...when they finally get where they're going!
It’s been a long journey here, to the land of claddagh rings and clover. We arrived at the airport several hours early (thanks, Mom), and had a delay in New York that put us an hour behind, but gave us a chance to check up on the progress of the swine flu…woo. Luckily we had a monster tailwind, and ended up arriving in Ireland almost an hour early – even the pub was closed when we got here! I myself could totally have used a pint, since by then I’d been up for over 30 hours, and though my row mates John and Pearl were lovely (John and I were champions at the onboard trivia game), the gentleman behind me must have kicked my seat 3,412 times, which made it virtually impossible to sleep without some sort of homicide first occurring. But we made it, retrieved our luggage, (which thanks to the lovely bag checkers at the TSA was disassembled, inspected, and haphazardly shoved back together and almost closed), and stood in line to lose most of our money to the exchange rate and have a chat with a lovely Irish gentleman who worked in the airport and had a bit of a cough, although he assured us it was only the “plain old Irish flu”, since he hadn’t been kissing any pigs of late.
Eventually, we got our OPW Heritage cards (I highly recommend them!) and proceeded to get our rental car from a lovely young lady who also owns a restaurant in southern Spain. That was also a bit of a fiasco, and having just come from hunting down Mom’s socks on the baggage carousel, we weren’t very amused to be standing in the rain looking for the shuttle to take us to the car park, only to see the hot pink van pull up and then pull immediately away. I don’t know how you classify a day that starts with so many things going wrong, other than by 12oz, 16oz, or 40oz. We settled for 3 coffees at €3 each, and some good ol’ fashioned cussing before we headed out of the city proper into the Irish countryside.
To tell the truth though, I was kind of excited to be driving in Ireland. I had a blast learning to drive in Australia on the left side of the road, and it’s just like riding a bike, if the bike was totally backwards. We picked up a little grey Kia, and I’m VERY glad that it was banged up and scratched all to hell, since I’ve had to put it into a ditch on several occasions since where the roads are not wide enough for two cars to pass.
Funnily enough, when I say the roads are narrow, I mean the roads are NARROW. Each lane on the major roads is only about a foot wider than the cars, and the back country roads are sometimes only wide enough for two cars to pass if fully half of both of them is off the road. I think these back roads are the loveliest to drive, as they kind of meander through the Irish countryside, but I’m not sure my companions could agree as they had their hands over their eyes for most of the ride. Mom brought along her TomTom GPS, which was somewhat both a blessing and a curse, for though it brought us eventually to our destinations, we heard a lot of the phrases “turn around at the nearest opportunity”, and “recalculating route.” Hardly any of the roads in rural Ireland are marked, though almost everyone you ask will give you directions. As an interesting side note, I’ve noticed that people here use pubs for landmarks – every set of directions we’ve received has used a pub for a reference point. Looking for a certain restaurant? “Oh, go down by the Church bar, I think it’s right across the way.” Looking for the route out to the Dublin Mountains? “Well, then, you just go down Patrick Street until you get to the Yellow House Pub. Take a right at the pub and it’s straight on from there.” I think this is a fabulous idea, but I think we’d need more bars in the US to make it work, there is at least one pub per block here, and sometimes 4 pubs in one single stretch from corner to corner. It almost makes you wonder why they’d sell things like this:
I mean, really, who’d put an Irishman to safeguard the liquor? Answer? Tourists.
It turned out to be a beautiful day for driving. Though drizzly and gray when we arrived, we were told that Ireland has many kinds of weather, and often you can see them all in the same day. So it was, and we set off to find Castle Maynooth under clear blue skies and warm sunshine. Though we didn’t manage to ever find a castle in Maynooth, even after several “turning around at the nearest opportunities” and a few dozen route recalculations, we did manage to find this handy dandy hand dryer from Dyson, that is SUPER neat and gets your hands dry in a jiffy. Why don’t we have these in the US?
So, after speed drying our hands and having a lovely ad hoc lunch built from a Dunne’s grocery store (salami rolled in parmesan on fresh baguettes, yum!) we decided to abandon the quest for Castle Maynooth, and head to Castle Trim instead. There are hundreds of castles here, I’m sure, and we didn’t figure it would hurt much to miss one. There are so many more things to see and do, and we got back on the road lickety-split, with little effort and only one teeny little episode that involved drenching a passerby with a puddle (I am working on judging distance on the right, sorry!!) and a little kiss of mirror with a delivery truck. *Mwah*, darling, no worries – they bend back!
(Oops. Driving on the left is going swimmingly, really.)
We stopped off for a bit in Summerhill, and really, it’s a hill. I’m sure it’s lovely in summer, with the trees all in bloom and the church filled with people. The church had a lovely angel on the front…
…a lovely selection of celtic crosses in the graveyard…
…fantastic scrollwork gates that were at least eight feet high and overlooked a field full of dozing cows…
…and a very pretty version of the Pietà in the parking lot.
Linda and I got out to take a few pictures, but the wind had kicked up again and the temperatures had dropped, so Mom stayed in the car while we clambered all over the grounds. Soon enough we were off to Trim Castle, which looked pretty far on the map, but was only about 15 roundabouts and 27km down the road. I really do love roundabouts, especially when you’re driving somewhere new, as every mistake simply leads to one more time around. If only the rest of life were that easy.
Castle Trim was a bit of a surprise. We used our Heritage cards for the first time, and got entrance and the tour for “free”, since they’re part of what’s included. SO nice to get discounts! We were a bit early for the tour, and the sun had come back out to play, so we walked around the grounds a bit. Trim is a bit of a surprise, really, since the grounds themselves are not that impressive. There’s a bit of ruin…
(and)
…a bit of the moat that still runs swiftly by…
…and the remains of the original castle, a big ol’ honkin’ stone edifice that now only houses hundreds of pigeons, rather than the Irish aristocracy.
We took a lovely tour inside with PJ, from OPW (the Office of Public Works) and learned all about the DeLacey family that built the castle and the surrounding buildings. Hugh and Walther DeLacey were the main characters in this piece of Irish history, and to hear PJ tell it sounds a bit like an angst-ridden television drama – though don’t confuse Hugh and Walter DeLacey with Cagney and Lacey – one’s a medieval soap opera with King John as the villain, and the other is an 80’s show about NYPD that makes Gloria Steinem start letter writing campaigns.
But all in all, PJ gave a fantastic tour, answered all my million questions about architecture and medieval housekeeping, showed us some neat models on the evolution of the additions to the keep…
…and even took us up into the DeLacey family chapel, with a double little alcove thing that drained directly outside (I know there’s a name for it, and for the life of me it escapes me) where the priest would wash his hands on the one side, and the vessels from communion on the other, so that all the dirt washed off would return to the earth, “in the true Christian tradition”, as PJ says.
All in all, it was a great tour, when I normally don’t enjoy them, and the grounds were quite nice. Score one for Trim Castle.
We left Trim about 3 in the afternoon, and headed on over to Newgrange at Brú na Bóinne. An interesting place, that. Not only is it a World Heritage Site, and a giant megalithic tomb, but it’s in the middle of nowhere, and surrounded by cows. I swear that some of the roads I drove on to get there were merely driveways that connected at both ends to the road.
Brú na Bóinne certainly doesn’t seem like much when you get there – the visitor center is lovely, and very modern, with a long entryway that is covered in greenery.
You buy your ticket, cross a lovely bridge that looks over the river Boinne (pronounced Boyne)…
…(which you pray you don’t fall in, since this is what they’ll use to save you: EEK.), and then get on the bus with Ruth, who will tell you to be careful when you walk in the road (though there’s no other traffic for miles), and finally arrive at the tomb itself, a huge grassy mound with enormous carved rocks that actually looks 5,000 years old, give or take a few weeks.
(and just as an aside, we also found a secret place nearby where the Irish cultivate pollen. I have no idea why the field was yellow, and no idea what they’re growing, but it was the only one we saw, so you decide…random flowers? Splash of color? Secret weapon? You decide.)
We had Maeve as our guide, and again it was fantastic. I really don’t normally enjoy guided tours, as I find that many guides are rather dry, and simply recite information by rote. So far the guides here in Ireland, most of whom are employed by OPW, have been fantastic – they are witty, engaged, quite knowledgeable when asked questions that may not be commonplace, and all have a great sense of humor.
The tomb was quite small inside, with some parts of the entry hall having to be negotiated hunched over and sideways, and when everyone in the (small) tour group was inside, there was hardly room to move. I do recommend it though – it was interesting to hear the theories on what the mound represents, the manner in which the remains were interred and subsequently found, and how for five days a year, 19 minutes of light in the darkest part of the year fully illuminates the interior of the tomb through a 25inch hole in the side – a hole 5,000 years old that is so perfectly engineered that it aligns the doorway, the floor, and the horizon to form a perfectly straight line. I have all of the conveniences of a modern world, and I can’t even balance my checkbook.
I would have actually liked to stay a bit longer, though the wind was fierce on the hill, but we’d only just arrived in time for the last tour, and Maeve was done for the day. Ruth came back to collect us, and off we went, back to the narrow roads and “turn around at the nearest opportunity” chiding voice of the TomTom.
As an aside, I’ve noticed that there are quite a lot of children at the OPW sites we’ve visited, most of whom have been Irish. The Irish are fiercely proud of their country’s history, and I guess it makes sense that they’d start them young. I was also really surprised that the kids were well-behaved, and that most of them were listening! These are kids from infant to six or seven years old, and not only are they quiet and well-behaved, but most of them were listening to the tours! I know it's such a small thing, but I was definitely impressed.
I only know that at that age, in the States, my friends and I went on many, many field trips, and most of the time, all we looked for was:
It occurs to me now that I might be the poorer for it.
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