The Last Day

On the last day of our trip, we visited Kilkenny, which Rick Steves says is "often called Ireland's finest medieval town."  While wandering into town we noticed this little eatery with a great name:

Crazy though it may seem, we did not avail ourselves of the sandwiches.

Kilkenny has a picturesque castle:

Front View

Back  View

Paul made friends with Indiana Jones:

We also saw quite a few bookmakers in Ireland.  At first I was all "that's so awesome, look at all these small independent book making shops!"  But then I realized I didn't quite understand the meaning of the term 'bookmaker':

We decided to enjoy one last kebab as dinner for the train ride back to Dublin:

where we were greeted by the friendly cat residing in the Airbnb place in which we were staying.  He made himself right at home in our room:

Cliffs of Moher

After Killarney, we took the train to Ennis to see the Cliffs of Moher.  It was a busy day.  We caught a train to Mallow then another to Limerick, then finally to Ennis.  Next, we hurried to our hostel to drop off our bags before returning to the train station to catch a 50 minute bus to the Cliffs of Moher.  We had a little under 3 hours at the Cliffs before the final bus back.

The Cliffs are pretty impressive:

  

Also, we liked this sign (to throw in a little CSI: Creative Sign Interpretation)

No walking on fire while admiring birds!

Ireland has been so dry for quite a while that this is the result (our shoes are normally black):

This was great for us because the weather was truly amazing.  How often do people get a clear blue sky at the Cliffs of Moher?  Not very often.  It was actually too hot - probably 85 or so - with no shade in sight.  We suffered through it, though.  :)

Killarney and the Ring of Kerry

Ireland is beautiful.  I think Paul and I both have questioned whether book-ending our trip with Ireland was wise.  It was the cheapest round-trip flight but we ended up flying between Ireland and mainland Europe both times.  However, it has been the perfect way to end this trip, and we are both very glad we included it.

We flew from Amsterdam to Dublin, stayed the night in a hostel, and headed out to Killarney via train to visit the Killarney National Park and tour the Ring of Kerry.  It's obvious that Ireland is really best done by car, since so many sites are inaccessible or inconvenient by public transportation.  However, we wanted to use our rail pass and didn't want to drive.

Our first night, we wandered around Killarney National Park and saw some amazing views:

The second day, we took the Ring of Kerry bus tour.  Not my favorite way to see an area, but our only option without a car.  The first stop was a bog village for an extra fee, so we opted not to participate.  It didn't look very interesting.  Then, we stopped to take some pictures here:

We also stopped at a sheep-herding demonstration.  We both weren't super-excited about it, but it ended up being really neat.  There were three dogs who all knew the same commands but had different signals for them.  There was a full set of whistles and a full-set of spoken commands for each dog.  These included left, right, forward, back, and stop, I think.  A dog's hearing is incredible!  The shepherd spoke pretty quietly, and the dogs could hear him way up the hill.  Here's a movie of the dogs in action [visit the blog website to see the movie]:

More views:

Ireland makes up for its (usually) drab weather with colorful buildings.

Unfortunately, scenery photos with mountains in the distance just don't turn out well, so most of our other photos of the Ring of Kerry aren't super-exciting.

After the tour, we rented bikes and toured more of Killarney National Park.  We saw some deer:

And took more pretty photos:

Ross Castle

Museums, Museums, Museums

On our last full day in Dublin, we hit a bunch of free museums.  We started out the day at the National Gallery.  It was okay but half of it was closed.  We did enjoy a Rembrandt painting of a spanking game.  There was also a beautiful sculpted Adonis whose hands looked so lifelike that I expected him to reach for me at any moment.

Then, we went to the Natural History Museum, which I didn't really enjoy.  It consisted of two huge galleries of cases full of taxidermied animals of all sorts.  And some skeletons.  Instead of curious, I really just felt sad about the lion and other cubs that were labeled as born at the same location and were therefore obviously killed to be stuffed.  And the many baby birds.  Give me fake animals any day.

Next, we stopped by the National Library (see, it says library above my head):

We couldn't see much of it, but the main reading room was very cool.  I always think I could get a lot of work done in an inspirational location like that - a huge domed room lined with books and filled with tables containing the traditional library reading lamps.

Then, we wandered around and looked at the outside of Christchurch Cathedral (you had to pay for a tour of the inside, of course):

Finally, we discovered my favorite museum in all of Dublin: the Chester Beatty Library (also free), located on the grounds of Dublin Castle (which is a governmental building that is closed to the public for 7 months due to some EU stuff).  The picture below is part of Dublin Castle and its gardens (Chester Beatty is off to the left, not in the picture).

If you're ever in Dublin, go to this museum.  Chester Beatty was a collector of many cool works of art, including tons of illuminated manuscripts from many different cultures, Asian scrolls and other materials, paintings, and more.  It's well laid out and not very crowded - at least when we were there.

And lastly, I'll leave you with a picture from this morning at St. Stephen's Green while we wandered around (freezing! I am wearing 5 shirts in that picture) killing time before we went to the airport to fly to Greece.

"1,000 Years Older than Stonehenge"

After sleeping like the dead Wednesday night, we were much more awake yesterday.  We caught a tour bus to Brú na Bóinne a little before noon to see Knowth and Newgrange.  Constructed around 3200 B.C., much about these neolithic structures is unknown.  They were associated with death (bodies were found in them) as well as astronomical events (several of the passageways line up with the sun during the equinoxes).

The tour guides emphasized endlessly that these passage tombs are 500 years older than the pyramids and 1,000 years older than Stonehenge.  They were also excessively fond of saying that the art on the stones "was open to all of our interpretations and all of those interpretations were correct."  I'm not quite sure what our interpretations were, but whatever they were, they were the right ones.

Despite the repetition, the sites are pretty cool.  Knowth has many passage tombs and other mounds:

Newgrange has only one.  However, unlike Knowth, we were able to go inside it.  Of course, photography wasn't permitted so I don't have a picture.  We were also allowed to walk on top of this large mound to see where later civilizations had built small settlements (Newgrange is only about 80 meters in diameter, so when I say small, I mean small!). 

The amount of work it took to make these is impressive.  The large stones that lined the outside of the mounds (seen in the first picture above) were brought from a location 20 km away.  It is thought that they were rafted down the river and then log-rolled uphill over a considerable distance to the monument's location.  

Whatever their real purpose, clearly they were important structures.

Tired in Dublin

After getting about 1.5 hours of sleep on the plane, yesterday was a very long day. I attempted to write this post last night but gave up.

We arrived at the Dublin airport at about 5am yesterday.  Immigration was fast and customs was basically non-existent.   We caught a bus to our hostel and enjoyed the view from the second story of our ride:

Given that we were up and about long before just about all the shops opened, we did quite a bit of walking around the city.  Then, hours later, Trinity College's Old Library and Book of Kells display finally opened.  You can't take photos of the Book, but we did get a few good ones of the Old Library:

It also had a cool spiral staircase, which Paul appreciated:

We also attempted the National Museum of Archaelogy.  However, since we had a tendency to fall asleep every time we sat down, we really didn't enjoy that one as much.  It's free, though, so we may go back.

Finally, last night we found ourselves a good Irish bar, had some fish and chips and beef stew, and enjoyed a couple of beers: