Ireland, Day Fourteen: Dublin

Every single person I talked to who has been to Dublin said Dublin was not that great. Poor Dublin! I felt like we couldn't go to Ireland and not go at all, though. So we drove the 3 hours from Derry and dropped off the car at the airport and were freeeee! We got a cab to take us to our hotel in the city center. 

Dublin's hotels are wildly expensive, New York style. I found the Harding Hotel, which seemed to be in a good location and looked nice, but was suspiciously reasonably priced. I was a little worried about it, but it turned out to be great! 

It was in a busy but cute neighborhood right in the center of town.

Walking around, it's pretty easy to see why everyone said Dublin wasn't worth the time. Not because there's anything wrong with it, necessarily, but because it seems a bit generic, like any big city. Very Londony.

I had really wanted to see the Book of Kells in the Trinity College Library but the guidebooks made it sound like a miserable experience, packed with tourists at all times. We did walk over toward the college but the entire street was filled with people milling around outside tour buses for blocks and blocks, so we turned right around and got out of there.

We went to the National Museum of Archeology instead.

This was a good decision! They have a bunch of cool stuff! I put Ben in charge of taking the photographs for this excursion.

The Temple Bar area is the tourist hotspot neighborhood and was about a 5 minute walk from our hotel. It felt like Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

 
Dublin Castle was also supposedly nearby but we had trouble finding it. Also, it kept raining and then not raining and at this point I was pretty much ready to come back to North Carolina and sit in the nice sunny heat.

We couldn't find the castle, it turns out, because it's been added to over various time periods and is very haphazard. The oldest part is the round tower.

We got takeout falafel for dinner to eat in our hotel room, which was right across the street from Christ Church Cathedral. The church bells kept ringing and ringing and ringing, and whoever was ringing them was not doing a very good job - off key, off rhythm - it was bad enough that I started googling to figure out what was going on. It turns out that on Friday nights they have PRACTICE SESSIONS for THREE HOURS where anyone can sign up to try their hand at ringing the church bells. Whose idea was this?? Right in the center of an urban area?!

Our trip home the next morning was uneventful, from Dublin through Boston back to Raleigh, all in economy class like regular people. SIGH. Another one in the books.

Ireland, Day Thirteen: Inishowen Peninsula

For our last day of road trip exploring, we decided to drive around the Inishowen Peninsula up to Malin Head, the northernmost point in Ireland. I have a coworker who is from this area and highly recommended it. We also considered Giant's Causeway, an hour in the other direction, but ultimately decided it would doubtless be very crowded and we didn't feel like dealing with a lot of people. This turned out to be the right decision.

The drive to Malin Head was beautiful and the area is very isolated. The very tip top of County Donegal.

Here they have another of the EIRE signs from World War II.

The wind was back. It was SO WINDY. Always with the wind. I also had woken up with a cold. So we walked out to the point and back, but didn't do much more exploring.

It was so windy here that the seafoam in this cove was blowing in little globs up the beach.

The last walking trail!

And here it comes, the rain. We booked it out of there to as not to get stuck out on the beach when it hit.

I was honestly shocked we made it the entire trip without crashing this car into anything. Trusty little horrible car!

We stopped at a famous seafood restaurant for a late lunch. The crab claws were like half the size of a human fist.

My coworker had recommended this restaurant, and it was also mentioned in the Lonely Planet book. We were there at 2pm and the restaurant was virtually deserted.

We ended up staying for quite a while after we ate to talk to the bartender - he is from the area and told us a lot what it was like to grow up there during the tensions of the 80s and 90s, the precarious peace they have going on now, and their fears for the near-term future as a result of Brexit. With Britain leaving the EU, they are going to have to do something about the invisible border with Ireland, when everybody involved would prefer to leave things as they are.

When we arrived back at the hotel I became extremely shivery and feverish and nauseated and stayed that way, more or less, for most of the night. It wasn't great. Ben had to go out and find me some acetaminophen because Advil wasn't cutting it. I was okay-ish by the following day; the nausea and high fever never came back, anyway, although I had cold symptoms for the next week or so. I don't know if this was coincidental food poisoning or what, but I'm three for three on being sick during our most recent vacations. I hope this isn't the beginning of a tradition.