Northern Ireland

  

We drove up to the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.  The scenery along the way was beautiful- rugged cliffs, stunning beaches and eerie castles. 

 

The giants causeway is a collection of unique basalt could columns. The legend is that an Irish giant (Finn McCool) built the causeway to travel to Scotland to fight a Scottish giant. When Finn got to Scotland, he realized that the Scottish giant was much, much bigger than him, so he ran back to Ireland. The Scottish giant followed him, but when he got to Finn's cottage, his wife had dressed Finn up as a baby. The Scottish giant figured that if Finn was the baby, his father must be enormous, so he ran back to Scotland in terror and destroyed the causeway behind him. 

There are approximatelyt 40,000 basalt columns that make up the causeway. Most are six sided, but five and seven sided columns are also common.  They were formed as volcanic lava slowly cooled hundreds of millions of years ago. 

We also visited Belfast, and took a black cab tour of the murals - giant paintings that were used to make political statements about the time of "the troubles", when violence between loyalists and republicans tore Northern Ireland apart. 

The violence has mostly ended, but there are still places in Belfast where 45' walls separate Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, and giant gates shut every night between them. 

One of the hotels in downtown Belfast has the record for being the most bombed building in the world. It was bombed 27 times, since it was the only fancy hotel downtown so senior British government figures stayed there. Since the peace accords of 1998, 35 new hotels have been built here and Dublin has the record for being the second safest city in Europe for tourists. 

We also visited the new Titanic museum. One of the stewardesses who survived the Titanic went on to be a nurse and served on the Titanic's sister ship, the Brittanic. She also survived when the Brittanic, which was operating as a hospital ship during WWI, hit a mine and was also sunk. 

And of course, there are great pubs here with incredible music! Tomorrow we are off to Marrakech!

Ireland- Jackie's Birthday at the Castle

We visited several castles in Ireland, including Powerscourt, which was listed as one of the top ten houses and gardens in the world by National Geographic magazine. 

For Jackie's birthday, we checked into the Ashford Castle, which was listed as the third best hotel in the world by Conde Naste. 

The castle's motto is "serving hospitality since 1228", which is when the first castle was built. 

Steve was required to have a suit jacket for dinner. There wasn't any room in cycling panniers, but the hotel lent him one for the evening.  

This is probably the only time in Steve's life that he will get away with giving Jackie a birthday card like this!

Ireland - the peninsulas

The most popular and scenic drives in Ireland are the south western peninsulas. 

Rugged, beautiful and reasonable for cyclists because the traffic is slow although there are plenty of hills!

Very cool roads!

Some of them are basically paved goat paths. 

The "ring of Kerry" is the best known route, but we found the Beara peninsula to the sout even more scenic - and virtually unoccupied. We only saw 10 cars in 3 hours of cycling. 

One of the coolest sights was Skellig Michael, a tiny offshore island. It was a monastery from 700 to 1200 AD. The Vikings used to like kidnapping the monks and torturing them to death - fun, I guess, if you were a Viking. Nobody knows why the monastery was abandoned. It was recently used for the filming of the new Star Wars movie. 

Now we have finished cycling, so it's off to a castle for Jackie's birthday!

Ireland - Farming

Yep, plenty of sheep here. They can't brand them so they paint the fleece with splotches of color to identify ownership when they are on communal pastures. 

We saw this guy today at a popular tourist outlook. He pulled 3 sheep, 2 cats and a dog out of his car, and then set up to sit around for a while. Barnyard animals on vacation? A chance to get your photo taken with sheep? We are baffled. 

And every farm has plenty of safety signs! I thought I might try to heist one of these and give it to my brother in law for Christmas. I like the part about " this is not a playground "!!

And if you were wondering why the pictures are all so green, that's because it rains here. A lot. And after almost two weeks without rain, we are getting plenty, so we rode our bikes to the nearest airport and rented a car! We're still cycling, but now we can ride in comfort between the good cycling routes instead of getting soaked while cursing heavy head winds. 

Ireland - Bogs and Moors

We took a train from Dublin to Westport, in the north west corner of the Irish Republic. 

Westport is a lovely little town. We cycled south through amazing passes to an abbey that used to be run by Benedictine nuns as an international girls school.  Originally, the place was the summer estate of a wealthy English politician who built it as a gift to his wife. The place had 33 guest bedrooms. Of course, the kitchens were situated as far as possible from the dining room, so that guests would not be upset with the sounds and doors of cooking. Pity the poor servants who had to haul all of that food across the castle! The original owner's wife died young - she caught dysentery while on vacation in Egypt - so her husband built a miniature cathedral in her memory, but used angels instead of gargoyles for decoration. 

We rode something called " the bog road" which was like a giant rocky swamp. The locals excavate peat from the swamp by digging trenches up to 5' deep, and then letting the stuff dry. It becomes very light, so then they bag it and sell it for fuel. We have been in a couple of pubs that were heated with peat stoves. The bogs are very atmospheric - they feel very remote, and we would cycle for a long time without seeing a vehicle or another person. We kind of expected to get attacked by dwarves or orcs. Or by out of work extras from The Game of Thrones. 

Ireland- Mr. Google on a Bike

Mr. Google and I generally have a pretty good working relationship. On our current trip, we rely on a couple of cycling guide books along with occasional Google map references to help us find where to go. 

Today, our objective was to get to the ferry across the River Shannon as easily as possible. If requested, Mr. Google provides directions for cycling that are the shortest distance, rather than the routes for shortest time that he proposes to cars. However, shortest horizontal distance does not necessarily mean shortest vertical distance! I guess Mr. Google must have some cool antigravity pods built into his bicycle. 

Fortunately, this is Ireland, so there is a pub at the bottom of every hill for rehydration!

Ireland - Cliffs and Islands and Cliffs

A couple of days ago we took a ferry to the Aran Islands. Yes, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was filmed here, along with other movies. We visited a Bronze Age fort that had been built around 600 B.C.

Nope, no need for a wall on the fourth side. 

One of the defensive barriers that stil exists is a ring of vertical rocks 1.5 m high between the second and third defensive walls that was designed to make an attack by horseback impossible. It was wild to think that the walls themselves, which were 10' high and 20' thick, had all been built by hand. 

The island is incredibly barren, in spite of being inhabited for thousands of years. This looks even harder to farm than the land my sister and brother in law own!

We took another ferry back to the mainland and the town of Doolin, which is adjacent to the famous cliffs of Moher. Yup, they made movies here as well, including The Princess Bride. 

Ireland - Dublin

We finally finished our 150th celebration by visiting a country in Europe that neither of us had been to- Ireland. Dublin is filled with many amazing sites - for a city of a half million people, it has a surprising number of things to see. 

One of the first places we visited was Trinity College, the home of The Book of Kells, a thousand year old New Testament that took 7 monks their entire lifetimes to produce. Trinity also has a relatively new library ( only 300 years old) that used to house a copy of every book published in Ireland. 

The Keelmainham jail operated for over 150 years until it was closed in 1960. It holds a special place in Irish history, as the leaders of the 1916 revolt against England were all hung here. 

Yup, plenty of beer here! The Guiness factory is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Europe. Here, Jackie is learning the proper way to pour a "pint of the black" - it takes about 4 minutes to do it correctly! Steve won an extra pint for remembering how many children Arthur Guiness and his wife had (21) and how many died before reaching adulthood (11). 

Did I mention that there was plenty of beer here?