarding pass online). We had no way to print a boarding pass. I could check in but had no printer available, Without a printed boarding pass we couldn’t check luggage as that was done through an electronic console; no human intervention.

I went to the checkin lane, got to the front of the line, and pleaded my case. Because I had already checked in online but couldn’t print, she waived the fee and printed all 4 passes, going and returning. Then came the process of checking in the luggage. My suitcase checked just fine. Nina’s wouldn’t and was asking for 187 Euros as it was 17kg over weight. Nina finally spotted a RyanAir person who gave me a very incomprehensible explanation, but went ahead and did the baggage checkin manually for us and I paid the 33 Euros ($40) for the extra 3kg. Then she wanted to upsale us on priority boarding and some kind of fast pass through security. We declined the additional 94 Euros. She told us that it’d be a half-hour walk to the gate after clearing security. She wasn’t kidding!

Security was a breeze and we were both patted down as usual because of the titanium knees. The departure display board said that our flight was five minutes delayed but no gate information. It simply said, “Enjoy our facilities. Info at 6:25” What facilities? No place to sit down. We couldn’t go to the gate a we didn’t know which one and then didn’t know what direction (there were three different concourses). We both sat on the floor up against the wall near the display board waiting until 6:25pm, the promised time when the gate information would be displayed. They don’t reveal the gate info until 1 hour before the flight. Then it was a full half-hour hike to get to gate 111. The boarding area was mobbed as several flights were leaving about the same time for that area. Two flights were going to board AT THE SAME TIME through gate 111. RyanAir doesn’t pay for gate bridges. We walked down two flights of stairs and across the tarmac to get to the airplane. It wasn’t raining but definitely threatening.

The 737-800 aircraft was configured for 208 passengers. There were very few (maybe 10?) middle seats open when we left the gate. The flight was scheduled for 7:25pm. We left the parking area at 8:00pm because of air traffic delays. The 1:15 flight to Paris was uneventful. If one wanted anything during the flight, a credit card was required, even for a glass of water!

I had booked an airport hotel near the Paris Bouvais airport for the night. We got there about 11:45pm. There was a very limited menu still available so we had some tomato soup (not too bad) and some crepes (very nice) and went to bed. Up at 6:30am on Friday, we went back to the airport and caught a bus to to Paris (14 Euros apiece) and then a taxi to the hotel (50 Euros). I’m sure there was a different method on the Paris Metro to get to the hotel, but I didn’t know what it was. We’ll know the system well enough by next Tuesday to take the metro out to catch the bus to the airport.

Amazingly, our room was available when we checked in at 11:30am! We put the luggage away and began the walk towards the Eiffel Tower. Then we decided we’d be much better off on the Metro. We bought a stack of tickets to use as we traverse the city and had our first experience with the Paris Metro. Worked well.

The Eiffel Tower is amazing.

Everyone has pictures from their visit and none of them do any justice to the real size of this structure. It Is Huge!

We waited through a 1:20 line to get on the elevator up to the 2nd floor. We walked around, took a gazillion pictures and also took quite a few pictures for other couples and one took a picture for us.

We had a chocolate eclair (delicious) and I had a cup of hot chocolate (divine). Then it was back to the metro to go to the hotel. I misread the map and we went two stops too far before we got off. It was a Very Long Walk back to the hotel. If I’d have gotten us off at the correct stop, the hotel would have been 2 minutes away. As it was, it was 20 minutes and we’d already surpassed our 10,000 steps for the day!! We were dragging when we got to the room at about 5:30pm.

About 6:30pm we went to a restaurant around the corner from the hotel. I had a pasta dish and Nina had a chicken dish. Both were quite tasty. We had dessert … chocolate cake with some vanilla ice cream for me, and French toast with vanilla ice cream for Nina. There wasn’t enough of either dessert to share….

So we’re now in the hotel room. Electric cords strung across the floor as there aren’t plugs anywhere close to the beds and we both have CPAP machines to plug in. A late alarm for tomorrow (Saturday) morning. We’ll make our way to Versailles for the day tomorrow. Meanwhile, time to crash. G’Night!

The plan on Wednesday was to drive down the coast from Belfast through Bangor, the various Bally…. towns to Portaferry, take the ferry across, poke around, and then come back. On the way down we stopped at the Walled Castle Garden in Bangor, a beautiful Victorian garden.

A little further down the road was a lighthouse, requiring a stop.

Nearby was the Donaghadee Lifeboat Station. Posted on the door was the info on their last callout:

As we got back on the road we saw a sign for a windmill, so off we went.

We learned that on this little peninsula there weren’t any rivers or streams sufficient to turn a water wheel, so around 50 windmills at one time dotted the landscape earning the area the nickname “Little Holland”. This is the only one of the windmills left. There was a little visitors center, but it was closed. Today the landscape is dotted with individual wind turbines. These aren’t like the windfarms in the US. The wind turbines here all look to be individually owned and operated, one here and one there.

I needed fuel for the car so we pulled into a small gas station. The car takes diesel. I was sure that I was using the diesel nozzle, but apparently failed and put 40 liters (about 11 gallons) of gasoline into the nearly empty tank. About 10 minutes later the car started acting very strangely. The engine would race, then stall, then chug along, then race, stall, etc. We were very close to Portaferry so I nursed it into town. The dashboard flashed “Engine Failure. STOP” and I coasted into a parking place right in the center of the town.

We called the roadside assistance number, which meant talking to an Europcar call center. They then said they would pass along the info to AA for roadside assistance. We made the call at 12:55pm. At that time the Europcar representative said it would take 90 minutes for the AA to arrive and they would call me on their way.

While waiting we looked around the town and saw an old castle.

There was a small visitors center. We walked in and were warmly greeted by a lady working at the center. “Do you remember me?” she asked Nina. Turns out she was working on Tuesday at the reception desk at Belfast City Hall. She and Nina had had quite a conversation and she was the one that recommended we drive down the coast to Portaferry. She had written the whole itinerary down on a small piece of paper which somehow during the day we lost. For me it was an astonishing coincidence.

At 3pm (two hours later) I called again as no one had arrived and no one had called. By this time we in a small cafe Captain Jacks having lunch. While the Europcar person was quite apologetic, I was on hold for about 20 minutes while they were checking and the call failed. I called back and was eventually told the AA person was 15 minutes away.

At 3:45pm I called Europcar again. This time they were 20 minutes away. At 5pm the answer was that they were “trying to sort it out.” At 6:10pm when I called, I didn’t get the Europcar call center, but the AA office in Dublin. Apparently Europcar quite at 6pm. This time AA escalated the call to a supervisor who said that AA Ireland had to transfer the ticket to AA UK and that the way it worked was Eurocar called AA Ireland. Because we were in Northern Ireland, AA Ireland then called Lyon, France to place the trouble call with AA UK who then placed the trouble call with AA Northern Ireland, and they had my location wrong. After that was straightened out, the AA vehicle arrived at 7:30pm and promptly determined the problem was the wrong fuel in the car. It would have to be towed.

They arranged a flatbed tow truck to come. It would take the car to a secure lot and then deliver it to Europcar on Thursday morning. We would ride with the tow truck. After dropping the car, he then drove us to our B&B. It was 11:45pm when we got to our bedroom.

It’s now the next day. I called Europcar at 8am to see what my options were. Putting the wrong fuel in the car is customer negligence. If there is any damage to the car, I will be responsible for it. Further, when a car is disabled due to customer negligence, there is a 24-hour “cooling off period” before they’ll issue another car. We were on our own for getting to Dublin to catch our 7:25pm flight to Paris this Thursday evening.

Fortunately, there’s an airport express bus from Belfast to the Dublin Airport that leaves once an hour and takes about 2 hours. We’ll take a taxi from our B&B to the bus terminal at 11am and take the next bus to Dublin and chill at the airport.

An interesting (and possibly expensive) end to our delightful two weeks in Ireland. It’s raining today. We’ve only had four rainy days and even then they didn’t rain very hard. Two of then were days we spent most of the day driving. People here tell us that the weather we’ve had is remarkable. I’m OK with that!

So, we’re off the Paris where the Yellow Vest Protests have been somewhat violent the past couple of weeks. We’re leaving one interesting political situation to experience another one.

We had heard about the “Black Cab Tours” that show the history of the “troubles” between the Protestants (Unionists) and the Catholics (Nationalists). Our hostess at the B&B booked a tour for us to pick us up at the B&B at 10am. Right on schedule, the cab arrived and was indeed a black taxi. Then off we went on a two-hour cab tour of the city.

In an effort to quell the violence that erupted in 1969 (primarily bombs going off around town, as many as 5 a day), the British Army began building a wall between the Catholic communities and the Protestant communities. Obviously that only heightened the tension and in reality exacerbated the problem. Rather than actually address the underlying issues, Britain went about trying to put bandages on the festering wounds.

We drove along the wall on both sides, went through the gates which even today close at 6pm until 6am. There are hundreds of murals painted on the sides of buildings on both sides of the wall. All of these troubles exploded into the public view at the same time as the civil rights movement in the US had proven to be a successful tactic, which didn’t go unnoticed by the Catholics who began adopting many of those tactics. Some of the murals:

Along the way we stopped at the Sinn Feín center (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_F%C3%A9in), the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. There I picked up a book titled “A Short History of The Troubles” by Brian Feeney. I’ve started reading the book. It’s well written and quite persuasive, so far. Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when the “troubles” in Northern Ireland were in the headlines, I sympathized with the Catholics but at the same time was very much at odds with what the IRA was up to. I doubt the book will change my mind much on the IRA, but it definitely has reinforced my thoughts regarding the Protestant’s oppression of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.

We had the taxi driver (he’s featured in one of the mural pictures above) drop us at St. Anne’s Cathedral in downtown Belfast, in the so-called “Grey Zone”, which is neither Catholic nor Protestant. The driver was clearly and unambiguously a Nationalist but tried very hard to be fair in his tour.

St. Anne’s Cathedral is an Anglican (Church of Ireland) cathedral. St. Anne is the mother of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The mother of Jesus is not mentioned in the conical writings (the New Testament in particular), but is mentioned in apocryphal writings, the Gospel of St. James (written about 150AD) in particular. Anne was also the name of the architect who designed the original wooden church that stood on this spot. So, that was certainly a suitable name

.

The sanctuary was very impressive. There was a series of three paintings that really caught my attention:

The painting on the left is titled “Dinner at Emmaus”, the middle “The Taking of Jesus”, and the right is “The Incredulity of St. Thomas”. I particularly was taken by the middle painting:

These paintings by a Italian artist Caravagio were lost for more than 200 years before being discovered and restored a few years ago.

The cathedral also has Irelands second largest pipe organ:

From the cathedral we walked down to City Hall. This is the most elaborate City Hall I’ve ever seen. It takes up an entire block and is incredibly ornate inside and out.

We had lunch in a small coffee shop in City Hall and then took a tour of the building. Nina took lots of pictures. I didn’t. I mostly just wanted to sit down.

Shortly after we arrived in Dublin I saw a billboard advertising the “Titanic Experience” in Belfast. I looked it up and discovered that the Titanic and her sister ship the Olympic were built in the shipyard in Belfast. Further, the shipyard was bombed by the Germans during the Blitz in the early stages of WWII. At least 140 naval vessels were built in Belfast during WWII. Shipbuilding continues to this day.

So after City Hall we got on a bus (1 pound 10 pence each) to the dockyards and the Titanic Experience, a 4-story building put together to tell the story of the building of the Titanic. That tour was definitely a highlight. I’d never thought about how a ship the size of the Titanic would have been built back in the early 1900’s. The Titanic was to be the first of a whole new class of ocean liners which stressed comfort and safety and the customer experience. The company building the Titanic built it and the sister ship side by side. They would build on the sister ship first, then take what they learned and apply it to the Titanic. They employed a photographic firm to document the entire building process, another first.

Just watching how the riveting was done was mind boggling. They didn’t have the automatic tools we use today. Instead the rivet was heated white hot in a portable hearth, tossed to the setter, pounded into the pre-drilled hole, and held there while a team on the opposite side hammered the rivet flat. Each rivet took a five-man team and the best teams had, on the other side of the rivet, a right-handed and a left-handed rivet-pounder who would alternate their blows to flatten out the head of the rivet. More than 4,000,000 rivets were set that way. Incredible.

The Titanic Experience didn’t lend itself to taking pictures. It was quite dark with a lot of projected black and white images. It was also very informative. Harland and Wolff, the company which built the Titanic continued in the ship building business very successfully until the early 2000’s when they shifted from ship building (the docks weren’t big enough to handle the much larger tankers and container ships) to building wind turbines.

We took the bus back to the city center and decided to have dinner as it was about 6pm. We looked at a couple of pubs but didn’t see anything interesting on the menu. We were both tired of walking, so we went into Burger King and had dinner there followed by an ice cream cone. After a 5 pound 20 pence taxi ride, we were back to the B&B and ready to relax … and catch up on British politics.

This was a day of high drama here in Northern Ireland. Most folks over here are not Boris Johnson (the current Prime Minister) fans. The lady running the Sinn Fein store asked me if I knew who Boris Johnson was. I told her that I did. She wanted to know what I thought of him. I told her that I thought he was an “ass”. She howled with laughter and I made a friend for life, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, the British Supreme Court of 11 highly respected jurists ruled unanimously today that the Prime Minister had lied to the Queen and to the public when he suspended parliament until the 14th of October. They ruled it was illegal. The only thing on TV this evening on almost every channel is people discussing what today’s ruling means. The opinions are quite varied depending on the political position of the commenter. Even Donald Trump’s address at the UN got almost no attention today, which is very unusual.

Tomorrow we’ll drive down the coast to County Down. Should be fun!

We planned today to be a driving and touring day along the north coast of Ireland. Tomorrow will be in Belfast town itself. Wednesday isn’t decided, yet. I’ve been thinking we were leaving on Wednesday, but that isn’t correct! That gives us one more day here in fascinating Northern Ireland.

The north coast from Ballycastle to Portrush was our main destination. Once there the route is well marked. It is a narrow, winding road with a lot of tour busses, replete with numerous places to stop.

Sometimes Google Maps frustrates me to no end. I put our destination as Ballycastle and it gave me a route and two alternates. I selected the alternate route. I didn’t push “start” for about 5 minutes while we arranged things in the car. Then it sent me up the original route, not the one I selected. It worked out OK as it turned out we needed as much time as we could get! We didn’t get back to our B&B until after 8pm.

Our first stop was in Ballycastle … where there isn’t a castle any more. A nice Anglican Church sits on the site of the old castle. It’s interesting to me that the Catholic and Anglican (Church of Ireland) buildings are always open from early morning until late evening. The Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches are not open except when they’re having services.

The Holy Trinity Church in Ballycastle was a nice stop. We were able to find a parking place right in front of the building. The sanctuary had a very small pipe organ.

Our next stop was in Ballintoy at a small Anglican church perched on the edge of a cliff.

Almost all Anglican Churches over here have a tower with 4 spikey corners making them fairly easy to recognize. After a couple of photo opportunities along the way, our next stop was the Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was definitely worth the stop.

Huge columns of rock stacked together as though they had been poured out in tubes. Many of these columns were 40-50 feet tall above the ground and another 50-100 feet below the ground. Ancient Irish folklore has these pillars set in place by a giant named Finn. The giant Finn had a wife and one son. This was their playground.

We passed some castle ruins and then stopped at Dunluce Castle. This was very interesting. The original wood castle was built in the 1100’s. Added upon and enlarged as various clans forced the previous occupants out and clamined it for their own, the castle reached it’s peak in the 1600’s. But then, because there was no port and the large ships couldn’t dock, the castle and associated village fell into disuse as people moved away.

The coastline is breath-takingly beautiful. This is the area where quite a bit of the TV series “Game of Thrones” was filmed.

From Dunluce we continued down the coast and eventually into Londonderry. By then it was pretty dark. We stopped at the Catholic cathedral and stepped inside.

It was raining as we arrived in Londonderry as well. This is the only walled town in Ireland and we drove through the walls several times trying to figure out how to get to the cathedral. As we got into the city center I lost cell service and thus Google Maps stopped working.

Belfast and our hotel were about an hour and a half southeast of Londonderry. When we got back to the area where our B&B is located, we stopped at a Pizza Hut Delivery location, ordered two personal pan pizzas, and had dinner in our room.

Tomorrow we’ll take a Black Taxi tour of Belfast. Should be interesting as the tour focuses on the “troubles”.

Another couple arrived at the B&B last night. Turns out they were from West Hartford, Connecticut. We had breakfast together. A very pleasant couple on a package tour (flight, B&B’s, car all in one price) for 6 days and had flown into Shannon Airport.

We loaded up the car and left the B&B about 9am headed towards Athlone, about halfway between Galway and Dublin. We got there about 10:15am and found a place to park near the castle and the cathedral. The castle didn’t open until 11am, so we went over to the cathedral which had a service underway. That meant we did get to a church service today….

The castle itself was large and impressive, but only a very small part was open to visitors. The visitors center had a two-floor layout that went through the history of the town and the castle. This is where the English were garrisoned in the 1550’s as they were conquering Ireland and where in 1554 they attacked and ruined Clonmacnoise.

We then continued on our way to Belfast on the motorway towards Dublin. We took a northern route around Dublin to get on the M1 motorway going from Dublin to Belfast. About 2pm we both decided it was time for lunch and started looking for a pub. We found one in Ardee and had a delightful lunch. Nina had some kind of a pie with chicken and mushrooms, I had roast beef.

There was an interesting statue near the place where we parked the car:

Nearby was a plaque that told the story of the statue:

The M1 motorway was just a few kilometers from Ardee which was about 30 kilometers from the border into Northern Ireland. Way back in 1924 following the Irish war of independence, a referendum was taken about whether or not to separate from England and become a independent commonwealth country. Sixteen counties in the northern part of Ireland voted to remain with England. All the rest voted to sever the ties. The result was a partitioned island but with a very soft border. Many in Northern Ireland weren’t pleased with the result and the “troubles” ensued with Protestants fighting bitterly with the Catholics and with the British. While most of that has been resolved, strong sentiments still remain.

Ireland belongs to the EU, as does England (mostly … they didn’t join the currency union so they don’t use Euros). And Ireland is the huge problem with England’s withdrawal from the EU, the so-called Brexit. If England leaves the EU, then Northern Ireland leaves the EU and a tax and tariff border would need to be put in place between the two Irelands, abrogating the peace treaty that granted the Republic of Ireland its independence. The Republic strongly insists that a soft border must remain in place. Northern Ireland is almost vehement in wanting a soft border because almost all Northern Ireland trade is between them and the Republic of Ireland. The EU agrees about a soft border. The US has strongly stated their opinion that the soft border must be maintained. No one knows how to do it. England is sure that maintaining a soft border between the two Irelands will make it impossible for England to completely withdraw from the EU. Negotiations continue, but the deadline is in 9 days when England is no longer part of the EU. We’ll be in Paris when that happens. Should be interesting!

So, in the Republic, things are measured by the metric system and money is in Euros. In Northern Ireland, the English measurements (miles, feet, furlongs, etc.) are used and the currency is the British Pound. We haven’t figured out how to switch the dashboard of the car from kilometers to miles. It must be possible … just not explained in the manual for the car.

Our B&B is the Rosleigh House on the south side of Belfast (www.roseleighhouse.co.uk).

It’s a lovely bedroom with a nice bathtub, suiting Nina just fine! There was a Subway shop down the road and that sufficed for dinner this evening. Now to decide what we’ll do for the next two days in Northern Ireland. On Wednesday we drive back to Dublin, turn in the car, and fly that evening to Paris.

Saturday, Sept 21st was our last day in the Galway area. We decided to spend the day on Inishmore, the largest of the three Aran Islands. We knew we needed to take the Aran Ferry over to the island and that the first boat left at 10:30am. We finished breakfast and preparations for the day about 8:30 and looked up the Aran Island Ferry on Google Maps which pointed us to a place on Forster Street in downtown Galway. Our hostess at the B&B had indicated that the ferry was quite close and the map showed 16 minutes to get to the Aran Ferry. Off we went.

There was nothing there except a bunch of warehouses. No water, no ferries, not even a sign. After going around the block a second time we stopped at a tourist information center located down the block from where Google Maps said Aran Ferries was located.

Well, their offices were there on an upper floor of one of the buildings. The ferries, however, departed from the Ros a’ Mhil terminal about an hour west of Galway. It was now about 9am and we needed to strike a trot to make the 10:30 ferry. The next one was at 2pm in the afternoon. So west we went, right past the road to our B&B and arrived at the ferry terminal at 10am. We parked the car (7 euros per day) and bought our tickets (40 euros each round trip), and boarded the ferry. The weather was windy, overcast, and about 55 degrees. Rain was forecast for later in the day. The seas were choppy, the ferry was packed full with tour groups and school kids, and the ride over took about 45 minutes of rocking and rolling.

Inishmore is about 9 miles long and 3 miles wide. There are some 4,000 stone fences on this island alone.

This area once had seven churches and has the grave of a saint (I can’t remember the name). It continues to be used as a cemetery. Speaking of cemeteries, there are two non-cemeteries where babies who weren’t baptized are buried as unbabtized folks can’t be buried in a real cemetery.

The stone walls were made as the land was cleared of stones. The more wall you made, the more land you claimed (at least that was the case a couple thousand years ago). Grass grows well on the island in and among the rocks, so cattle and sheep are the main agricultural products. Tourism is the #1 money maker with fishing at #2. About 800 people live in the island.

One of the main attractions on the island is Dun Aengus, a pre-historic round fort perched on the 300 foot high cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The walk up to the fort was a little over a half mile but a significant climb. It took us 45 minutes to ascend and 30 minutes to come back down.

The fort consists of a couple of half circles protecting the fort with a central half-circle. The open side of the circle is the ocean. The fort was occupied by many different peoples over its history and was abandoned as a fort in the 1700’s. It’s now a historical site managed by Ireland’s Office of Public Works.

St. Ciaran, who founded Clonmacnoise monastic community and arranged the alliance with Glendalough monastic community first studied on Inishmore. The ruins of a church named for him remains. It was added upon and rebuilt several times before being abandoned in the mid-1800’s.

This was St. Ciaran’s church first church, or at least the first church named for him. Later another church was built in St. Ciaran’s name in the port city along with a Holy High Cross.

There are no Protestants on the island, according to our tour guide. When we arrived on the ferry, we had a couple of very important things to do. First was find a WC and second was to find an ATM as I had paid our B&B bill this morning and used up most of our cash. Meanwhile, everyone else headed either for the bicycle rental shops or to the tour busses (more like tour vans). When we went looking for a tour bus, one was available and he was looking for passengers. We signed on (15 euros each) as he waited to see if he could get more passengers. When they didn’t materialize, the two of us had our private tour guide.

The church fell into ruin when the last Protestant departed the island. Everyone is Catholic now, according to our tour guide, not that he attends services very often, mind you.

The last ferry back was at 4pm. The trip back on the ferry was just as rocking and rolling as the trip over and it started to rain as we headed back to shore. We redeemed the car and headed back to Barna for dinner. Other than a candy bar each, neither of us had eaten anything since breakfast.

We stopped at Donnelly’s in Barna, the same place we ate the night we arrived. I had a fillet of cod, Nina has the Chicken St. Elgar and we topped it off with a dish of apple strudel and ice cream as well as a piece of chocolate cake topped with a toffee sauce and a scoop of vanilla ice cream (we shared both dishes). Definitely one of the better meals we’ve had since arriving in Ireland.

So our time in the area of Galway is ending. Tomorrow we head for Belfast and will make a stop in Athlone to visit a castle. The Galway Branch doesn’t meet until 11am and is almost the opposite direction of where we need to go for Belfast. No Church for us tomorrow.