We arrived at home more than 24 hours ago. All went well on the trip but I have one last image to share:
End note
Slán, Eire!
Good-bye, Ireland!
We’re at an airport hotel in Dublin ready to catch our flight to Vancouver in the morning, then on to San Francisco.
No road movie today, but a few road pics:
Belfast, day 3: doing the tourist stuff
On our last full day we set out to slow down and take it easy. So we bought tickets online for one of the two red Hop On – Hop Off tourist bus services and planned to use it to get to the Titanic Experience, Belfast’s biggest tourism magnet.
After a brief heavy rain we walked five minutes to City Hall and discovered that (1) the two red bus services are really one and (2) the bus we’d aimed for was full, so we’d have a bit of a wait.
When we finally got going we got the usual tourist highlights (“Belfast’s answer to the leaning tower of Pisa” – we have one of those in San Francisco).
We hopped off at the Titanic Experience only to learn that the earliest tickets available were for two hours later. It was lunchtime so we bought the damn tickets and headed out to catch the next red bus for the rest of their tour. And after another long wait we did just that, an hour’s worth of places we’d seen yesterday though the dueling Catholic and Protestant murals in West Belfast included some that were new to us.
We hopped off again one stop before city hall for a wonderful lunch in the outdoor dining area at Mourne Seafood, then just missed the next red bus departure and sat for another half-hour.
When we finally reached the Titanic Experience for the second time, it proved to be worth the wait: a series of exhibits that progressed from Belfast’s era as a city of Industrial Revolution linen mills and exploitive labor conditions to the rise of shipbuilding and a skilled, more prosperous workforce. The era of steam brought further growth capped by the construction of the Titanic and her sister ship.
Here we stepped into gondolas that swooped gently from the superstructure to the lowest levels to see the construction of a large ocean liner, hearing the workers’voices and a hint of the noise of assembling and riveting a steel ship.
Back under our own foot power we saw exhibits about the tragic end of the Titanic’s maiden voyage that never reached New York, the stories of some who survived and others who didn’t, the formal inquiries that followed, and finally the discovery of the ship on the ocean floor 73 years after its sinking.
By the time we left the last red bus of the day was long gone, so we returned to our hotel by taxi.
Belfast, day 2: a market and the Troubles
After breakfast we headed for the St. George Market a half-mile east, near the train station where we arrived yesterday. The public market seems well organized by merchandise: fish, jewelry, antiques, clothing, etc. While Karen shopped I took photos of the building.
We had lunch at a small cafe on the way to the hotel.
At 2 p.m. our driver Brian arrived for the black cab history tour we’d arranged yesterday. The focus, of course, was the Troubles that convulsed Belfast and all Northern Ireland from about 1967 to 1998. Many operators provide these tours and we often crossed paths.
We started in West Belfast’s working-class Protestant neighborhoods where large murals and memorials celebrate their fighters and their fallen heroes and civilian victims.
Then, after driving along the towering barricade that separates them from their Catholic neighbors to the south, and is still locked at night…
…we looked at murals and memorials in working-class Catholic neighborhoods to fighters, martyrs, and civilian victims.
Brian impartially deplored the hatred and bloodshed from extremists on both sides and echoed what we’d heard in the Republic over the last two weeks: Ireland will become one country again, probably not too far in the future and hopefully without more violence. The current moment holds promise (an open border between the two countries despite Brexit) and danger (the Protestant Unionists in Northern Ireland are boycotting their governing coalition with the Catholic Sinn Fein party).
Belfast
A few moments since we arrived this afternoon by train from Dublin:
Day 13: new friends, old friends, farewells, Wednesday, August 17
On our own again for the day, we followed up on a tip Karen had received from a New York friend and asked to visit a fine art print publisher, Stoney Road Press. They said yes, so we rode a city bus to an industrial area of Dublin well north of the River Liffey and walked in light rain through several blocks of tiny row houses to an unassuming doorway in the shadow of a railroad embankment.
Inside, it was magical: skylights providing light everywhere, hundreds of broad printed sheets hanging from clips overhead, two large electric flatbed presses, and a small, skilled staff inking plates by hand. I was struck by the silence: unlike at the magazine printing company where I once worked, these presses run quietly, one sheet at a time, and conversation in normal tones is possible.
The owner showed us around, then talked art with Karen over tea for an hour and showed us box after box of limited-edition art prints. An artist arrived for a day of work on a series of prints of her work and joined us at the table. We met the shop’s pet chameleon, here returned to his/her bush after a ride on Karen’s wrist.
Then it was time to go. Our friends from a Dublin suburb (Aoife, a former work colleague of my son Alex, and her husband Rowan) picked us up, and after lunch we joined them for an errand at Powerscourt, a shopping center near our hotel. The center’s website boasts that it is located in “the third finest Georgian House in Dublin,” bearing the name of the 18th-century English viscount who had it built as his townhouse. The shopping center conversion includes a wood-paneled elevator shaft.
Tonight at our last group dinner we said goodbye to our tour leader Cathal and to our fellow travelers. Tomorrow Karen and I are off to Belfast for three nights in Northern Ireland.
Day 12: Dublin history and more, Tuesday, August 16
The tour is winding down and in a way feels like it’s already fading. Four of our group of 23 were not with us today – two with Covid and their spouses (who’d had it earlier) joining them in quarantine. [Our Madison friends’ return home will not be delayed as I wrote in an earlier version of this post. The new CDC rules allow them to travel.] We had dinner with them last night and knew she wasn’t feeling well. (I’ve had a fairly miserable cold since Friday but am improving and have tested negative twice for Covid.)
On a more positive note, the 80° heat wave of the last few days has broken and today’s high is 65°. Most of our hotels have not been air-conditioned.
Our reduced and sobered group put on masks (few used them until today) and traveled by bus to the General Post Office north of the Liffey for a museum tour retelling the Easter Uprising there in 1916, the first major battle of the Irish War of Independence. Back outside we could still see the pockmarks left by bullets.
From the GPO we walked to 14 Henrietta Street, one of the many Georgian townhouses of the wealthy Anglo-Irish ruling class in late 18th-century. Most were carved up into miserable, crowded tenements for the Irish poor after the Acts of Union in 1800 moved the Irish seat of government to London. The tenements were finally eradicated around WW II and now have other uses; this one is a museum of wealth and poverty, as this basement room, which housed a single large family without running water, sanitation, or electricity, accurately depicts.
We were all on our own for the rest of the day. Karen and I left the group as we passed an arts center called the Chocolate Factory and enjoyed a surprisingly good lunch from the tiny menu at their cafe.
We then caught a Luas (Dublin city) tram to Trinity College Dublin where I hoped to see the huge old library before it closes for renovation, but alas, the only way to visit is to buy a ticket to view its greatest treasure, the Book of Kells, and they were sold out for the entire day.
So on the advice of a random undergraduate sharing our park bench we went to the university’s geology museum instead to admire its Moorish-style architecture and striking varieties of stone.
Tonight we will again meet Eoghan (see my Aug. 4 post) for dinner with our two remaining Covid-free Madison friends.
Days 10-11: Back to Dublin, Sunday and Monday, August 14-15
Yesterday was our longest travel day on the bus, southeast from County Donegal to Dublin. A large part of the trip was through Northern Ireland but the border, and any effect of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, was invisible. Our only clue at the village of Clady where we entered was that a gas station on the west edge of town had prices in euros while another a mile or so to the east showed pounds. A couple of hours later our welcome back to the Republic of Ireland was a billboard advertising the national lottery.
We had a long stop at a theme park near Omagh called the Ulster American Folk Park. Galleries in the visitor center and replica structures and reenactments (costumed staff representing a blacksmith, a housewife, etc.) around the grounds trace the causes of mass emigration from Ulster to the U.S. since the 18th century, the lives Irish emigrants found in America, and how their presence has affected their new host country. (The province of Ulster consists of the six counties that are part of the UK and three, including Donegal, in the Republic.)
My take: nice but not worth the 2+ hours we stayed there. I found the visitor center’s focus on the Mellons of Ulster and Pittsburgh grating but not surprising since they were major funders of the park. At least we got the first rain since we arrived in Ireland ten days ago.
Today, Monday, we began with a walking tour north from our hotel almost to the River Liffey. Our first stop was the Oscar Wilde house facing St. Stephen’s Green, a large park. After a film about the house that focused on Wilde’s high-achieving parents and schoolboy Oscar’s brilliance we had a talk by the head of the foundation that shares the building with an American university. He outlined Oscar’s growing celebrity as a novelist, playwright, and poet including a months-long tour of the U.S. and Canada, and then gave an unsparing description of how Wilde squandered his and his family’s wealth, ignored his wife’s and widowed mother’s descent into poverty, and ended up in prison for his very public pursuit of gay liaisons that were illegal in that era.
Outside, I spotted something wonderful: a public parking meter that is also an EV charging station!
We followed this with lunch and a one-woman theatrical performance at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre. The play was a high-volume, high-energy story, maybe autobiographical, of a young girl and her mother (she played both parts) and competitive Irish folk dancing (the loudest, most energetic parts) as she becomes a teenager and young adult. Our applause was very enthusiastic. I took no photos.
From there Cathal led us a short distance to the National Museum of Ireland’s archeological museum where about half of us peeled off; the remainder were heading to the natural history museum.
Karen’s and my first goal was the bog people: remains discovered in peat bogs of people killed thousands of years ago, preserved by the peat’s low oxygen and high tannin content. They were just inside the entrance, each body or partial body displayed separately and I thought respectfully, and I again took no pictures.
We ended our afternoon in the museum’s exhibit of Celtic gold, then headed back to the hotel.
Day 9: Along Donegal Bay, Saturday, August 13
A long day on and off the bus. Our first stop was the fishing port of Killybegs west of Donegal where we had two local guides – first a man from a fishing family who led us past a trio of huge high-tech trawlers, explaining how they use seines “larger than a football pitch” as much as 300 miles offshore to haul in tons of mackerel that are then shot through a huge pipe into a forward hold filled with near-freezing water to preserve them. When the hold is full they proceed to whatever port in Ireland, Scotland, England, or Norway can give them the best price. The crew? Two officers, two engine room crew, three or four deckhands, and a cook. Everyone but the cook pitches in on all the jobs on board but there is almost no hard labor since the work is done by machines. Our second guide showed us around the town.
After lunch we continued west, stopping to enjoy views at occasional beaches or villages. This beach is 175 steps down from the road. Our bus was blocked by a traffic jam caused by illegally parked cars that had overflowed the parking lot, adding a quarter-mile to our walk back from the overlook.
We ended at Glencolumbkille (“St. Columba Church Valley) at the west end of County Donegal where it meets the Atlantic. Again we had two teachers, one for a brief lesson in the Irish language and one to show us around the village, including one of a series of carved prehistoric standing stones that have been repurposed as Catholic devotional objects.
Atop a small earthen mound, the stone is about 6 feet tall.
We made it back to Kee’s Hotel with just 15 minutes to spare before dinner.
Day 8: on the road to County Donegal, Friday, August 12
This will be short because there aren’t many interesting photos and it’s late.
Our lunch stop was in Sligo, where a loquacious, witty woodcarver named Michael Quirke entertained us while he made personalized carvings in beechwood for Karen and another member of our tour group – free of charge!
Sligo also has a ruined church in the “abbey” that had been much grander than yesterday’s in a village on Inishmore:
Here in our hotel in Stranorlar we just enjoyed an after-dinner performance of traditional hornpipes and other Irish music by a pair of talented and astonishingly nimble-fingered musicians on a tiny accordion, various guitars, a banjo, and a hand drum.
Bill travels 