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.

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.