This is the final post in a blog about Ireland, where I spent July 20-31, 2019 on vacation on a bus tour and then in Belfast and Dublin with my mother.
The header photo here is a view in the Ring of Kerry. My favourite scenery on the trip.
To read the blog from the beginning, scroll down. To read other blogs about other trips, see other parts of this website.
Slainte! (the Irish cheers, which someone once helpfully pointed out can be pronounced by saying “it’s a lawn chair” really fast :))
Back to Dublin in the morning and Mom wanted to visit the iconic Old Library of Trinity College Dublin with its long room and the illustrated manuscript the Book of Kells https://www.tcd.ie/visitors/book-of-kells/. I’d already seen it last visit so I went to the little Dublin museum, a quirky museum with artifacts dedicated to each decade of Dublin’s development https://www.littlemuseum.ie/. On the way there I also stopped in on an exhibit about writer Seamus Heaney at the National Library.
Tomorrow morning, we would head for the airport and back on an uneventful flight to Canada. For the evening, though, we headed back to pack up and discovered that our morning request for room upgrade had resulted in a huge beautiful suite almost the size of my apartment, and importantly, another floor above the nightclubs.
We also took an if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-‘em for our final night and slipped through the throng of young people to score 2-euro pints (no wonder these kids are hitting this club) and a last meal of pub food to sneak up to our hotel room. Slainte!
In the morning we took the bus back to Dublin, which was not particularly eventful. What was eventful was arriving at our hotel, which I’d booked somewhat last minute when we decided to switch around the order of our post-tour trip and go to Belfast a day early, leaving the pickings slimmer for hotel bookings. Of two possible options, this latter hotel “above two of Dublin’s hottest nightclubs” had seemed like a decent idea at the time, however as we got closer to the hotel and its already pulsating EDM rhythms.
In the afternoon we visited the National Museum of Ireland, including the Natural History Museum (appropriately teeming with children and also living up to its nickname of the dead zoo) and the more interesting Archaeology museum.
If the story of our hotel seems incomplete above, the late night update is that it seemed quiet when we went to bed around 11:00 pm, but then we were woken to the sound of screaming and swearing outside the window around 2:00, followed by the flashing through our blinds of red and blue signaling police lights. I suppose this is the norm for a hotel that includes ear plugs with the toiletries.
On our last day in Belfast, we decided to tour the city. First, we went to the impressive City Hall https://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/tourism-venues/cityhall/cityhallhistory.aspx , which had a decent museum about the history of the city and its people (helpful because it was Monday and the other museums were closed, apparently their dark day).
We then walked down by the water, then to Belfast Cathedral (also known as St. Anne’s) https://www.belfastcathedral.org/ and the nearby Writer’s Square with quotes from various Irish writers printed in the walkway.
We finished our afternoon by taking a city bus up to Belfast castle https://www.belfastcastle.co.uk/, which has great views and seems to be mostly an event venue now. For dinner we returned to Brennan’s bar for more fish and chips! (and Guinness and cider!)
Besides learning more about northern Ireland, another reason we wanted to come up to Belfast was for its proximity to the Giants Causeway https://www.ireland.com/en-ca/amazing-places/giants-causeway, a UNESCO world heritage site with 40,000 hexagonal-shaped basalt pillars created by volcanoes 60 million years ago.
This morning we met a day tour at 9:45 at the Europa hotel (famous for being glamourous but also for being the most bombed hotel in Belfast) and took off on a daylong drive.
Our tour first took us to the Dark Hedges apparently of Game of Thrones fame (here’s the video, Mom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=140&v=zsftoWJ4S-k) and a 300-year-old rope bridge
(I’m no more a rope bridge walker than I am a Game of Thrones watcher although I’m much more open to television).
Our tour day was a bit wet (okay, a lot wet) but it was nice again to see some spectacular natural landscape. Our day on the bus ended with a photo stop by Dunluce Castle, first built in the 13th century and now a ruin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunluce_Castle
At the end of the day we visited the Crown Liquor Saloon started in 1826 and noted here as “Belfast’s most famous bar” https://visitbelfast.com/partners/crown-liquor-saloon/ to take pictures and then went to the less famous but also less crowded Brennan’s bar https://visitbelfast.com/partners/brennans-bar/ just down the street for a meal of Irish meat pies and Guinness and cider.
After saying farewell to the last of our fellow travelers on the tour, Mom and I took a taxi to the train station and headed north to Belfast. The train ride was only two hours, although work on the tracks required us to transfer and spend half of that time on a bus.
We arrived into Dublin and got our bearings around the city centre, changed over our money to Sterling (Ireland operates on euro whereas the North uses British pounds) and then booked a black Taxi tour which had been recommended to us by others who had been to Ireland https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g186470-d2705984-Reviews-Belfast_Famous_Black_Taxi_Tours-Belfast_Northern_Ireland.html
The words that other tourists use in the TripAdvisor reviews in the link above are apt: this tour was eye opening as was our visit to Belfast more generally. While our coach tour guide Tony had shared with us some of the politics and division in Ireland, driving around and witnessing some of the 45-foot fences and locked gates that separate the Unionist-Protestant from the Republic-supporting Catholics really emphasized that this is a country still with a lot of tension.
Our helpful Black Taxi Tour guide Martin filled us in on the political conflict known as “the Troubles” (this seems like a quaint word when you consider the seriousness) which I think is helpful to read about here as the situation is so complex that it’s not easily summarized on a vacation blog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles. Our tour guide mentioned that the rest of the world doesn’t really know the full story of this unrest and I agree: certainly, my eyes were opened. Also, a big topic of conversation now, especially with the entry of new British PM Boris Johnston into office while we were on the tour, was the continuing impact of Brexit on Ireland, something I feel newly educated to watch out for in the coming months.
With this new perspective as backdrop, I felt meditative that evening as we returned once again to the hub of Irish life for more Whiskey in the Jar and other cheery earworms in a pub called The Rusty Saddle across from our hotel.
Our final official day of the bus tour began with further travel on the hop on hop off bus and then a visit to Dublin’s newest museum (opened in 2016) called EPIC the Irish Emigration Museum https://epicchq.com/. I had thought this would be focused more narrowly on the famine ships and early emigrant experience but it was actually about the whole Irish identity even up to modern day Irish people and their influence around the world.
The museum was very modern and made impressive use of technology, with interactive screens and characters representing different types of Irish emigrants.
For lunch we went to a funny pub along the Liffey (Dublin’s main river that runs through the city) called Lanigan’s, which not only had decent food but interesting horror themed décor. We walked home through the lively Temple Bar area.
In the evening we boarded our tour coach for one last drive to a village just outside of Dublin called Howth where we had a last supper with at Abbey Tavern https://www.abbeytavern.ie/ apparently housed in part of the original site of St Mary’s Abbey founded in the 11th century. There we had another good Irish meal and watched an evening of not only music but traditional Irish Riverdance-style dancing.
As we began to wind our way east again to Dublin, we stopped at a whiskey distillery called Kilbeggan https://www.kilbegganwhiskey.com/ and learned about the whiskey making process (yes the tour did end with a wee tasting). I also bought some whiskey marmalade which I have yet to open.
We jumped back on the bus and arrived in Dublin in the afternoon and started our exploration of the city on board a hop-on-hop-off bus tour.
Mom and I managed to make it through a full 2.5 hour loop for an overview of the city.
Then we had dinner at a pub nearby called the Bleeding Horse.
The highlight of Day 5 was yet another natural wonder, the Cliffs of Moher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliffs_of_Moher in the Burren region in County Clare.
These stretch for 14 km and rise 215 metres at their height above the Atlantic Ocean. We took off from the town of Doolin in a boat to see them from the water, which is really spectacular because you get to see the whole formation rising above you.
Like many spectacular scenes these photos really don’t do the scene justice so you’ll have to imagine.
Pictures being worth a thousand words it seems wrong to write more when I could just keep posting images
Here’s one more from the boat.
Today we travelled to the southwest county Kerry, stopping at a cute market town called Macroom and landing in Killarney for a lunch of vegetable soup and a walk around the town. Besides pointing out the sights, our tour guide Tony has been filling us tourists in on details about everything from the Irish economy to weather to the political situation. This last topic has been particularly eye opening as the situation is more complex here than I think the average North American realizes, certainly than I realized.
The highlight of our day and the trip for me was driving around the Ring of Kerry, a 170+-km driving route around county Kerry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Kerry that starts at Killarney and curves around the Iveragh Peninsula to include spectacular views along windy roads that made me glad we’d outsourced the driving to a professional. Stops along the way included the extensive Rossbeigh beach (yes I put my feet in the water), Ladies View (apparently named for the admiration by Queen Victoria’s ladies in waiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_View) and towns like Kenmare.
At the end of the day we landed in the cute little town of Dingle https://www.dingle-peninsula.ie/ where we had fish and chips at a restaurant in town called Harrington’s. Finally after many nights of being either too tired or too late to go to the hotel pool, Mom and I made it to the spa at our hotel where sitting in the hot tub we chatted with a retired fisherman who said he had lived 200 m up the road all his life and told me all about his four kids and the family he had in Montreal but had never visited. Travel stories come from everywhere.
On day three of our tour, questions were answered when I learned that Cobh is really pronounced “cove” (it’s spelled in the Irish) and renamed from the original Queenston, the name of the town when it was fatefully the Titanic’s last stop before the fateful voyage. At a museum called the Titanic Experience https://www.titanicexperiencecobh.ie/, we each got a card representing a passenger who boarded in Ireland.
I was Nora Hegarty, an 18-year-old travelling with her cousin, who had planned to become a nun when she arrived in New York. At the end of the tour we were able to look up our fate: Nora did not survive. Again, most of the Titanic memorial tourism I’ve seen has been based in Canada for example in Halifax https://maritimemuseum.novascotia.ca/what-see-do/titanic-unsinkable-ship-and-halifax so it’s interesting to see the slightly different perspective of the emigrant traveler.
We looked around the town of Cobh including walking up a very steep hill to St. Colman’s Church which had some great views of the city. On the way down, we stopped for scones at a little tea room run by artist Deborah M. Stevenson https://www.facebook.com/DeborahMStevenson/ who makes good scones with lots of raisins in addition to interesting portraits.
Next we went to a relatively new tourist attraction, the 104-acre Spike island https://spikeislandcork.ie/ which was apparently opened to tourists only in 2014. The Island is only accessible by ferry, and home to a 24-acre complex that was originally created as a military base called Fort Mitchel. Created in 1804 in reaction to the threat of invasion by Napoleon (earlier forts had also existed on the site), the Fort housed up to 3,000 soldiers. In the famine years of the 1840s, it started being used as a prison. The last prisoners left in the late 1800s and then the complex was used by the British and Irish army and navy over the 20th century.
Then Spike Island became a prison again for young offenders in 1985, many of whom were there for stealing cars in another period of heavy unemployment in those decades (the prison was finally closed in 2004). At the prison, you can see a punishment block including cells where prisoners were chained to the walls, the modern prison rooms that held the young offenders in 1985, and a collection of cannons and military machines both old and modern. The prison was an interesting place to learn about many of the different periods of unrest in Ireland as well as times of poverty. It was also interesting to see the emergence of such a new tourist attraction with a lot of growth potential.
Our first full day on the bus tour started with a proper Irish breakfast, which I could (and would, after a week of it) get used to: plenty of bacon (British bacon, or I guess Irish too, my favourite!). Afterwards we continued southwest for New Ross, where we stopped for a visit on a “famine ship” called Dunbrody https://www.dunbrody.com/. The ship is a reproduction of an 1840s emigrant ship and tours offer a window into the emigrant experience following the Irish potato famine aka the “Great Hunger” of 1845-1849 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland), when many Irish people left for the United States, Canada and other destinations abroad. At the time, potato blight meant that the main food sources for Irish families disappeared (various sources noted that Irish were eating between 15-40 potatoes per day!).
On the Dunbrody, each visitor was given an identity as a passenger, and a guide and costumed interpreters acted the parts of other passengers, giving a personality to people who sailed on the ship both in steerage and first class. I was a single mother travelling with her infant son.
It’s interesting to visit from a country that the Irish emigrated to (Canada was a major destination). In Canada, the focus is on the immigration narrative, i.e. how hard it is to start the life in the new country. Here the focus is on the experience of leaving, the unknown, and the forces that push rather than the forces that pull. More than once we would read about emigrants throwing a party that they termed as a “wake” saying goodbye to their old lives. Particularly heartbreaking in this time was the extreme poverty of the 1840s famine and the news that so many died on route. The ships were often called coffin ships because the death rate was up to 50 percent.
Afterwards lunch took a lighter note as we visited a country pub called Marine Bar http://marinebar.ie/, where we had soup and sandwiches and listened to owner Christy O’Neill play familiar Irish songs like Whiskey in the Jar, The Wild Rover, Molly Malone, and Danny Boy. We’d continue to hear these standards over again throughout our journeys to more pubs. They do get in your head.
Following our lunch stop, we arrived in Cork and looked around the city. Since it was a Sunday, many stores were closed, but a shopping district provided some familiar names (hello Marks and Spencer https://www.marksandspencer.com/ and my new favourite euro-store Flying Tiger – originating in Copenhagen, Denmark, this needs to come to Canada https://flyingtiger.com)
Later on our own Mom and I stopped into a pub offering a deal for pints and wings and listened to some more Irish music. Hello again Whiskey in the Jar and Wild Rover. By now we’d also learned the Irish term Craic, pronounced crack (to the delight of the Irish who kept reminding us, no, not that type of crack you crazy North Americans) and meaning “fun” – so it was a bit of that as well to end the day.
I feel like each trip begins with steeling myself for the longest flight ever, but one trip set a new record because we started on our bus tour directly after arriving at Dublin airport. Our flight was just over 6 hours and very smooth if crowded. It was great to get a pickup from the airport so made the first confusion of finding our way around a little less than usual. Welcome to Ireland, take 2.
I first came to Dublin in 2013 via ferry while I was backpacking around England (see https://www.weeksintheworld.com/uk/). I’d wanted to see Dublin especially because in my undergraduate literary studies degree I did an entire course on James Joyce’s Ulysses, which uses the city as its backdrop. An amazing professor made the course very memorable and delving so deeply into a work of literature with such a strong setting made me eager to see the city.
The first time I came, I spent two nights, saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College, went to the Writers’ Museum, took a tour of Kilmainham gaol and walked a lot of the city. The visit prompted me to add “more of Ireland” to my travel list, and when my Mom (Sandra) said she would also be up for the trip, we booked a weeklong tour plus some extra time in Dublin and a couple of nights in Belfast.
Back on the longest day, we boarded the coach that would become our home for the upcoming week on a Royal Irish Tours “Irish Twist” Tour https://ritvacations.com/ireland/promo/irishtwist/ and headed from the airport immediately out of town to Wicklow, south of Dublin. Over a pub lunch, we began to get to know our 22 fellow tour travelers, all Canadian over what would become a familiar fare of vegetable soup and sandwiches. I thought it would be pint o’clcock as soon as we got off the plane but realized alcohol would only compound the zombie state so decided to hold off. There would be plenty of pints in days to come: Guinness for Mom, cider for me.
We arrived at the Ferrycarrig hotel just outside Wexford and had a nice meal in the airy dining room overlooking a natural setting. A wedding was being held at the same time in another part of the hotel and it was clear why the couple would choose it as a venue. But the peaceful scenery would have to wait until I put down my head for a proper 12 hours.