Ireland photos

I've finally waded through most of the photos, and have begun posting them to http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.deuby. Check 'em out. I'll be unable to post the rest for about a week, but will continue working on them.

Thursday - Dublin

We got up and out to the train station for Dublin the next morning, Rachel squeezing the three of us into her teeny Peugot. (I thought it was a two-seater until I looked closely at the back seat!) I was reminded of two butterflys in a press. Not that I would ever compare Connor to a butterfly. I called "shotgun!" immediately on seeing how tight the fit was. Rachel kindly made sure we were on the right train (Dublin, not Belfast thank you - that's for the next day).

We spend just this day in Dublin, walking all over the town center. The first thing we did was walk to Trinity College (where ex-president Martin Sheen is studying) to see the Book Of Kells. The college campus is an oasis from the chaos of downtown Dublin because it's surrounded by the college buildings, with only one or two entrances, and everything faces inward.

Not to put too fine a point on it - Kells was underwhelming. What was interesting - and jarring - is how the whole exhibit is organized. We stood outside the building that housed it in a nice summer sun, by a very green lawn with "Keep off" signs :). The line was quick and we were soon inside. Straight into the gift shop! Tickets there, then into an entrance hall that explains the details behind the book and its illustrators. Then, you go into a dimly lit room to see the open book itself (it's turned to a different page every few months - imagine having the title of "Official Kells Pager Turner") and a couple of others. It's a very old book, in excellent condition, with the finest illuminations of any surviving medieval book. That said, of course they're drab in comparison with today's colors. It is interesting, however, on consistent the text is; it could have been typeset by a machine rather than created by hand.

From there you go into what for me was the more interesting place, the Long Room. The Long Room is the old library, straight out of something from Harry Potter. Long and relatively narrow, it's two storeys of books on either side of a long corridor. It just oozes old. It smells it too, of old musty dusty books. When we walked through, several workers were carefully replacing books that had been worked on or otherwise restored, carrying them up a tall book-ladder one or two at a time, with gloved hands. To my surprise, I leaved these books can be checked out with a reader's card; the only caveat is that they must be read only in the nearby reading room.

The surreal part of this experience occurrs at the far end of the room, where you walk down a wide stairway...and leap forward 200 years into the very modern gift shop, only feet (rather, meters) from where you first walked in. The gift shop is directly underneath the Long Room.

We left Trinity and walked west to the Temple Bar district of pubs and shops in a cobblestone, auto-free area of several blocks. It was relatively calm at noon on a Thursday, but the district has a reputation for rowdy "stag" and "hen" parties. On a recommendation from a woman Sharon talked to in a Dingle pub, we searched out Burduck's, apparently the oldest chips shop in the city. There's no place to eat in the shop so we carried the huge brown-paper wrapped packages to a city park right next to Christ Church cathedral. We'd hardly sat down when we were accosted for some of our food by a homeless guy, who turned abusive when I refused. And for all that, the fish was really oily and the chips (fries to us Yankees) soggy! If he had only timed it a little better we would have gladly given them to him :).

Wednesday - Off to Dublin!

One aspect of staying above a pub I hadn't considered: when you head out in the morning, you get to knock around the place before it's even open :). Before we left Kenmare, we stumbled on the regular Wednesday morning market. We did a little shopping, bought some delicious lunch provisions - Kerry Blue cheese, olive bread, miscellaneous goodies - then hopped in the car and headed out.

Driving across country - thank goodness for the ring-bound atlas of Ireland, insist on nothing less - we stopped for a late lunch in Cashel, host town of, well...the Rock of Cashel .

It's an impressive old castle / church complex perched on a hill at the edge of town. It's the highest point in the area, so it commands good views (and therefore was hotly contested by the local rulers until they handed it over to the Church around 1100 AD). The tower of the complex, tall (90 ft) and very longlasting, was also built around 1100.

We got back to more typical Irish rain while we were there - low cloudy with periods of rain sweeping in and out every 10 or 15 minutes.

As we worked our way towards Dublin, we slowly graduated to larger and larger roads - from the narrow and twisty rural country roads, to the better and faster secondary roads, finally to the motorways into Dublin and the ring road around it. After days of brief maximums of 100 kph, we felt like we were flying on the motorways!

We didn't go into Dublin after this long day's drive; instead we headed the additional 45 minutes north to Drogheda, an ancient medieval town (founded in 911 AD) on the river Boyne. Nick and Rachel have their first home there (anyone interested in a nice house with easy access to the train to Dublin??), and offered it for us to spend a couple of nights. Rachel greeted us there and we took her out to dinner at the "d" hotel in Drogheda, a sister hotel to the "g" in Galway. (Drogheda seems like an odd choice for this hip style of hotel; I wonder how it's doing?) The place was empty of practically all furniture, but her kind neighbors brought in a sofa and a couple of beds for us to sleep on!

Tuesday - Skellig Michael

The big event of the day for Tuesday was a trip to Skellig Michael. It's a special place in the world awarded to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We had to drive from Kenmare at the base of the peninsula to Portmagee at the very tip, which covers half the famous Ring of Kerry. Though the roads are equally famously narrow, because we left in the morning, we were off the ring before the tour buses came charging through. I had to drive kinda fast to make it there in time, which was kinda fun :). Sharon drove back; she's much more comfortable than she was (as I am), but I think she must be thinking of converting to Catholicism after spending time in this country because she keeps exclaiming "Jesus!" when oncoming trucks suddenly appear in a narrow country lane.

The trip to Skellig was a much more, er, direct, experience than I'd anticipated. Twelve of us got onto a a small boat, and with little ceremony headed out to sea. Skellig Michael is 6 km straight out into the Atlantic. WE all perched on what seemed like a large deck hatch, and Connor & I lucked out and had the windward side. I was vindicated in my Connor-nagging because he'd whined about wearing anything other than old running shoes, jeans, and a hoodie pullover. At our insistence he wore his new Gore-Tex light hikers and brought his waterproof / breathable jacket. One of the crewmen handed out slicker jackets, and we zipped up our jackets and used the slickers to keep our legs dry. MY legs dry; Connor got his pants soaked because he didn't need the slicker in the first 2 minutes of the ride, so he removed them from his pants. Live and learn - maybe.

We were very lucky in general, though, because the weather was again so mild. The debarkation from the boats to the tiny pier is up a very narrow, exposed steep set of steps with a rope as a rail. This is the very beginning of your upward journey at SM. After an inital flight of steps, you follow an inclined path for a ways (some of which is covered to keep you guano-free in a bend favored by the local gannets).

Not far past a heliport jutting out over the water, you come to the first in a series of almost 600 steps up the side of the island. Now, any one that's done a moderate amount of hiking can say that though they're steep, the steps are wide and excellent. The would be a small part of a mainland hike. However, they're very exposed - a fall would seriously hurt you, and quite possibly put you in the ocean with little chance of rescue. I suspect this is why the heliport is there.

Where it's not steps or rock, it's green ground cover of some kind, dotted with tiny white flowers - a uniform carpet.

The place is simply spectacular. You spend almost the entire time exposed on one side or another because SM is basically a jagged volcanic rock ("skellig" means "splinter" in Gaelic) jutting up out of the ocean. The peak of the island is 700 ft above sea level, and at the very top is a cross that pilgrims climed up to, then kissed. (The monastery is on the other peak.) This very tough pilgrimage was apparently enough to buy your way out of many sins! Other than where the small monastery was, we saw one place on the entire island that was flat enough to hold about 30 people. The island is not large at all, and a fear of falling could make the trip a real challenge. I had to keep reminding myself we saw it on a sunny, fairly clear day. Most of the time it's cloudy, misty, foggy, with much rougher waters - making the climb much tougher.

Skellig Michael was founded by monks in the 6th Century, to be isolated from the restof the world (they accomplished THAT) and the monastery was inhabited for 500 years. Hard to imagine, scraping out a cold life there. But 10 lifetimes, probably 33 generations, did. They fought off Viking raids, one of which took their abbott.

On the return, the pilot took us right up to Little Skellig island. This is preserved as a bird sanctuary, and it's well-used by them. There are 20,000 pairs of gannets (a sea bird that dives from 30 meters into the water to catch fish as deep as 15m - they sound like a large rock dropped into the water) on this rock, so many that the flanks are white with them (and their guano) and thousands of birds form a loose cloud wheeling overhead.

Wehn we passed close, we saw some seals and most amazingly a man maneuvering a currach boat in the inner lagoons. He might have been some kind of scientific observer; if he rowed the 6 km out to the island in that little boat, that's very impressive! And probably very unsafe.

After our Skellig adventure, we had lunch at the Bridge Bar in Portmagee, where Sharon declared it had the best brown bread (aka Irish soda bread) she'd yet tasted. A sunny drive back to Kenmare completed our day.

Monday - Kenmare

We drove from Dingle to Killarney (a tourist center full of tour buses and souvenir shops, making us thankful we didn't book rooms there) and out the other side, through Killarney National Park (I probably don't have the name right). Nonetheless, it's a beautiful drive.

It's also a very narrow drive, with a very twisty turny road about 2/3rds the size of a Plano subdivision road to accomodate two cars passing, or if you aren't lucky, a car and a massive tour bus passing. We timed it to avoid this on almost all of our time on Dingle and Iveraugh peninsula roads, so it was an enjoyable drive though the park and down into Kenmare.

We chose Kenmare on the Rick Steves' Ireland recommendation, and he was right. It's a nice little town, a bit more touristy than Dingle but also a bit more modern in subtle ways. We stayed at O'Donobhain's, a B&B above O'Donobhain's bar and restaurant...how convenient!

Staying at city B&Bs is interesting. There's a little door next to the bar/restaurant entrance, and the residences are generally on the floors above. Srain Eoin in Dingle had the basics, while here in Kenmare O'Donnabhain's has a little more of an established big(ger) city feel to it. The B&B has a second toor to the outside which is locked at night for security purposes. Since they only give you one key, this can lead to logistical problems. I stayed late to hear the accordion player and found myself locked out of the place! Fortunately two guys were going in, and I convinced them I was a good guy by showing them I was a cyclist like them.

I managed to leave my €24 phone card in the public telephone the next morning, not being used to phone cards, but was able to confirm a lucky reservation to Skellig Michael that morning.

Sunday, Monday - Dingle

We drove from Limerick to Dingle, the main town on the Dingle Peninsula in the west of Ireland. It's not so well known as the Iveraugh Peninsula below it, with the Ring of Kerry, but it's gorgeous.



Our route took us west from Limerick, then south through Tralee - getting accustomed to signage, roundabouts, etc. all the while - over the mountains and into Dingle. It was a beautiful drive, and plenty narrow. We reluctantly decided to not go over Conor Pass, a legendarily narrow pass over the mountains in the center of the peninsula, because we chose to spend the day out on the beautiful western end of the peninsula.

Dingle's an interesting little town, very colorful, with a great harbor. It's thick with tourists by the waterfront, but it's not so bad up on main street where we stayed. The B&B we're in - Srain Eoin, which means "James Street" in Irish - is situated upstairs between two pubs. This is quaint, and the noise wasn't bad because everything closed at 11:30 PM (!), but since pubs are no nonsmoking, all the smokers gather out front...and it wafts up into our window. So most of the evening it was closed. The room is modern though the floor creaks a lot; what tells you we aren't just down the street is looking out the window in the morning and seeing an ancient, crumbling old stone chimney across the street behind a blue sky.

Blue sky, yes - despite dire predictions we've had terrific weather so far. It was rainy on and off in Limerick, but since coming to the west it's been sunny and great. Of course I managed to leave my sunglasses in the other car, so they're going to Nick's house and we'll meet up again near Dublin. I just have to remind myself I went for 40 years without them :).

So far we've been sleeping like the dead. Full days and generally quiet nights help. Of course so does a couple of pints at the pub :). Connor fits in just fine, kids of all ages are in there. We've been hitting the "trad" music scene as much as possible in the evenings. Our place is right down the street from the Little Bridge pub (I can't remember the Irish name), the best-known place for this music in town. It's a very friendly, unpretentious place, with parents and their kids, lots of locals (Sharon had a nice chat with a local lady who gave us pointers to different places in the country), and yet one fellow passed out on the bar. Connor watched with amusement as the friend bartender who'd been serving us drinks pulled the guy's head up by the ears so he could look into his face!

Our big expedition on Monday was to Great Blasket Island, about half a kilometer off the coast and the westernmost point in Europe. It's deserted now, but people lived there until the mid 50's. Thanks to our guide book we found a great ferry to GBI right from Dingle harbor (as opposed to driving out the very narrow roads again to Dunquin beach).

It was a great ride on an absolutely spotless day; the younger crewman on the boat said he'd never seen it so good. Our Limerick friends say it's been raining every day for two months! The water around GBI is blue and clear; the skipper said that basking sharks come in to feed on shrimp and plankton during the year, and seals are very common (though we didn't see any).

GBI is hilly, treeless, and carpeted with green grass many golf courses would be envious of. In fact, you could compare much of it to a giant fairway. A fairway with views that put Pebble Beach and St. Andrew's to shame. Steep cliffs, crashing waves, blue ocean, and sheep to keep it trimmed neat. On the south side of the island there are hilly rows scattered throughout; it took me a bit to realize these were the ubiquitous stone fences, only so overgrown with grass after 50 years there were almost unrecognizable.

It was a great day trip. We tried to make it to the top (most westerly point) of the island, but ran out of time before the ferry arrived.

Outbound, Limerick, Kinsale

We had a late, but uneventful flight to Shannon. Eastbound flights are singular Connor lost his earbuds, but we had backups. Nick & Rachel have a beautiful house out in the country outside of Limerick, along a country road that scared the hell out of us. It's just barely finished - they're still waiting for glass for the living room doors - but it's a true electronic cottage. In the odd corners of the house, like the laundry room and the garage (which serves as an office) there are fans and blinking lights everywhere.

Left-hand driving has been an experience: unsettling in unexpected ways. Adjusting a mirror on the left, to look in the opposite direction, a left hand shift, look to the right instead of the left at each intersection. What trips me up the most is the fact my instinct wants to position my body towards the far left of the lane (not just into the right lane as you'd expect) so I tend to run the mirror into the bushes. And Irish country lanes have bushes RIGHT up to the road, trimmed back only by the cars themselves. I'm okay in general, but my brain overloads when when it gets too much data, like approaching a five-way intersection, we need to hit the second lane to the left...which way do I look for traffic??? And Nick being a lousy, unsympathetic passenger :).

Saturday, we got up late due to the jet lag, and finally got out the door shortly before noon. We drove down to Kinsale, a resort town on the water a couple of hours south of Limerick via Cork. Since I'd gotten my left-hand driving feet wet on the way from the airport, we let Sharon get used to driving on the motorways to Cork. Unfortunately, in Mallow she ran over a curb at speed that leaped in front of her, and killed the left front tire. We put on the spare, and limped to Kinsale (<80>When we got home, Nick discovered problems with his high-tech wireless wall control lighting system - it was driving him mad. There are some times when a light switch should just be a light switch...

(Apologies in advance for typos caused by the various unfamiliar european keyboards)

In the evenings, we went for a coupla pints at the local pub in Murroe. Finally had some fresh Guiness from the tap, attracting some curious looks (it's not a big tourist spot so they rarely get Americans), and half-watched a bad Burt Reynolds cowboy movie playing overhead. He was the Indian, so it was distracting :). I did an informal Guiness taste test back at the house - the "tin Guiness" at home, at least from here in Ireland, tastes pretty damn close to the draft version.

Sunday morning - In a fit of brilliance this morning I managed to delete yesterday's Kinsale photos. Damn. Mostly of John's fort; it could have been worse. Oh, and Nick in a fit of (more) generousity loaned me his Canon EOS 350D digital SLR; I think I'm going to spend half the trip to Dingle figuring out how to use the durn thing :).

Off to Dingle!

Back in the saddle again

Well, it's only been nine months since I last posted! In the meantime I've started blogging for Intel, so I've kind of been keeping my hand in.

I'm right on the cusp of falling out of a very heavy work schedule, handing off everything current to my colleague, and heading to Ireland for a couple of week. I think it'll take me a week to decompress. Well maybe not; after a long plane ride and a couple of pints (at 7:45 AM when we arrive? Hey, it'll be just before closing time back home!) I'll feel better.

I'll try to post here as time, inclination, and internet access permits.