Separate Ways Today

 Today we decided to go our separate ways to see what we wanted individually rather than forcing everyone to go as a group.

We visited the EPIC Museum first, crossing over the River Liffey.  A cool bridge.


Then toured the museum.  You can’t really tell, but these are all ships on the end of those ‘things’ sticking out.

It’s all about Irish Emigration, for various reasons - from the 1700s through to today.  It was OK - lots of things to see and read about, but not guided at all.

Next we went to The Jeanie Johnston: An Irish Famine Story.  It was just down the street.  Here’s a replica of the ship, The Jeanie Johnston.

This ship never had a death on it because it took on only half the people (200 vs 400 for the same size ship), they had a doctor on board, they let people up on deck for half an hour every day (4-6 week crossing to the Americas), they let them dump their waste buckets and shake out their blankets, and they fed them.  The other ships, called coffin ships, didn’t do any of that.

This is how they slept.  Quite a story.

We went off for some lunch then continued on to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.



Beautiful medieval church and just like Christ Church up the street, sections have been added on until it’s what is there today.  Beautiful though.

And Jonathan Swift is buried here, under the floor - Gulliver’s Travels.  I think I read that about 40 years ago.

We were pretty much done for the day, but we were going by Dublin Castle, so had to mosey around it a bit.

We headed back to our place and after a while, decided to head down the street to another pub called O’Neill’s for dinner.  I think we’ll be done with pubs for a while after this!













Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Belfast

Image
Today we headed to Belfast.  We had trepidation at first after having heard about all “The Troubles” in Ireland in the 60s, 70s and 80s.  So first we headed to the Titanic Experience museum.  The place is huge. It goes through the early 1800s of Belfast and into shipbuilding as huge employer.  Then into the engineering and building of the Titanic.  Of course next was the launch of Titanic, and the disaster, then the aftermath.  So quite an interesting exhibition. We then decided to catch a cab into the middle of Belfast as we didn’t really want to drive there.  We were able to leave our cars in the underground parking garage while a cabbie took us to town.  He was terrific and after telling him our destination, we asked him where one of the best pubs would be.  He took us to The Crown, one of the oldest in Belfast.  It was beautiful!  Floor to ceiling. It even had these little spots called a “snug” where upper class ladies came to d...
Read more

North Northern Ireland

Image
Today consisted of a visit to the Giant’s Causeway, the City of Londonderry, and the Town of Portrush. The Giant’s Causeway is a World Heritage Site established in 1986.  It really is quite fascinating and occurs just in this spot on the northern coast.  Here are a couple of pictures of what it looks like up close.  You can check it out on Wikipedia, but essentially it is a geological formation.  And the Irish have a legend that goes with it that involves Finn McCool. By the time we left there it was after noon, so we decided to go to Londonderry for lunch.  It was about an hour away, but hey, who cares?  We finally managed to find a place to park the cars, and found a nice little pub.   Here we are out front after we were satisfied. Londonderry is a an old walled city that sits on the River Foyle.  Here’s a bridge that is part of the old wall. That guy underneath was playing a Handpan…a fairly new instrument from Switzerland.  Sounded beauti...
Read more

Cashel and Blarney

Image
 Today was a bit of a castle day.  First we visited the Rock of Cashel.  This castle, built on a large limestone outcropping (the rock), was the home of Irish kings for centuries.  They controlled the whole southeast from Limerick, all through the south and all the surrounding area. We did a tour of the place which took about 45 minutes.  He explained the various buildings in the castle and some of the stories from the past.  Quite interesting.  In fact, St. Patrick was here as the castle was given to the archbishop of the time between warring kings.  This is St. Patrick’s well which is blocked off so no one can touch it. This is the cathedral inside…and the tower outside. And a beautiful view of the surrounding countryside. And another tourist kindly took our photo. When we were done here, we went to nearby Cahir for lunch.  We thought we would get out of the town of Cashel as it was pretty busy.  We walked by here and Gerard said he ha...
Read more