Harder to Catch than a Leprechaun

That may be what some of you are thinking about me, as I have neglected this blog for far too long. But now I'm back, ready to make bad leprechaun jokes, because I have promised my dad and other relatives to write a post about my dad's and my trip to Ireland. I can't promise you a pot of gold at the end, but there will be some pictures I hope you enjoy.

My dad and I went to Ireland for 7 days, starting on the Tuesday before Easter. We had been talking about a trip to Ireland for a long time, ever since I got it into my head that I wanted to bike across Ireland and my dad also expressed in interest in Ireland, seeing as how his mom's side of the family (go Sheahans!) is from there, and he had never been. Fortunately, we did not go through with my original (naive) plan of actually biking all around Ireland. For one, it is not nearly as flat as I thought it was. Two, the roads in Ireland, except for a few brand-new highways, are all terrible. Skinny, poorly paved, and almost always bordered on both sides by stone walls, making trying to squeeze past a car going in the opposite direction a moderately terrifying experience (also not ideal for preserving the non-scraped and scratched state of the sides of one's car). Also, as far as we could tell, there were no alternative bike trails, so overall it would have been pretty miserable to actually have to bike everywhere (and I haven't even begun to talk about the fact of us being out of shape). So instead we rented a car and bought a tour package from Costco Travel that did all of the hotel bookings for us. We were in Dublin for a night, Killarney for two nights, Galway for three nights, and then Dublin for a night again (because we flew in and out of Dublin).

Dublin had some beautiful buildings, but overall just had the general feel of any other European capital city. Nice, of course, but nothing particularly unique or "Irish." Also, Dublin is insanely expensive, on par with London, making it one of the most expensive cities in the world. We were much more excited to visit the countryside, and we weren't disappointed. Killarney is in the southwest of Ireland and situated on the edge of a national park. The town itself is quite small and entirely based around the tourism industry. So it had its share of cheesiness, but overall was quite cute. And anyways, the main point of coming to Killarney is the surrounding area. Biggest surprise of the trip: there are mountains in Ireland! Maybe not quite ski-able, but definitely mountains, not just hills. I don't know why I thought Ireland didn't have mountains, but the whole west coast is full of them. My dad and I spent one day hiking around in them for 7 hours (which was about 3 hours longer than we meant to) because somehow the path seemed to always be leading uphill, even when we thought we'd got to the top of the mountain. We calculated the change in elevation we covered, and I believe it came out to around 20,000 feet, adjusted for inflation and the need to make our story more interesting. This is a long way of saying we were very, very tired at the end of it, but enjoyed spectacular scenery the whole way.

After Killarney we drove around the Dingle Peninsula on our way to Galway. We had lunch in the cute seaside town of Dingle and then gazed slack-jawed at the cliffs plunging into the Atlantic Ocean and the fact that sheep and cows were grazing right up to the cliff's edge! I guess the original inhabitants of that area had to  figure out how to use every possible square foot of the arable land found between ocean and mountain slope. There's not a lot of it, as we quickly came to the conclusion that Ireland's national crop is not potatoes, but rocks. We eloquently described it as "stupid full of rocks." The fabled green pastures of Ireland are only possible in places where somebody has spent hours of back-breaking labor to clear rocks from a plot of land in order to allow grass to grow and put animals onto it to graze and fertilize it. This also explains the mind-boggling number of stone walls crisscrossing the whole country, since you had to do something with all those rocks. I think the central areas of Ireland may be more naturally rock-free, but along the coast the inhabitants had to battle rocks as much as the rain, wind and storms blowing off the Atlantic.

 After leaving the Killarney area we took a very small detour to visit Lixnaw, County Kerry, the town which my ancestors lived in before immigrating to America. A small town, not much going on there on Good Friday afternoon, but it had an absolutely beautiful parish church. It had a wonderful, quiet reverence inside and it was a very special moment for my dad and I to light a candle for Grandma and think about how happy she would have been that we made it out there.

 




 

We ended up in Galway on our third night, which is a really fun, lively town, though the local girls displayed an odd propensity to get completely decked out (tarted up and some stronger expressions would be more accurate) to go out and participate in Galway's heavy-duty pub culture, while a guy in a polo could be considered on the well-dressed end of the spectrum. I believe it is a general trend that girls tend to dress up more than boys when going out, but the discrepancy seemed to be particularly large here.

We did two main excursions during our time in Galway. The first was to the largest of the three Aran Islands, Inishmor, about 6 kilometers off the coast. Took the ferry there, rented bikes, rode around all day and then caught the ferry back. The islands, famous for their wool fisherman's sweaters, are sparsely populated and, though situated not too far from the mainland, remained somewhat lost in time, with electricity not even reaching them until the late 1970s. Though a popular tourist destination, they retain a sense of calm and simplicity (at least until an Atlantic storm and 30 foot waves come pounding in). The day we were there was spectacularly sunny and we greatly enjoyed cruising along the island's narrow lanes, surrounded by stone-walled pastures (lots of rocks, as usual) and taking in both calm sandy beaches and sheer cliffs capped by ancient stone ring forts. The second excursion was to the Cliffs of Moher, south of Galway in County Clare. Over three times as high as the cliffs on the island (I believe they are the tallest cliffs on the European Atlantic coastline), and really just amazing wonders of nature. As my dad commented, though, we were almost disappointed that the day we visited the weather was so nice - hardly even any wind to speak of. I think pouring rain and gale-force winds would have made our visit much more authentic!

Dad, if you have any more anecdotes that I left out, please leave a comment. I can't really do justice to the beauty of Ireland or the experiences of this trip, even with a combination of words and pictures, but I hope you all have a chance to visit one day and see it for yourselves! Another post will come soon, and I will do more regular updates in the future, promise.

Slainte! (Health/Cheers!)

Dublin

Dublin hotel room

funky mirror

Why go bald, dad, huh?

the Spire on O'Connell Street

at Marsh's library

one of the many amazing doors in Dublin

in Killarney

cathedral in Killarney

beginnings of Killarney National Park

Ross Castle

boat tour

mountains! in Ireland!

getting our walking sticks

found some clovers!

a lot of the scenery in the park was much drier/browner than one would expect

what we thought was the Torc waterfall

the actual Torc Waterfall

Muckross Estate and jaunting cars

Muckross Abbey

the Gap of Dunloe with low clouds moving in

dang sheep are everywhere in Ireland

Dingle, on the coast

the hand was necessary to hold the hair in place

the Aran Islands

stone fences EVERYWHERE

checking out the cliffs on the island

not as tall as the Cliffs of Moher

the Cliffs of Moher

the grass in Ireland grows so fast the cows don't even have to stand up to find a new spot to eat

the ruins of the Clonmacnoise monastic village