We started our day with a very nice breakfast at our B&B. The hostess seems quite concerned if we don’t eat enough! Particularly of the traditional Irish breakfast which consists of a fried egg, a couple of pieces of bacon (English style), a couple of sausages, other unknown meat slices, orange juice, and some cold cereal. That works fine for me, but Nina is definitely not a traditional breakfast eater. We’ll see what tomorrow morning brings!

Our bedroom is on the bottom right. It’s a lovely home and a very nice yard (called a ‘garden’ over here), but the road to the house is literally a double-track dirt road.

Our first stop was at an ATM machine in Galway. I simply type ATM into the Google Maps search bar and up comes all the ATM machines in my area. Nearby was a small Franciscan Abby church so we spent a few minutes inside. It was a simple, very comfortable Catholic church getting ready to say mass about 30 minutes later and parishioners were starting to come in. From there we went to the Galway Cathedral. It was nice, but very modern (built in the 1950’s and refurbished in the 90’s). No visitors allowed during high mass which was at 9am and again at 11am.

The Franciscan Abbey looks like a well-used church and feels quite like a downtown church should feel.

The cathedral sits on the north side of the River Shannon and is a bit north of the center of town. The town built the cathedral in the 1950’s so that Galway could finally be called “a cathedral city.”

By 10:30 we were pretty much done with anything in downtown Galway, so off we went about an hour east of Galway to a national treasure site Clonmacnoise (CLONE-mc-NOIS). This was a monastic community started in 544 AD and decimated by the English in 1552 AD, just about the time of a great reformation in the Church of Ireland and the demise of monastic communities.

Clonmacnoise (in Gaelic it’s written as Cluan mhic Nois) was founded by St. Ciaran along with twelve companions on what was then junction of the two major trade routes, one overland between Dublin and Galway and the other down the Shannon River. Today it’s way out in the countryside. Back then it was the center of a major community of artisans, journeymen, farmers, and tradesmen. During its history it was attacked 27 times by the Irish, 9 times by the Vikings, and 6 times by the Normans. The monastery and town were rebuilt every time until the English laid the town and monastery to ruin.

The West Holy High Cross stands on the west side of what was the cathedral. Traditionally cathedrals were built facing east-west with High Crosses located at the four compass points. We joined a tour lead by a very delightful, red-haired Irish woman who lived about 20 miles away. She described three of the four High Crosses as the 4th one had been stolen away by a neighboring town. At the end of the tour she let us know that the High Crosses we were looking at were all fakes … replicas. The originals had been moved into a nearby museum for preservation.

This doorway into the cathedral was added in the 10th century when the south wall was rebuilt (next picture). It’s a “whisper arch” … a person standing facing the archway on the left can clearly hear a person facing the archway on the right whispering and vice versa.

That was our tour guide standing next to the wall explaining to us how they can date the construction of the wall. Scaffolding was not known until the 11th century. In the 10th century stone masons would insert timbers in the wall as the wall was being built to stick out far enough to lay planks down to act as a kind of a scaffold. When the wall was finished they would cut the timbers off flush with the wall, plaster the wall, and after white-washing would be done. Eventually the plaster fell off and the timbers rotted away leaving the holes in the wall.

Need to cure a wart? These stones with a hole in them date back to pre-Christian paganism and had Christianity wrapped around them. The stone is placed close to the tomb of a saint (the tilted structure in the background). The water that accumulates in the hole is supposed to be “touched” by the saint and have medicinal properties. This one cured warts.

St. Ciaran, who founded this monastic community, died at the age of 33 from the yellow plague just a couple years after settling here. He was buried supposedly here and the structure built later. Excavations didn’t yield any bones. The supposition is that they were carried off elsewhere as relics. A lot of preservation work has been done to keep the structure from collapsing entirely. People would try to bury their dead as close to the walls of a saint’s tomb as possible. In addition, people would carry off dirt from around the tomb of a saint to put in their fields as a ward against disease (specifically potato blight here in Ireland) … a practice that still happens covertly despite efforts to stop it.

Even though Clonmacnoise was sacked by the English and left in ruins in 1554, the place continued to be used as a graveyard. Thousands of graves, some as recent as last month, populate the grounds, giving truth to the phrase, “people are just dying to get in here.”

We spent the entire afternoon wandering around the buildings, graves, and an adjacent convent. We had a light lunch at a small cafe in the visitors center. Then we drove back to the little village of Barna where out B&B is located. We drove down to the pier where Nina got a small dose of the ocean and then we had a scrumptious dinner at a local restaurant.

Tomorrow we’ll take the ferry out to the Aran Islands and get ready to go to Belfast on Sunday.

We’re slowly figuring out things with the car. When I’m stopped, if I put the car into neutral and release the clutch, the car engine turns off. As soon as I press on the clutch, it starts again. Works great when driving through Galway during rush hour where there were very long waits. Also, the car knows somehow what the speed limit is, which is displayed in the right center of the speedometer / tachometer display. When we pass a speed limit sign, the dash always displays the new limit just as we pass. There is wifi in the car. Nina is able to send and receive text messages, look at web pages, and just about anything data related (no phone calls) when we’re driving around. It isn’t incurring any roaming data charges, as everything possible about roaming is turned off. Maybe that’s how the car know the speed limit?

But, we haven’t figured out the radio, yet. Nina found a small document that may help. We’ll need to spend some time sitting in the car not in traffic to see if we can get some music.

Our room at the at the Carrig House B&B (Truskey East, Barna, Co. Galway, H91 H6TT) is very nice, but there’s no clock in the room! I think I’ve figured out how to turn the heat on. I’ll know for sure in an hour or so.

Nope. No heat. Time for bed … and there’s no hair dryer for Nina.

The GPS says 2 hours 54 minutes. It took us the entire day! That’s what Nina’s mother would call a “Uncle Wiggly Day”. We picked up our laundry which was kind of folded in a big black bag (we needed a bag to put dirty clothes in, so that was good), filled the car up with gas, and headed north to Limerick.

At least at the gas station I used, one first fills up the car then goes inside to pay. Not every place takes American Express (this one did), but I also have a Visa card that we can use. The car runs on diesel which is $1.54 per liter which comes out to be $5.83 per gallon. Fortunately, the car gets better than 40 mpg.

Limerick was an interesting city. It isn’t mentioned at all in the Lonely Planet guide book. We stopped first at the St. Mary’s Cathedral:

Then walked down the street to St. Ann’s Catholic Church. The cathedral is part of the Church of Ireland (Angilican) whereas the church was definitely a Catholic church. We enjoyed them both for very different reasons.

We had a nice lunch in a small corner restaurant and headed for the Cliffs of Moher.

That drive got interrupted a couple of times. First, we ran across a derelict church in a very small town.

Then bought some water at a small convience store where the electriciy across the town had just gone out. Fortunately we had the exact change as the clerk couldn’t open the register.

Then we saw another church ruin on top of a hill with a huge cemetary. Of course we had to stop there!

While we were walking around the cemetery, workmen using power tools began to remove the fence around this gravesite:

The church building itself had stopped being used as a church long enough that the interior was being used for gravesites as well.

As we got close to the Cliffs of Moher Visitors Center we stopped for ice cream at a small shop as we could see the ocean and needed to stretch. When we got to the visitors center, the parking lot next to the center was full, the auxiliary lot was quite a distance away, the center closed at 5pm and it was 4pm already. We kept driving.

By now the scenery was significantly different. Rather than hedgerows dividing fields and along side the roads, there were stone fences. Stone fences everywhere!!!

Rubble stone was also available in some areas in huge piles. No cultivated crops in this area were to be seen, because the soil was just too rocky??? Lots of cows and sheep, though.

We got to Galway right a rush hour and the traffic was quite brutal. There isn’t any kind of a ring road around the city. The only way was right through the city and out the other side as our B&B is about 10 miles west of Galway. The GPS got us kind of close. Putting in the lat/long coordinates got us much closer.

This B&B is quite nice. We’re in a double bed which should be interesting. There are two outlets in the entire room. Good thing I bought an extension cord/power strip back in Dublin! The wifi seems to work pretty well.

We had dinner at O’Donnelly’s Pub in downton Bandra, which has no ATM machines! That’ll be a priority stop in the morning as we’re both out of cash.

I didn’t bring my MacBook with me, just my iPad along with a bluetooth keyboard. The Logitech keyboard gave up the ghost somewhere along the route to Ireland. I’ve been writing using the keyboard on the screen, which is a veritable pain in the rear. Yesterday while wandering the streets of Cork I saw an computer repair shop. They had a small bluetooth keyboard. I really like it … much better than the Logitech keyboard. Now I’d like to figure out how to add pictures from the iPhoto library. On my MacBook at home I export the pictures I want to use and then import them into WordPress. Not so simple on the iPad. Pictures taken on the iPhone first have to migrate to iCloud and then get sync’d down to the iPad. That seems to take a Very Long Time to happen.

Further, trying to get around without having a cell phone connection just doesn’t work. I’ve ordered international roaming for my iPhone … $10.00 a day. Being so disconnected was just plain too frustrating. Google Maps is literally indispensable over here, even when it sends us to completely the wrong place. That happens most often when I drop a pin and then ask Google to give me directions to the pin. Every time we’ve ended up somewhere very strange.

Yesterday evening when we drove into town I noticed that the low tire icon was lit up. We were planning to drop off our laundry this morning and there was a EuroCar location in that area, so I went there. The guy was able to switch the car display from German to English, but now I have a speedometer rather than just the digital speed display (which I liked better). The passenger rear tire was low, according to a display that, now that everything was in English, we could find. He put in the address for their tire facility into my phone and off we went. Google got us almost there … two doors too far down the street. The tire had a nail in it. It was quickly fixed. I dropped a pin where the laundry was located, asked for directions there, and we ended up down by the docks. There was no icon on the map for the laundry, but there was one for a nearby gas station. I selected that and we got where we wanted to go. No more trying to navigate to a dropped pin. The laundry could have been picked up tonight, but we didn’t want to be constrained to be back by 6pm (and we weren’t).

The main event for the day was the Blarney Castle and the Blarney Stone. Blarney is about a half-hour west of Cork, an easy drive. We parked in the pay-for lot, bought our tickets (14 Euro each, senior citizen price), and walked to the castle. It looks just like it does in the pictures in the guidebooks and on the net. There was a line, which meant that climbing the stairs wasn’t as arduous as it could have been. Every few steps we had to wait a bit. When we finally got to the top, literally the only thing one could do was lay down, slide way down (with a guy holding on), and kiss the wall. We both did the deed. Now we’re waiting for the promised eloquence to manifest itself.

The whole process is rather contrived. To make it more interesting, they’ve created some walking routes around the castle that take in things like a “poison garden” with all kinds of lethal plants (out of reach, of course), some caves, a small pond, and such. We just went to the castle, climbed the stairs, did the Blarney Slide, and went back to the car. then we drove into the town of Blarney and had lunch at a local pub (Diet 7-Up this time).

It was now 2pm. About a half-hour south was the quaint town of Kinsale which featured a very well preserved Star Fort. That sounded interesting, and it was. I’m still waiting for pictures to sync. Maybe I’ll add them later. After the fort, which was definitely a highlight of the trip, we went back into town to the oldest church in town, built in about 1140 AD. That was another highlight.

Wahoo! Pictures have sync’d. First picture is the Blarney Castle. 2nd picture is at the top of the castle. The Blarney Stone is on the far wall where the people are congregated. One gets to the top, does the Blarney Slide (my made up words), goes back down. About a hundred steps each direction.

This is some of the interior of the Charles Fort just south of Kinsale. It was quite a large facility, retired from service after the end of WW1. Around the 1970’s someone got the idea that it might want to be preserved. Restoration work has been going on since then.

One of the types of places we wanted to visit on this trip were old churches and cathedrals. This is the old Church of Ireland church in Kinsale:

Beautiful building, well preserved, and a delight to visit.

Finally, the cathedral in Cork:

A magnificent gothic cathedral built in the 1840’s.

Enough for today. We’re off to Galway tomorrow.

Our breakfast was very nice and our hostess filled us in on where to go in town. We took the 207 bus into the city, but didn’t know exactly where to get off. We ended up riding the bus all the way to the end of the line and then back to the city center, which turned out to be less than 2 miles from the B&B. Cork is quite a bit smaller than Dublin!!! Nina found this quite hilarious.

We wanted to see the cathedral. I looked up Cork Cathedral on Google Maps and got a walking route. The building was on the top of a hill which was quite a climb for us. Most of the way there we came across a small square with benches. While catching our breath and resting our feet, we noticed a sign “The Butter Museum” over the door of a nearby building. Curiosity reigned … and it turned out to be a museum about the butter trade in Ireland. The cattle in Ireland are grass fed, whereas in the US almost all of the butter is made from grain-fed cattle. Grass-fed butter has a better taste, easier to spread, and contains beneficial nutrition we learned. The national brand for butter is “Kelly Gold” and it is good butter. I’ll want to look for it in the US (which has a quota on how much butter can be imported).

The cathedral turned out to be the wrong one. It was a cathedral, but quite modern. It’s called the North Cathedral by the locals. The one we wanted was equal distance south of the city center as the North Cathedral is. The only benefit was that we were walking downhill.

The Saint Fin Barre Cathedral is magnificent. It’s an Irish Church cathedral (not a Catholic cathedral). It was build in the mid 1800’s in a gothic style. Very nice. They also had a labyrinth which we visited and Nina walked the entire course. A labyrinth is not a maze, just a pathway that winds around into the center and then winds back out. One way in, one way out. Of course Nina had to stop and “meditate” in the center. In the past, these were called “Road to Jerusalem” before they were called “labyrinth”.

We walked all over downtown and found a shop for ice cream. We took the 207 bus back to the hotel thinking that we could take our laundry to a launderette we saw on the way into town. We got there at 6:15pm to find it closed at 6. So we drove into town and parked in a parking garage. Turns out all the places to eat that we saw earlier in the day served lunch … but were closed at 6pm. We finally found a pub called Oyster Tavern that served dinner. Then back to the B&B. Tomorrow we’re headed to Blarney and the Blarney stone!

No rain today. Crystal clear skies and temps in the low 70’s. A very nice day.

I had set the alarm for 6am. The plan was to have breakfast at 7 when the restaurant opened, catch the bus for downtown and then take the airport bus to the airport, collect the EuroCar rental car, drive back to the hotel, collect our luggage and stuff, and head for Cork by way of Glendalough, a national historic site.

And, as usual, things didn’t go as planned. I thought we would be back to the hotel by 10am. We barely made it back by noon, the designated checkout deadline. The airport bus took an hour by itself, which included a rather extensive tour all over the city picking up people. Then there was quite a wait at the rental car counter (figures, being a Monday morning with all the business travelers coming into town). Then we had an issue with the car’s windshield wipers. Turns out you can’t just have them replaced … they had to replace the entire car, with a French car. All of the instrumentation is in German. I still haven’t figured out how to change it to be in English. I’m sure it’s possible, but in the usual French fashion, they have their own way to do things that are not necessarily obvious to Yanks. Getting out of the parking slot was a serious challenge. We couldn’t figure out how to release the parking brake. Most cars have a lever or a foot pedal. Not this car. I finally found someone who could help. Turns out there’s a button on the center console that one has to start the car (clutch in, press on the brake pedal, push the Start button) then hold the button down for at least 10 seconds to release the Parking Assist Brake.

Glendalough became a religious Catholic retreat in the early 600’s. It flourished for at least 1200 years. Established as a priory, it had a fairly large monastic contingent along with quite a few pilgrims and other priests taking a sabbatical or a religious retreat. Today the cathedral is in ruins along with a few other buildings. A small chapel is intact but closed to visitors. There’s a large cemetery, but the readable headstones are from the 1800’s forward. It was a beautiful, drizzly day and quite a ways inland and in the mountains. It was well after 4pm when we finally drove way for the remaining 3-hour drive to our bed and breakfast in Cork.

Fortunately the last 2 hours of the drive were on the motorway (think of an Interstate highway with occasional toll booths) with a 120km speed limit (about 72 mph). We arrived at the B&B just before 7pm.

We have a nice, but very small room. The double bed and a second single bed take up most of the room. There’s a small room with a toilet and a shower. Getting into and out of the shower is a contortionist ordeal. Neither of us really know how to work the shower, either. There are two knobs, neither of which do anything expected.

However, the room is nice. The beds are comfortable and we had no trouble sleeping. The hostess is a delightful woman. We’ll have a good stay here.

Dinner was across the street. The food was excellent although quite expensive. Doesn’t matter. The budget is already blown.

Clean clothes and a very good night’s sleep made for a great wakeup. It was fake raining (light drizzle) which went on for the entire day. We made our way into the city and started at the Dublin Castle. We had a marvelous tour guide for our 11am tour. The tour went about an hour and we learned a grundle about Irish history.

After that we made our way over to Grafton Street, another pedestrian shopping street. The only thing thing we purchased was some ice cream …. and a 10 Euro watch for Nina at the Argos catalog store.

We also spent some time people-watching at one of the large parks in downtown Dublin. By the late afternoon the clouds had cleared and the sun was out. A couple of hours later the clouds were back and the drizzle started again. After getting back to the hotel we took a taxi over to the Tesco store and returned most of the stuff we had purchased because our luggage hadn’t arrived. Then we walked and walked looking for a restaurant that was advertised as an all-you-can-eat buffet. We finally found Cosmos … it was a very large buffet. The rule was all you could eat in 1 hour and 20 minutes. For us it turned out to be ”all we wanted to eat.” There were quite a few loaded plates going by us. Our plates were not so much. A cab ride back to the hotel and time to crash for the night.

According to the Church’s website, the Clondalkin Ward met at 10am about 2 miles away. The address on the website was just a street name, no number. The cab driver first went up the street and nothing resembling a church was found. He turned around and we went back to the intersection, continued a bit south, and there was the building. He was very surprised that there was a church there.

The ward was very friendly. The building had a lovely 3-manual organ (I would have loved to play it), but all the music was played on the piano. Different young people played each of opening, sacrament, and closing songs. The primary children sang an intermediate hymn accompanied by another young person who just played the melody. But, everyone sang! And sang nice and loud. It was delightful. The speakers were a young man, probably Teacher age (14-15 years old) who spoke on the Holy Ghost and gave a very well prepared 10-minute sermon. A fter the Primary song, an woman spoke as the closing speaker. She was fun, but sometimes very hard to understand. We’re the ones with the accent, I keep reminding myself.

Sunday school was taught by an American expat. Two other couples were visiting from the US. One couple volunteered to drive us back to our hotel. Turns out he grew up in Grace, Idaho, and his great grandfather was our Stake Patriarch who gave me and Nina our patriarchal blessings. After church they had a pot luck luncheon. No need to buy anything for lunch!

We took the bus into Dublin and went to the National Gallery. We only visited the first floor but really enjoyed the paintings and sculptures. We only had a couple of hours available due to the abbreviated Sunday bus schedule. It was raining pretty hard as we walked back to the bus stop. We were both Very Tired when we got back to the hotel. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant and collapsed into bed. Another very good day.

Highlights were definitely the Dublin Castle Tour and church meetings on Sunday. And, the art gallery.

This was the end of our time in Dublin. It was time on Monday morning to collect the rental car and head to Cork.

We arrived at Terminal 1, the old terminal, about 4:30 pm on Thursday, Sept 12th Dublin time which is 7 hours ahead of Tooele. The lost baggage people were very friendly and helpful giving a good first impression of what we would encounter in Dublin. Everyone is friendly and helpful, it seems.

We took the airport express bus into the city center, O’Connell Street, and then a taxi 30 minutes west into Clondalkin, a western suburb, where our hotel was located. The cab driver was delightful and we had no problem understanding him.

The.Aspect hotel is a nice hotel right on a bus stop going to the city center. The front desk people were very friendly and very helpful, loaning us a couple of power adaptors so our cpap machines would work and we could charge our iPhones. Fortunately we carried our cpap machines on the airplane with us. We should have (and will in the future) carry some extra clothes with us as well.

After breakfast on Friday morning, wearing the same clothes we left in, we took the bus into Dublin. Bus fare was 3 Euros apiece, exact change, coins only. It took about 40 minutes. From there we bought a two-day hop-on, hope-off pass and went the entire route around the city, a 2 1/2 hour ride. Nina got quite bored with it but I thought it was quite informative. We found a nice restaurant and had a fabulous pizza for lunch. We shared a pizza but both thought we should have gotten our own!

Then we walked down Henry Street, a pedestrian shopping street. By this time Nina had run out of battery on her iPhone and couldn’t take any more pictures. We bought an external battery and a lightning cable and she was back in business. We also needed an extension cord. We weren’t finding anything so I asked a security person standing in front of a Mark & Spenser store. He said there were some available in the store, but they’d be really expensive. He sent us to an Argos store down the street. “They have everything!” he said. “We could get exactly what we wanted.”

Argos turned out to be a kind of a catalogue store. You look up what you want in a catalogue, enter the number in a computer terminal to check availability, then go to the counter, pay, then pick it up at the delivery counter. Voila! We had the needed extension cord. There are no outlets anywhere near the bed in the hotel.

When we got back to the hotel the luggage hadn’t arrived. No answer at the phone number to get status. The Air France luggage-tracking website was no help. We went shopping and returned to find the luggage had arrived, but the hotel restaurant was closed! Pizza was available at the bar, though. It must be a good day when one must eat pizza twice in one day???

Thus ended the first full day in Ireland.

So, I had about 250,000 frequent flier miles. Nina has 190,000 miles. Time to use them before we can’t get around anymore. We decided to go to Ireland for a couple of weeks, pop over to Paris for a few days, and then head back home, a total of 21 days.

Everything was booked without an issue. We would leave on Sept 11th and return on Oct 2nd.

I scheduled a Lyft ride to take us to the airport early Wednesday morning. It was accepted. I got a text message saying that Christian was 10 minutes away. We went outside with luggage. No one came. Then the Lyft app said they were looking for a nearby driver. When we were down to 2 1/2 hours before the flight I finally cancelled and we drove ourselves to the airport. I complained on Twitter (that’s where Lyft does their customer service) and a few hours learned from them that the driver cancelled the ride and they couldn’t find another driver at that hour. Their solution? Ban that driver from my account. He’ll never be assigned to me again. Whopee. Never mind that mInd that I’m now paying $230 to park instead of $95.00 for the ride.

Our flight schedule was from Salt Lake to Los Angeles, short layover, then fly to Boston and another short layover. Finally from Boston to Dublin. When we arrived at LAX, I received. Message that we’d been rerouted because equipment issues ln LAX were delaying the flight to Boston and we would miss the fight to Dublin.

The new routing was LAX to CDG (Charles DeGaul), an 11-hour flight, than a 5 1/2 hour layover, and finally fly into Dublin. In addition, the flight was fully booked and we were in middle seats and not even together. It was a lousy flight. We finally arrived in Dublin at 4:30pm on Thursday instead of 8:30am on the original schedule. Somewhere along the way our checked luggage got left behind. We’d been underway for 30 hours and would be wearing the same clothes for at least another day.

Nothing had been delivered when we got up Friday morning. So we went sightseeing for the day. When we got back to the hotel about 7pm, still no delivery. The only way to check was online as the baggage check number was constantly busy. So we took a taxi to a nearby Tesco (kind of like a Walmart or a Target) and bought some clothes and toiletries. I have trip insurance so that would be (mostly) reimbursed. We got back to the hotel and our luggage was there.

Today (Saturday) we went back to Tesco and returned most of it. Life is good. I’ll write about what we’ve been doing otherwise in the next post.

L