We try to make our vacations a good mix of stuff that we will enjoy and stuff that the kids will enjoy, some days more successfully than others.  Of course, ideally, all of us would enjoy all of the activities, but we find many museums to be a tough sell!

However, on our second day in Dingle, we managed to have a whole slate of activities custom-made for Charlotte and Elijah’s maximum enjoyment.  And Jeff and I managed to have a good time, too!

First thing, though, Jeff ran to the laundromat and picked up our laundry.  Aaahhh!  Clean clothes again!

After a very good breakfast, we stepped outside and tried to gauge the weather.  It was cloudy (a normal state of affairs in Ireland) but not currently raining, so we decided to start our morning with a round of pitch-and-putt golf at the nearby and appropriately named Dingle Pitch & Putt.  For those of you unfamiliar with this activity, it is priced like miniature golf but is played like real golf with very short fairways (30 to 70 meters between the tee and the green).  Each player is given a pitching wedge and a putter before setting off to play 18 holes.

I pulled out the camera at the first hole to take a few photos, only to discover that I had not put the SD card back into the camera after uploading photos to the laptop the previous evening.  Doh!  So I started the golf excursion by running the half mile back to the hotel to retrieve it, while Jeff and the kids started playing.  I hadn’t meant to run that morning, but that’s how it goes sometimes!

The course is beautifully situated, with the harbor  and rolling green hills in the background.  A cool breeze was blowing in across the water, enough to cool us down without blowing us or our golf balls away.  Beautiful!

What fun!  Charlotte and Elijah had never before done more than hit a few balls at a driving range and play miniature golf, but they both did great at this activity.  Jeff and I, who have not played a round of golf since before Charlotte was born nine years ago, quickly got back into a decent rhythm…sort of.  We had paid a one-euro deposit on the eight golf balls we took when we started, and guess who the first person to lose a ball was!  I whacked one of mine over the fence into the driving range.  But luckily for me, the guy mowing the grass over there saw it happen, jumped off the tractor, and tossed it back to me.  Whew!  One euro saved!

 

Early on, we let a couple of people pass us who were moving more quickly, but, for the most part, we had the course to ourselves.  We ended up playing about 12 holes before lunchtime and deciding it was probably time to move on to our next activity.

So, after golf, we walked around Dingle a bit, popping into a couple of shops.  But, frankly, we’d gotten our fill of shopping the previous day, so we found a hot dog stand, had a quick lunch, and headed back to our second, kid-friendly activity of the day, Oceanworld, Dingle’s very own aquarium, one block over from our hotel.

While the aquarium was small, it had a bunch of fish and a couple of neat things to do, including a tunnel in which fish swam all around us and a very cool, large-sea-creature tank, with sharks and a very curious sea turtle who kept swimming to the side and staring at those staring at him.

Oceanworld also had a petting pool, filled with very friendly rays, starfish, regular fish, and even a crab or two.  The rays would swim right over to people’s hands and brush themselves against them, almost like a dog or cat!  It was pretty cool, although my squeamish children usually managed to yank their hands out of the water before the rays got too close!

The most famous resident of Dingle is not a human, but a dolphin name Fungie who has lived in Dingle Harbor since 1983.  Boat rides to spot Fungie are offered all day, every day, with a “no Fungie, no pay” caveat attached to it.  Since we didn’t want to take the time or spend the money to ride a boat, I settled for taking the kids to the harbor front, where they could actually take a ride on Fungie.  Or at least a cool statue of him.

By this point, we were moving on toward late afternoon, and Jeff and I were still interested in visiting the Great Blasket Centre, the museum about life on the Great Blasket Islands that had been closed during our circle tour the previous day.  So, after being on foot all day, we hopped in the car and were off.

Our first stop in the museum was the bookstore, as I was interested in getting a couple of books written by islanders and are Irish classics.  Irish Gaelic was the only language spoken on the Great Blasket Islands, and scholars from all over the world went there to listen and study it.  One lifelong resident of the island, Tomas O’Crohan, also spoke English and spent much time teaching these scholars how to speak and write Irish.  O’Crohan, who was born in 1856 and died in 1937, finally decided to write his own life story, as he saw that the island way of life was slowly dying.  (It was finally evacuated in the mid-1950′s.)  His book is called “The Islandman,” and we bought a copy of it, along with a book by Peig Sayers, another famous Blasket storyteller.

Our scholarly purchases complete, we then toured the museum, which really offered something for everyone.  There were beautiful photographs of the island, the wildlife there, and important people in its history.  We watched a 15-minute film about the island and saw a re-created island home, which defines “rustic.”

The kids found an interactive room that taught Irish words, in which they spent lots of time.  It included a bunch of hopping around, which made it even better.

The museum was also the perfect place to take photos of the islands, the coast, and the ocean.  In the first photo, you can see the remains of the town.

We ended up closing down the museum, which was well worth the effort to see.  On the way back to Dingle, we stopped in a small village called Ballyferriter and grabbed a pub supper at a place called the Ostan Leann Sibeal.  We not only got great food, but also copious amounts of it, so by the time we got back to Dingle, we decided that a walk was in order.

So we headed toward Dingle Harbor and took a scenic walk by the water, through cow and sheep pastures, past a tower folly, and up hills, our final destination being a lighthouse overlooking the water (bottom photo) where Fungie the dolphin lives.  And, believe it or not, Jeff and Charlotte both managed to spot that darn dolphin!  There was a dolphin-spotting boat out on the water, and Fungie evidently popped out briefly for them.  Elijah and I never did see him, much to Elijah’s chagrin.

Here are a few of the highlights of our after-supper walk.

And I can’t forget the wildlife.  The last photo shows a rather worrisome situation for us, as this cow really wanted through that tiny opening and wasn’t very inclined to move out of the way so we could return to our car.  But Jeff the Cow Whisperer took care of it for us.  I think that Charlotte is still convinced that waving your arms, clapping your hands, and shouting a bit is the way to communicate with a cow.

Whew!  What a full day.  When we finally outsmarted the cow and made it back to the car, we headed to the hotel, where we put the kids to bed.  And because we enjoyed the music so much the previous night, Jeff and I decided to find some music this Tuesday night, too.  Murphy’s Pub, right up the street from John Benny Moriarty’s, had advertised a traditional Irish singalong, so we popped in there and grabbed a table.

It was fantastic.  Three people were playing, one man on guitar and vocals, one man on accordion, and one woman who played about five different instruments, including the flute and the bodhran, a goatskin drum.  At one point, the vocalist asked for a volunteer from the audience to sing a number or two, and this elderly Irish gentleman, 80 if he was a day, shuffled forward, took the microphone, and belted out “Hard Times,” inviting all of us to sing along on the chorus.

Again, we stayed about an hour and left feeling as if we had experienced a genuine bit of Ireland.  Good times.

Next time…the Cliffs of Moher, a rousing medieval banquet, and the inevitable countdown to our flight back to the US.  Stay tuned!

Dingle Town is located a bit over 20 miles onto the very scenic Dingle Peninsula, a small strip of land that juts into the Atlantic Ocean.  This peninsula is north of and across a narrow bay from the more famous and bigger Ring of Kerry.  As we were seeking a no-repeat trip for me, we bypassed the Ring and spent our time in Dingle.

Here is a photo of our drive in…beautiful!

Upon arrival in Dingle Town, we had a pressing matter of business: to find a laundromat!  I’ve mentioned several times the discount airlines on which we traveled, which necessitated packing VERY lightly.  We each had about five shirts, five pairs of pants, seven pairs of underwear…you get the picture!  Jeff had a few more clothes because he also had to pack work stuff, but, at this point in the trip, we needed clean clothes!  The guidebook mentioned one place right off the road into Dingle, which we easily found.

Ireland has virtually no self-service laundromats, not that we really wanted to sit around and wash clothes anyway.  Instead, you drop off your laundry and are charged either by load or by weight.  Sometimes, same-day service is available, but, as we arrived mid-afternoon, our laundry wouldn’t be ready until the next morning.  No problem!

With that chore done, we headed off to the Dingle Harbor Lodge, where we had booked a room for the next two nights.  So far, our vacation had taken us to a different hotel each night (not the most relaxing way to travel), so we were more than ready to settle in here for a bit.

Hotels in Dingle can be very expensive, especially in July and August.  But, again with the help of the guidebook, we found the Dingle Harbor Lodge.  It was listed with the hostels, which we have never tried, but it was really closer to a hotel in services and had fantastic prices.  The rooms were simple, but we had an internet connection and a private bathroom, and the hotel was a five-minute walk from everything we wanted to do.  Perfect!

When we checked in, the very friendly desk clerk gave us a map outlining a scenic drive around the peninsula, told us where the live Irish music was that evening, and recommended the Goat Street Cafe for a late lunch/early supper, as we had completely skipped lunch during our shopping marathon and drive to Dingle.

So, off we headed to eat.  The Goat Street Cafe had been swamped that day, so it was almost out of chicken, but the waitress managed to scrape up one serving that our kids could share, while Jeff and I had soup and sandwiches. 

Afterwards, as it was getting on toward 5:00, we had a decision to make.  We really wanted to take the scenic drive around the peninsula, mentioned not only by the hotel clerk, but also by our guidebook.  Even though it had been cloudy for most of the day and raining that morning, the sun had come out in the afternoon, and it was gorgeous outside.  We hated to not take advantage of sunshine in Ireland; add to the mix that the daylight sticks around until 10:30 in the evening, and we decided the driving the peninsula that afternoon was a great idea!

The Slea Head Drive or Dingle Peninsula Circle Tour, whatever you want to call it, is a 30-mile loop, driven in a clock-wise direction, with many points of interest along the way.  Rick Steves’ guidebook is terrific; we zeroed our odometer at a certain landmark and then knew exactly where each of the interesting stops was.  Because of the time of day that we were going, there was virtually no traffic, and we had most of the sights to ourselves.  What could be better?

This tour ended up being a good mix of both historical sights and fun sights.  Scenes from the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman movie, “Far and Away,” were filmed on Dingle, so Rick Steves pointed out the cottage in which the then-married stars lived.  We also got a look at the rocky hill where Tom Cruise’s movie family got burned out of their cottage by the evil landlord.  Here it is.  Fun!

We also stopped at one of the few beaches on Dingle.  The landscape on the Irish coast is rocks, cliffs, and more rocks, with very few “beachy” beaches.  Plus, we had trouble figuring out when anyone might actually swim or laze on a beach here, due to the rain and cold, even in the middle of July.  Charlotte and Elijah ran about a bit while Jeff and I shivered on a bluff.  Definitely not my type of beach, although running on it might be nice!

We next made a couple of historical stops, the first at Fort Dunberg and the second at group of so-called beehive huts.  Fort Dunberg dates from between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D., Ireland’s Iron Age.  It is obviously defensive, perched on the very edge of a steep, dramatic cliff.  It’s a small wonder the whole thing doesn’t blow into the ocean…you can see how windy it was from the kids’ picture!

Ireland is a country dotted with sheep, and it is at Dunberg Fort that we convinced the kids to approach a couple, just for kicks.  The sheep are not vicious, but, in my experience of chasing sheep in Ireland, they will run away as soon as you get close.  Imagine our surprise when these sheep didn’t!  Our city-slicker children were hilarious!  At one point, Elijah turned around and hollered, “Are these sheep trained?”

Yeah, buddy.  Sure they are.

The beehive huts, just a bit up the road, look like stone igloos and were dwellings, probably from the same time period as the fort.  It is amazing how these things were put together…waterproof, windproof, with only a small opening at the top for smoke to escape.  The bottom photo is of the kids down inside one whose top had come off.

Even without the interesting stops, this drive would have been worth it just for the amazing scenery.  The ocean is wild here, smashing against the rocks with great force.  The Great Blasket Islands off in the distance, inhabited until the 1950′s, make one ponder about the difficulty of making a life in such a barren, wild place.  The bottom photo is of Great Blasket Island from the cemetery on the mainland where islanders buried their dead. 

At this point in our drive, we stopped by the Great Blasket Centre, hoping to tour the museum that described life on the desolate islands, but it was closed.  Maybe tomorrow!

We also stopped by the ruined Reasc Monastery, complete with beehive huts, an ancient cemetery, a ruined kiln, and the remains of a church dating from the 6th to 12th centuries.  The stone pillar, however, dates from 500 B.C. and is Celtic, indicating that this site was probably a pagan holy site that Christian monks incorporated into their holy site.  You can see the faint traces of a Christian Celtic cross carved in the top.

At our next stop, we had what was our most maddening experience of the entire trip, and it still makes us grind our teeth to think about it.  We wanted to take a look at the Gallarus Oratory, a 1,300-year-old, early Christian church, one of the best-preserved in Ireland.  We knew from the guidebook that there was supposed to be a public right-of-way to see it.  However, the man who owns the land all around the Oratory built a “visitors center” and charges people for the “right” to walk across his land to look at it.  In order to avoid being drawn and quartered, he also offers a video about the Oratory to add value to his three-euro admission charge.

While Jeff and I have nothing against free enterprise, we also don’t appreciate being taken advantage of.  We told the man we simply wanted to see the Oratory, and, instead of directing us to the public right-of-way, he charged us six euros and sent us on our way.  In retrospect, we should have asked or just left or something, but, since every other way to the Oratory appeared to be closed off or locked up and time was a-passin’, we gritted our teeth and paid.

We walked back to the Oratory, which was an amazing structure.  It is completely waterproof without the benefit of mortar and has a small window facing east.  The views from the church…well, you can see for yourself!

As we left the Oratory, Jeff spotted a small, overgrown path to the right of where we came in and followed it to a very small parking area.  Sure enough, there was the public right-of-way.  We needed to have continued down the road we came in on, instead of stopping at the visitors’ center.  As we left, the man who sold us our tickets was sitting in his car outside (I think he had spotted Jeff discovering the path) with his windows tightly rolled up, making an effort not to look at us.  On our way out, we noticed how neatly this guy had covered up the smaller, government signs with his own signage.

Grrrr.

Oh, well.  Live and learn.

On our way to the first of our two final stops, take a look at what we saw.

Yep.  It’s a big flock of sheep blocking the road in both directions, complete with a farmer in front and a sheepdog in back!  The guidebook promised we would see this at least once if we did any driving in rural Ireland, and sure enough.  It was even more entertaining when a car came from the other direction.  The sheep swerved to avoid the car, and the sheepdog made sure that they kept clear of it by nipping a few stragglers.  Wow!  There’s a genuine Irish experience!

The shepherd actually turned off down the tiny lane that we needed for our next stop, so we followed the sheep to Kilmalkedar, a ruined church with a special pillar in front of it. 

The church and cemetery date from the 12th-century, the pillar from 900 years before that, yet another example of a sacred pagan spot being incorporated into a Christian holy site.  Anyway, some centuries ago, someone drilled a hole through the top of this pillar, and it became a spot where people came to seal deals and “swear to God” by putting their thumbs through either side and touching in the middle.  It’s a rather popular place to renew your marriage vows, if you are so inclined!  So, here we are.

The kids didn’t want to be left out of the sealing-a-deal action, so here they are, although what they were sealing, we’re still not sure!

Three or so hours later, our final stop on the circle tour was another ring fort, circa 1000 B.C.  These forts have survived so well and so long due to local belief that they were “fairy forts.”  While we didn’t see any fairies, we did see a beautiful view and some sheep, one of which was very disgruntled that we chased him from his favored perch.  This fort is literally in someone’s back yard; we could see into their kitchen and dining room from the fort.  I’ll bet they liked that, although they probably take great comfort in the fact we could not walk around this fort without stepping in sheep poop!  Yet again, here is this idea of public right-of-way on obviously private property.

As it started raining in earnest at this fort, we were more than ready to return to Dingle, which we did.  It was now past 8:00, and the kids were hungry again, so we searched down the local Subway…which closed at 6:00!  What?!?!  As we really didn’t want a big, sit-down meal, we found a grocery store and got sandwiches and chips, which we ate back at the Dingle Lodge.

Then, it was bedtime for the kids and music time for me and Jeff.  One thing we both wanted to do while in Ireland was find a local pub and enjoy some traditional Irish music.  Dingle Town is a good place to do this, so off we went to a nearby place called John Benny Moriarty’s, recommended again by both the guidebook and our hotel clerk.

At John Benny’s, we grabbed a table and had the privilege of listening to Tommy O’Sullivan, an Irish singer who has actually recorded professionally.  We had a drink and stayed for about an hour, purchasing a CD before we left.  I’ll tell you, Irish pubs are really not about drinking, although plenty of that goes on.  Irish pubs are about listening to music, meeting new people, and having great conversation.

Along those lines, we had a bizarre, small-world experience at John Benny’s that night.  A guy wearing an orange Illinois jacket sat down at the table next to us.  Between songs, Jeff leaned over and asked him if he was from Illinois.  Turns out, he and his family live in Bloomington, which many of you know is about a 30- or 45-minute drive from Peoria.  They were on vacation and would shortly be heading to Dublin to listen to his nieces play in some sort of traditional Irish music fest.  His wife had stayed in the hotel with their son, who was 12.  (We didn’t share that we’d left our seven- and nine-year-old in the hotel.)

Too strange, but quite lovely!

Around 11:00, we headed back to the hotel, where we found our kids sound asleep.  We were definitely loving Ireland!

Next time…spending the day in Dingle Town.  Can anyone say, “Golf?”

You may or may not know that I had actually visited Ireland, Wales, Northern England, and Scotland in 1997, back when I was teaching high school English in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  My good friend and fellow teacher, Gina McClanahan, organized an EF Tour, one of those big-bus trips designed for school groups, and she let me have one of the free spots on it.  (For every six people that signed up, someone went for free.)  It was a fantastic trip, one that I still remember fondly, and a large part of the reason that I wanted to share these places with Jeff and the kids.

We were actually going to try to replicate the trip but quickly figured out that Scotland had to go, unless we wanted to spend all of our time driving and very little actually relaxing.  Everywhere of interest in Scotland is just too far away from the rest of what we wanted to see, so we decided to save that for later.

Because of my previous trip, or perhaps in spite of it, we worked hard on an itinerary that would not totally repeat what I’d done before.  After all, what fun is that?!

So, I say all of this to say that we managed to take this trip with only one repeated visit for me…the Blarney Woolen Mills in Blarney, Ireland.

In spite of what the name may imply, Blarney Woolen Mills is not a cool, educational place to learn about making sweaters.  It is a huge retail center, geared to big busloads of tourists, that sells everything Irish.  It is one-stop shopping for all of your Irish souvenir needs.

Yep.  This is the one place we chose to repeat from my 1997 trip.

On Monday morning, Day Six of our great adventure, we ate another huge breakfast and drove ten minutes from Cork to Blarney.  Because we had squeezed in our distillery tour the previous afternoon, we sort of had a free morning.  We could have headed straight to Dingle Town, a two- or so hour drive, but we couldn’t check in to our hotel until mid-afternoon.  Or we could spend the morning shopping.  We opted for the latter!

We are not big shoppers, but I wanted a couple of small pieces of Irish Belleek pottery, and, as we had cut Northern Ireland out of our itinerary when we cut out Scotland, I could not actually buy the pottery at the Belleek factory.  So, in we went.

I think that we were probably the only people in there who hadn’t gotten off a bus, and I would be surprised if anyone but the salespeople was not American.  But we didn’t let this ruin our fun.  We ended up spending a good two hours here, especially after discovering that the store was running a huge sale on Irish-made sweaters.

Anyway, I found two small Belleek serving pieces, an oval-shaped mint tray and a shamrock-shaped divided dish.  Belleek pottery is sold world-wide; the classic stuff is white with delicate green shamrocks painted on it.  I think some of the more modern stuff doesn’t have the shamrocks, but I wanted something that said “Ireland,” so shamrocks it was!

While I was pottery shopping, Jeff was keeping the kids far, far away in the Irish souvenir section.  (Elijah can break something by looking at it, so we try to avoid taking him into places where fragile things are.)  Elijah had a few euros left to spend, and Ireland was his last chance to do so.  We told him that this would be his best chance to find himself something nice to take back to the States, and, by the time I rejoined my family, Elijah had made his selections: a stuffed bear in an “Ireland” t-shirt for himself and two small stuffed animals for his sister.

Yes, Elijah used his own money to buy Charlotte two souvenirs.  Given the love-fight relationship that Charlotte and Elijah have, I have to admit I was a bit surprised, but it did my heart good.  Elijah is a genuinely compassionate child, and I think he wanted to share his good fortune with one of his favorite people.  Charlotte, who was out of euros and struggles with being grateful, was touched and kept thanking him.

(Another example of his soft-heartedness…When we were in Michigan, my mom, who has had custody of our cats for the duration of our time in France, told me that Sam, our flame-point Himalayan, had died on June 25.  Yep, same day as Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.  Not a good day.  When we told the kids, Elijah, to whom Sam never really warmed, burst into tears and told us, “Now I will never have a chance to be friends with him!”  It was sad.)

After the kids were properly souvenired up, Jeff and I moved to the clothing section to look at the Irish woolen sweaters, which are beautiful.  I am allergic to wool, so I wasn’t very optimistic about actually finding anything, but there were a couple of blended items that were designed to be worn over other clothing, which I could tolerate.

One item was the beautiful wrap pictured below.  (I lifted the picture from www.blarney.com/blarneyshop.htm .)  I loved it on the hanger, and then I tried to put it on.  I swear, this piece of clothing is an Irish intelligence test!  I could not get it on properly, no matter how hard I tried.  Jeff came over, and, when he stopped laughing at me, he couldn’t help me either!  In my feeble defense, I saw another woman with the exact same problem a couple days later at another Blarney Woolen Mills, strangely-enough located  in Limerick.  I ultimately decided that I had no business buying an article of clothing that I couldn’t figure out how to wear, so I settled for a more traditional cardigan.  Yeesh.

Jeff also purchased a sweater, but he didn’t have any trouble figuring out how to wear it.  Jeff also picked Elijah out an adorable newspaper boy’s cap, and I found Charlotte some sheep pajamas.

And voila!  All of our Irish souvenir shopping was done!

Around noon, we stuffed our new goodies into our already packed car, and we were off to Dingle.  No, we didn’t go kiss the Blarney Stone at nearby Blarney Castle.  I actually did this on my first trip to Ireland, but Jeff and the kids just weren’t interested.  If you think about it too long, it is pretty disgusting.  Rick Steves describes it as “spit- and lipstick-slathered.”  And specter of swine flu hovers over all.  Ick.  No kissing strange stones.

On to Dingle Town!

Before I go back to Ireland (at least in blogland!), I’ll give you another quick update.

We bought a car on Saturday!  We kept the van when we went to France but had gotten rid of the Nissan Pathfinder.  Jeff wanted a Japanese-make, manual transmission, four-door vehicle, and those specs greatly narrow down the choices, as only about five percent of cars manufactured for the US are stick shifts.

Anyway, we visited a couple of dealerships on Friday, and someone at the Nissan dealership told us that there was a huge used-car sale in East Peoria, something like 600 cars, and that was where all of the dealership’s used cars were at the moment.  On Saturday afternoon, we headed out to the sale and managed to land with a salesman who loves manual transmission cars and had driven the only three on the lot that fit Jeff’s specifications.  (How’s that for God working in amazing ways?!)

Four hours and three test drives later, we left with a 2006 Subaru Forester with low miles.  We had tried to get the price of a Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V down into our budget, but the manager just couldn’t do it.  Jeff is a bit bummed about not having a Nissan this time, especially that Spec-V, but the Subaru is a very nice car, so we’re satisfied!

That is one huge thing off our shoulders.  Now to get the house finished up!

Back to the Emerald Isle…

The Irish are famous for two contributions to the world of alcohol…Guinness and whiskey.  You cannot travel anywhere in Ireland without seeing neon Guinness and Jameson signs in the windows of nearly every pub.  And both of these companies export only 50 percent of their product, which means that half of the Guinness and whiskey brewed in Ireland stays in and is consumed in Ireland.

Those numbers are mind boggling.

So, we decided that a trip to Ireland wasn’t really complete without a tour of a whiskey distillery, and the guidebook said that the Old Midleton Distillery provided the best experience.  So, when we finished up at the Rock of Cashel, we motored toward Cork, where we would spend the night, ten miles away from the village of Midleton.

Our original plan had been to head straight to our hotel, relax for the evening, and then visit the distillery first thing Monday morning.  However, we spent less time at the Rock of Cashel than anticipated, and we actually had time to take the tour on Sunday afternoon, if we went straight there.  So we decided to go for it and arrived just after 4:00 p.m.  The next English tour was scheduled to leave in 40 minutes, so we bought our tickets, checked out the gift store, and wandered outside a bit, enjoying the sunshine, as it probably wouldn’t last!

When the bell announcing the tour rang, we gathered in the lobby to wait for our guide.  This is when we discovered that there were lots of Americans in this group, including one very loud family.  This in itself wasn’t weird, but, when we saw this same family three days later in another part of Ireland, that was a bit strange!

Our tour consisted of a video explaining the founding and history of Jameson whiskey and then a guided walk through the old distillery.  No tours are allowed in the new, modern distillery, which we could see from the historical buildings, but we did get a lesson in how Irish whiskey was created once upon a time.

Here are a few interesting highlights.  Below is the five-story grain storage building, with specially reinforced floors to hold the weight of the grain.  This building didn’t have an elevator of any type for many years, so the bags of barley were carried to the upper levels by hand.

This distillery has one of the largest waterwheels in Ireland, used to bring in the water used for the whiskey.

This Old Jameson distillery is also home to the largest pot still in the world; it holds 32,000 gallons of whiskey.

The kids each had the chance to ring the bell close to the pot still and to try on some old-fashioned fire helmets.

We also learned that Jameson whiskey is triple-distilled and stored only in oak barrels, which creates a smooth, distinctive taste (although I believe “smooth” is a highly subjective term!), and then aged for anywhere from five to 18 years.  Below is a photo of Jameson whiskey at different stages of aging…from left to right: newly distilled, one year, five years, 12 years, and 18 years.  A bottle of 18-year Jameson will set you back 150 euros.  No joke.

We ended the tour in the Jameson Bar, a shot of whiskey or a soft drink included in the price of admission.  But wait!  Our tour guide also asked for eight volunteers to participate in a tasting of the three most famous types of whiskey, Irish, Scotch, and the American Jack Daniels. 

Jeff got picked!  So, he got to try all three types, although in admittedly small quantities!  (He didn’t finish any of the shots.  It WAS just a taste test!)  Apparently, Scotch whisky (yes, it is spelled differently) is created over peat fires, which give it a distinctively smoky flavor.  Jack Daniels is corn-based whiskey, single-distilled, which gives it a very different flavor from barley-based whiskeys.

So, here is Jeff, official Jameson taster!  He even got a personalized certificate.

The kids stuck with soft drinks, and I tried the whiskey.  I could only choke down about two sips, the first of which I took straight and the second in which I’d dumped a bunch of ice.  As I said earlier, “smooth” is a relative term.  I think we were sampling five- to seven-year stuff, and two swallows was more than enough to figure out that whiskey is not for me.  But it was fun to tour the distillery and give it a try!

And do you remember our original plan of visiting this place first thing in the morning?  Ha!  I can’t even imagine drinking something like this at 10:00 a.m.  I’m glad we made a late-afternoon tour!

When we finished up, we headed to our Cork bed and breakfast, the Belvedere Lodge.  Again, we were pleasantly surprised with the size of the family room, and the proprietor recommended a couple of restaurants in downtown Cork.  As it was Sunday, we were able to park for free on the street and walk to the Newport Cafe, where we had supper, and I enjoyed a fish-and-chips meal for the first time!

Then, it was off to bed.  The next day: shopping in Blarney and the enchanting Dingle Peninsula.

Because we were to arrive so late in Dublin on Saturday evening, we had decided that we would wait until Sunday morning to retrieve our rental car from the airport.  So after checking out and bidding good riddance to Bewleys, we rode the shuttle back to the airport, hoping to quickly grab our rental car and be on our way.

Ha!

Once at the airport, Jeff dashed inside to fill in the paperwork.  He found out that the rental car pickup area was off-site, necessitating another shuttle ride to actually retrieve the car.

No problem.  We pushed our luggage over to the rental car shuttle area, where we waited and waited and waited for our particular van.  Finally, it arrived, we loaded in, and off we went.  When we finally arrived at the parking lot, Jeff went in to get our keys, and then we were treated to an unpleasant surprise…the red, banged-up, Mitsubishi piece of garbage that was to be our transportation for the next six days.

I’ll say up front that we did sign up for an economy car.  After all, we were traveling very lightly due to our two legs on discount airlines, and you really just don’t want a big car in Ireland, anyway.  We had specified four doors but little beyond that, and our rental car in England had been perfect, with plenty of trunk space and a comfortable ride for all of us.

Not so with this car!  Jeff had the existing-damage report and quickly discovered that 75 percent of the dents, scratches, and dings on the car were not marked, including a really big and noticeable one on one of the rear passenger doors.  We had a bit of trouble identifying damage through the grime and dirt on the car, as it appeared to have not been washed since the last usage.  The inside was clean enough, but the trunk was miniscule, which meant that, until we could combine the contents of our bags at the hotel that evening, the kids and I had to sit with a bunch of stuff at our feet.  It also had over 120,000 km on it!

The car simply didn’t look safe.  Jeff stomped back inside to ask about it, and the guy responded, “Oh, yeah, it’s been serviced, it’s completely safe, yeah” without even coming outside.  We have friends who had a rental car break down on them in Ireland, so, of course, that’s all I could think about!

Fuming, we finally managed to get our stuff crammed into the car, Jeff turned in the modified damage report, which the guy inside didn’t even look at, and we headed away.  Before we had been on the road long, we discovered that the radio didn’t work and that the car had no cruise control or air conditioning.  The latter wasn’t a big deal because it wasn’t hot, but no cruise control got very old very fast for Jeff with how much driving he did.  The next morning, we discovered that the left rear tire was low.  At the service station, a kid checked our tires and told us that that one was pretty much flat.

Welcome to Ireland!  After Bewleys and the rental car agency, we weren’t having warm and fuzzy feelings about this place!

Nevertheless, Jeff grimly said, “I’m not going to let this ruin my vacation.  This will be funny soon.”  I think I gave him a sidelong dirty look because we were on the road nearly an hour longer before I calmed down!

But Jeff was right.  It was early days in Ireland, and we WERE going to enjoy this country, and, as I like to tell my kids, attitude is everything.  Onward and forward!

Our first stop in Ireland was the Rock of Cashel, a striking church ruin rising out of the Plain of Tipperary.  We arrived around lunchtime, so we first went to a place called Granny’s Kitchen and enjoyed soup and sandwiches.  Thus fortified, we climbed up to the Rock.

There has been something on this site since ancient times, but the Rock of Cashel is most famous for being the place where St. Patrick baptized an Irish king in 450 A.D., ushering Christianity into this area of Ireland.  It served as a cathedral, complete with its own archbishop, until the mid-1700′s, when cathedral status was transferred to a church in town.  After all, the Rock of Cashel was neither comfortable or hospitable, as it was originally a defensive stronghold, so the archbishop was happy to move to more congenial surroundings.  Naturally, the abandoned Rock fell into the ruins that we can visit today.

We got our first lesson in the changeability of Ireland’s weather at the Rock of Cashel.   We’d heard all the old sayings and saw even more before we left Ireland:  “There is no bad weather in Ireland, only inappropriate clothing”;”It rained twice last week, once for three days and once for four”; and the classic, “Don’t like the weather?  Stick around for five minutes.”  Ireland is very much a country of rain with bursts of sunshine…or perhaps, sunshine with bursts of rain, depending on a person’s relative optimism!

At the Rock of Cashel, we were happily walking around under blue skies and sunshine, when we felt the first drops of rain.  Before we could get our rain gear out, the drops of rain had turned into a torrential downpour.  No sooner did we get our rain gear on, the sun was back out and the skies were blue again.  I think this happened twice during the 45 minutes we were there!

In any case, here are some pictures of the cool things we saw.  This is a replica of St. Patrick’s cross; the original, dating from the 12th century is in the adjacent museum, moved inside to protect it from the elements.

This is what remains of the cathedral.

This is a very cool cemetery, full of Celtic crosses.  People are still buried here…as long as their names were put on the waiting list in the 1930′s!  Once all of those people die, the cemetery will be officially full.

At the base of the Rock is the ruined Hore Abbey, against the Tipperary Plains.  Before we left, we let the kids climb on the exterior rocks, something they had been begging to do since we arrived…but as it started raining again, they didn’t climb for long.

 

While we got wet and nearly blown away by the strong wind, we enjoyed our visit here.  It was a good way to break up our trip from Dublin to Cork, where we were to learn all about the making of Irish whiskey at a tour of the Old Midleton Distillery.

And I’ll tell you about that next time!