I’m proud of Julia and Sydney. They decided to tackle Dublin on their own today, and it sounds as if they did a magnificent job of it. They got to the National Museum of Ireland when it opened, and took their time looking at bog people and hoards of gold and what-all the museum has. They then went to the National Gallery of Ireland, to which Mer and I haven’t been yet. They said it was really good. At one of the museums (I think it was the art museum), they made a friend of one of the room guards, Gerard, with whom they chatted for some time. The gift of the gab is rubbing off on them! They tried to finish the day with the eclectic Chester Beatty Library and/or Dublin Castle (both are in the same area), but both were closed today for some reason. On the whole, though, they had a great daytime of touring.

Meredith, Dubbs, and I walked over the Liffey River a short ways to a recreation of an Irish famine ship, the Jeanie Johnston. The rebuilt ship is seaworthy and sailed to Canada and the US back in the early 2000s and then was used by the Irish navy for training, before Dublin bought it and turned it into a museum. The Johnston was chosen as the ship to rebuild because no one ever died on board the ship, with a total of over two thousand passengers on her various voyages. Even when the original ship sank later as a cargo ship, the crew was rescued after over a week of seeing the ship become more and more waterlogged and slowly sinking during a storm.

When the potato blight hit the Irish fields in the mid-1840s, the crop failed. Of eight million people Ireland, one million starved and one million left. The ones who left mostly went to North America aboard ships like the Johnston. Most ships had remote owners who were trying to make money, and conditions on ships were poor, which led to the death of one in four passengers. The Johnston was owned by a local owner who knew many of the passengers, so he did what small things he could to improve conditions — he had a doctor on board, he turned away and refunded tickets for anyone who was sick, he required that passengers spend at least thirty minutes a day on deck for air and sun, and he made sure the crew emptied the chamber buckets below decks multiple times each day. The captain himself would go down below decks to visit and cheer the passengers. It seemed to make a difference.

After the ship tour, we walked over to the 14 Henrietta Street museum, which is a museum dedicated to a Georgian house on Henrietta Street, a cul-de-sac of brick houses that were fashionable and expensive in the 1700s. The house was owned by a wealthy family who entertained lavishly. Several of the front rooms have been restored, although there is little furniture in them. After about fifty years, the house became a law office, and then was converted into a tenement house, with the huge home being split into seventeen one- to three-room apartments. The move was good-hearted as a way to solve Dublin’s over-crowding as people moved from the country to the city. The landlord installed gas lighting, running water in the basement, and flushing toilets in the back. It was all considered modern, and so rents were fairly high. To help offset the costs, families had extended family members move in or sublet rooms in the apartments, so that by around 1900, there were over one hundred people living in the house (and that didn’t count “the unfortunate poor” who slept in the stairwell and weren’t counted by the census). As late as the 1970s, there was a family of eight living in one room in the house. Two of the apartments of the house have been restored to how they looked during the tenement days. One was squalid, and one seemed tidy (if cramped). Both have been reconstructed based on scraps of paint, wallpaper, and linoleum that were found on site, as well as interviews with former residents who grew up there in the forties and fifties.

We then grabbed a light lunch and took a cab up to Ireland’s National Cemetery, where almost 1.5 million people are buried, with about 200,000 monuments. I have never seen so many large Celtic crosses before. Multiple famous Irish people are buried there, and we sought out a few. We looked for the writers — the Irish poet and playwright Brendan Behan and the poet/priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as Maud Gonne MacBride, who was a close friend to Yeats. Mostly, we enjoyed wandering and looking at headstones that caught our eye for the beauty of the memorial or for the inscriptions on them. There’s the tallest round tower in Ireland in the cemetery, and several general memorials (including a very moving one from the French to honor the Irish who fought for French causes). It may seem weird to tour a cemetery, but the three of us enjoyed it.

We met back up with Sydney and Julia at the hotel before going out for a quick grab-and-eat supper so we could make our 7:00 time for the National Leprechaun Museum’s presentation of “Dark Tales” — adult versions of Irish folk tales. Mer and I had done this a year ago, and it was a delight again. I love good storytelling, and we heard about banshees and a man who invited the dead to a party, and one or two warring magicians, and more. It was a full hour of stories, and it flew by.

From there we walked back home. That ends the Irish adventure for this time. We leave for the airport in the morning. Dubbs is going to go to the EPIC Irish emigration museum because her flight leaves later than ours, but we’ll go straight to the airport. Ireland and the Irish people have once again been very kind to us, and I hope we can all get back someday. Tomorrow is the long eighteen-plus-hour trip home, but at least we have good company for the journey, with much to recap and discuss.

Happy Thanksgiving! We are very grateful for the stay we had in Derry the last few days. We had multiple pleasant interactions with Irish people, and our hosts at our B and B were superb. We’ve had good health so far on the trip, and the weather has been much better than the days of solid rain we had seen in the forecast when coming to Ireland. So far, so good. But we’re not done yet!

We left Derry late in the morning and headed south toward Dublin. After a three-hour drive and a last-minute detour due to a closed bridge, we arrived at the Battle of the Boyne visitors’ center. As the Battle of the Boyne continued the story we saw beginning with the siege of Derry, I thought it would be a good sight to visit. We needed something that we could see in a couple of hours and that was close to Dublin, and Boyne fit the bill. Plus, Meredith and I hadn’t seen it on our last trip to the valley a year and a half ago, so it was new to all of us.

The visitors’ center is a small, but well-done, presentation of a very important battle about which I hadn’t known much of anything. The deposed Catholic king of England, James II, got French support to land troops in southern Ireland. France was hoping England would get tied up and leave France alone to go conquer things. William of Orange, a Protestant king of England who had deposed James II with the approval of Parliament, arrived in the north of Ireland with his troops. The two forces met at the Boyne River, and after William’s near brush with death from a very near miss of a cannon, William of Orange’s troops beat James’ army, and so Catholic Ireland lost an ally, and France had to deal with England messing around on the continent.

We petted a kitty outside the cafe (so cute) and then ate lunch before going into the center. The map room was offline, so that was a little disappointing, since I love an animated light map. But there was a fifteen-minute film explaining the events of the day, and a docent went outside with us to point out important places from the main battle. We walked along one path to a marker explaining where a small town had been, and then went back to the car another way.

Since we had a little time, I decided to try to squeeze in seeing a ruined abbey that was nearby. We had to go around the same under-repair bridge, so it took a bit longer than it should have, and when we finally found it in a cow field, there was a fence around it with the gates zip-tied shut. Not my finest tour-leader moment.

We headed off to the Dublin Airport to return our car and meet up with our friend Dubbs. Dubbs is spending a year or more studying in England, and she was kind enough to fly over to Dublin to spend a couple of days with us. We returned the car with no issues, and Dubbs met up with us after only a few minutes of our waiting. Since there were five of us, we took a taxi into Dublin to our hotel. It was much easier than dealing with a bus and walking while dealing with luggage.

Once we dumped the luggage, we walked over to the Temple Bar area, which is a happening place for bars and food. We finally found a quiet place next to a hotel where we could eat and still talk, and we got caught up some on Dubbs’ adventures of late. After supper, we walked to Grafton Street (with a quick detour to get a photo op with the statue of Molly Malone of Irish song fame), which is the main shopping street of Dublin, because we were pretty sure it would be all lit up with pretty lights. It was. We walked the length of the street and then headed back home to the hotel.

It’s been good to spend time with Sydney and Julia, and it was fun to add Dubbs to the mix, and Meredith, of course, is my favorite travel companion. I’m so very thankful that I have quality people in my life.

One of the great benefits to being in a (mostly) English-speaking country (some accents are impenetrable) is the ability for monolingual me to communicate. Based on my firm grasp of my native tongue, I’m able to get local recommendations from, well, locals. That superpower is what led me to tour the Inishowen Peninsula yesterday. Today I knew we were going to tour the northern coast (the Antrim Coast), but I added a stop to our agenda based on the recommendation of our B and B host, who had asked after what we were doing today. He said stopping at Downhill to see the bishop’s house (Downhill House) and temple would be worthwhile, and he was right.

It took about an hour to get to Downhill, and we arrived in a soft misting rain. We could see a large ruin of a house on the top of a rise, but we walked into the walled garden instead, based almost solely on the presence of bathrooms on the far side of the garden. There was little to see in the garden — it is mainly the home of several apple trees and picnic tables — but it did get us to the bathrooms and a pretty dovecote (a house for doves), and, more importantly, it took us to a side path that bypassed the ruined house and took us to the Mussenden Temple, which the Earl-Bishop had built as a library to house his books. Fun fact — because of the damp of Ireland, he had a fire going year-round in the basement of the temple to keep his books dry.

The temple is built to look like a Greek temple in miniature, and it sits right on the edge of a rather dramatic sea cliff overlooking a couple of miles of beaches. It used to be further from the cliff (they could drive a carriage around it), but the cliff eroded, and it’s only a few feet now from the edge. The rain had stopped for us, but the wind was whipping, and the waves were crashing impressively into the beach. The temple was connected by a long path to the main house, which is where we headed. The back of the house looked like a castle with battlements. There were a few cars and trucks in the entrance for workers, and so that way was closed. I thought the house would be closed, but we wanted to see the front. Sydney and Julia took a crushed gravel path around to the right, and Mer and I took the wetter but less windy way around to the left, and we met in the front, which was decorated in a Georgian style (think classical homes) instead of like the castle in back. The main stairs to the house were intact, and the front of the house was open. In we went.

The house had been lived in until the 1920s, and was used as a barracks during World War II, and was finally abandoned in 1945. So it’s been less than eighty years since the place was given up, and there is now no roof anywhere, no windows, no doors, no upper floors, no stairs, and even some of the walls are missing. It always amazes me how quickly a house “knows” no one is living there and falls apart. Still, the house was picturesque and grand in a ruined way, and several of the rooms were still labeled as to what they were, and we think based on open space that the house must have had a large interior courtyard. We wandered around quite a bit before heading back to the car. It had been a great recommendation.

We drove on to a highlight of the coast and one of Julia’s bucket-list items, the Giant’s Causeway. The Causeway is a series of forty thousand hexagon-shaped columns that protrude up from the ground between the cliffs and down into the sea. The Causeway was obviously built as a bridge by the giant Finn McCool to go fight a Scottish giant so that Finn wouldn’t have to get wet on the trip over. There are even similar rocks in Scotland, so that’s proof positive of the causeway’s having been giant-built.

We had a tip from the internet, backed by the recommendation of our host, to park at the Causeway Hotel instead of at the next-door visitors’ center. The hotel charges ten pounds for parking, and the receipt acts as a voucher for ten pounds off eating in the tearoom, which we knew we would do, so it was like free parking. You can walk from the parking lot to the road to the Causeway by walking over the green-space roof of the visitors’ center, and you can even use free restrooms on the hotel grounds. It’s an amazing deal when you consider that the official parking lot charges 12.50 pounds per person, or, in our case, a staggering total of almost fifty pounds (sixty-three dollars). Somehow the Rick Steves guidebook didn’t mention this hotel lot option, so I mention it instead.

We chose to walk down the road/sidewalk to the Causeway. There is a bus that costs one pound each, but we all wanted to see the sights along the way, and we would take the bus back up the hill. That was the right choice. The path slowly revealed different parts of the coast, and the waves were mighty. I asked a ranger, on a scale of one to ten, how active the sea was today. He said, “On a scale of one to ten, don’t go in.” The waves were great.

We took a ton of photos on the way down and then got to the causeway. There are three causeways, with the first being shorter and smaller, the middle being bigger and longer, and the last one being huge – both tall and long. We all climbed on the first one, and went down to the last one. Sydney, in her words, “chose life” and sat on a bench looking at the pretty. Meredith, Julia, and I climbed up to where two rangers were standing, chatted with them a bit, and then walked out to near the end of the causeway. While were were out there, the wind picked up even more. It was a wild place. We stayed for a bit, and then made our way back just as it started to rain again, this time a little harder. We got on the bus and headed back to the top of the hill, where we left the visitors’ center crowd and made our way to the tearoom. It was warm and cozy and decked out for Christmas, and we got some light food (scones and cookie bars) that were delightful. In all, our parking and food came in around thirty-three pounds, or seventeen pounds less than parking alone would have been in a different parking lot. We were very pleased.

It was getting late now, around 3:00, and we headed off to the next sight, the Carrick-a-rede rope bridge, which is a rope bridge to a scenic island. I figured it would be so, but the bridge was closed because of high winds, and we weren’t even allowed down to see it. I reset the tourist compass to go south about twenty minutes, to go to the Dark Hedges. The Hedges are a dual row of trees on each side of a road, and they are thick and tall enough to cover the road over. It’s a pretty sight on its own (it’s been featured twice on our Ireland page-a-day calendar), but it was also the backdrop for an important scene in the fantasy show Game of Thrones, of which Julia is a huge fan. She was pretty excited. Sadly, part of the road was closed for construction, but we still got to see much of it, and got a few fan photos for Julia. That was satisfying.

The drive back to Derry was long, as it was in the dark and had on-and-off rain, but we got home a little before 6:00. After regrouping (and letting me calm my frazzled driving nerves), we headed out for supper at an excellent restaurant just inside the old city walls, but on the far side (from us) part of the walls. After supper, Mer and I walked the walls the long way around to see them at night, and Julia and Sydney went home the quicker way.

Since the walls dumped us only a block from the pub to which we had been last night, I suggested we check it out again to see if there was different music on tonight. There was, and so we took a seat at the end of the bar, and we were happily confused. Last night the crowd was there to talk and to drink, and several parties were quite tipsy and loud. Tonight, the crowd was quiet and mostly listening to the music, and no one seemed to be drinking too much. My theory is that for the pub, the “weekend” is from Thursday to Tuesday, so we hit it on a quieter working night. We stayed for about half an hour and heard two different songs about Derry that we knew, as well as a Scottish song and several covers of American songs. It’s an odd thing to watch two middle-aged Irish women waltz to “Rhinestone Cowboy” in a pub, but it was a fun way to end the evening. After all, always trust the locals — they know more than you do.

Today I made the bold decision to go “OR” — Off Rick. Mer is fond of Rick Steves guidebooks, and they have stood us in good stead, but every once in a while, I want to go somewhere Rick doesn’t go. A local man strongly recommended the Inishowen Peninsula, which is what is north of Derry. I had been eyeing that trip anyway, and we had never been there before, so with a local’s endorsement, I decided to spend the day exploring there. We managed to get to about half of what I wanted to do. Next time.

We managed to get out of town and into the country (and to actual Ireland) pretty quickly with the help of the GPS. It sent me down increasingly small roads until it told me to turn into someone’s field, which was clearly wrong. I swapped over to my travel phone instead, and that got us where we were going – the reconstructed ring fort Grianan of Aileach. The fort is situated on top of a hill overlooking multiple mountains, a river, an island, and a lough, so we were already impressed just from the parking lot. The original ring fort was constructed around 600 or so, but legend has it that it was mostly destroyed around 1100. The fort was rebuilt in the mid-1800s by a well-meaning archeologist, but the method would probably appall most scientists today, who seem to favor preservation of ruined sites. At any rate, as a tourist, I appreciated the ring fort, as it was where I could climb the walls and look all about. It may be less pure, but is more functional than a thousand-year-old pile of rocks.

We took a ton of pictures and enjoyed the views. We lingered for some time up there and walked all around the fort, both inside and out. We then headed north to our next destination, the town of Buncrana. The town is right on Lough Swilly, with a pretty beach and paved walking trails along the water. The lough has many small mountains spilling down into it, so it was also a pretty place to be. We walked north for three quarters of a mile so I could see a stone bridge, and along the way, we discovered were were on the “Amazing Grace Trail” — a walking trail with signs that told the story of John Newton, the former slave trader who wrote “Amazing Grace” and fought to end slavery in England. I got treated to the hymn in three-part harmony from my traveling companions.

As we approached the bridge, we stopped next to a parking lot to take pictures, and a woman got out of her car to come over to us. She recognized us from the small church we attended on Sunday, and we were in the same parking lot in the same lightly populated northern part of Donegal at the same time. That was amusing. She recommended we go over the bridge and walk along the lough some more, which we did. The views of the sun off the water were especially good, but we only went less than a mile along the trail, since it seemed to go on for some ways.

That left a hefty walk back to the car, so we stopped at a snack shop in the parking area to use the bathroom and grab some candy bars. The woman at the till continued our experience of meeting gregarious Irish folk who were very kind to us and loved chatting. Fortified with sugar, we found our way back to the car to head up to our next sight, which had been recommended by our saleswoman — Fort Dunree.

Fort Dunree is a fort built in the late 1700s by the English to protect the harbor against the French. It was an active fort for the British through World War I and even into the 1930s as part of the agreement that created the Republic of Ireland, but in the 1930s, the fort was handed over to the Irish, who staffed it during World War II to keep the fighting nations from messing around with neutral Ireland’s waterways. Sometime after that, the fort was decommissioned, and the small army town of wood and aluminum huts around the fort have fallen into disrepair, and multiple signs warned us that we wandered the area at our own risk.

The lower fort is still intact as a museum, but as it was late, we skipped it. Meredith, Julia, and I walked down to some lower pill boxes for the views while Sydney contented herself with viewing the pretty from a bench by the fort. After we looked around, I wandered up a path into the old army town area, and saw the upper fort higher up on the hill. Julia asked if that’s where we were headed, and I nodded, of course. Meredith and Julia are game souls.

The upper fort was worth the climb. We not only got great views of the mountains on the opposite shore of the fort, but we also got to see a long crescent beach towered over by a rocky mountain that was on the far side of the fort hill and couldn’t be seen from below. We stood up there to listen to the silence, broken only by the distant sound of the waves crashing on the beach below.

Back down to the car and on to our next sight, which was more of an experience. I wanted to drive over the Gap of Mamore, which isn’t towering, at eight hundred feet tall, but is very dramatic as you go down the north side of the gap. We stopped at a pull-off near the top and spent a decent amount of time there looking at the sea and small town below and the mountains all around. And the sheep. There are always sheep. We stopped again part way down for different views.

By now, we were running out of daylight. One of the downsides of traveling in Ireland in November is that it gets quite dark by about 4:30. I programmed the GPS to take us thirty minutes away to a circle of ancient standing stones. We almost made it. My phone GPS had us walking into someone’s back yard and field, so I knocked at the door to ask about the stones. A very pleasant lady answered and told us where it was, and invited us back to her gallery when we were done. I wasn’t fully sure of her directions, and the light was really failing, so we stuck around to see her art.

Mary works with bog wood. That is wood dug out of peat bogs when someone digs up turf to burn. Bog wood can take up to five years to dry, but then Mary carves it based on shapes that were suggested by the wood. The results are fairly abstract in most cases, but she had some representative pieces as well. We liked her work and bought a small necklace to use as a Christmas tree ornament.

That ended the Inishowen Peninsula tour, and a thirty-minute (occasionally tense) drive brought us back to Derry, where we got supper. We went back home, and after a short break, Mer and I went to a local pub to see if they had music tonight. They did — a solo singer who played guitar. Julia and Sydney decided to stay cozy at the B and B, but Mer and I stayed at the pub for about an hour. We were very pleased to have gotten to some live music.

Tomorrow will be mostly Rick-led as we explore the scenic Antrim coast. We’ve continued to have mostly rain-free weather, which opens up the outdoor options nicely. Here’s hoping for more beauty as we putter around the island.

One of the reasons we travel is being there. It’s easier to understand why England was afraid of what was going on in France when you are in Dover and can see France just twenty-three miles away. You can understand why Venice was a maritime power when you are surrounded by water everywhere in the city. You can see why the Scots would flee to the remote Highlands when threatened by the English. And being in Derry, I was able to make a little more sense out of “The Troubles” and of the song “The Town I Loved So Well” and of the newer show Derry Girls.

We got underway today about 10:00, starting with a tour of the mile-long circuit of the 350-year-old still-intact city walls. Meredith was narrating out of her usual trusty guidebook by Rick Steves. The walls are now a strolling place for anyone, but from the 1970s until about 2005, they were closed to the public, as the British patrolled the walls, especially to keep an eye on the Catholic Bogside area below the walled part of the city. More on that in a bit.

For those who don’t know or remember, “The Troubles” is a term used to describe the tension and violence that were in Northern Ireland between (mostly pro-Irish) Catholics and (mostly pro-English) Protestants. The Troubles were mainly active from 1970 or so to the late 1990s, with the British finally removing most troops by 2005 or so. Derry/Londonderry was a hotspot for the Troubles, but happily, peace has more or less been the norm for over twenty years now. May it long continue.

Anyway, we were a short way into our wall walk, and just beginning to learn about how the Catholic King James II laid siege to the Protestant stronghold of Derry, when it began to rain hard enough for us to think about inside options. We headed over to the Siege Museum, where we learned the story of the siege that was started when a group of young apprentice men took things in their own hands and shut the city gates on the approaching army, which sparked the will to resist from the town and started a 105-day siege by the English forces that was eventually commanded by the king himself. It was only broken when two relief ships managed to fight up the river to relieve the city, just before the twenty thousand people inside the walls, who’d been eating mice and rats and were on the brink of starvation, were about to capitulate.

The Siege Museum also told of the Apprentice Boys Society, which is group of men who honor the defenders of the city. They organize a couple of marches each year in the city and sponsor the museum. The presentation was a bit pro-Union/Protestant, but still useful in starting to untangle the mass and mess of history that led up to the Troubles. Catholic King James II had to retreat and was defeated a year later in Ireland and was replaced by a Protestant king in England.

The rain had stopped by the time we left the museum, so we continued on our wall walk. It did have grand views of the surrounding hills (Donegal in the Irish Republic, just a few miles away), and of the memorial murals that were painted on Bogside (Catholic) houses in the 1990s. We got close-up views of the in-the-walls Protestant cathedral and enjoyed getting most of the way around. When we had just a couple hundred yards left in the wall walk, the rain returned, so we went into the Tower Museum, which had a permanent exhibit on the history of Derry, an exhibit on the excavation of a Spanish Armada ship from the nearby loch, and a temporary exhibit on the show Derry Girls, which has much to do with our being here.

My brother had recommended the show to us a while ago, and our friend Meredith showed it to us. We loved it. It’s a comedy (of all things) about five teenagers going to school in the nineties in Derry during the Troubles. It’s brilliantly funny in many places, and poignantly serious in a few places. Since we hadn’t really done the Derry area on our previous trips, Meredith said she wanted to see Derry on this one. Because of the central location of the city for all things north on the island, we decided to stay here for four nights before finishing the week in Dublin.

Anyway, the Tower Museum exhibit had sets and props and costumes from the actual show, and video interviews with the creator. Julia had seen the show, and so the three of us chuckled through the sets, and it made Sydney add it to her to-view list. Much fun.

The museum wound us on a one-way route through the history of Derry, starting with the founding of a monastery in an oak grove (“Derry” seems to be related to the Irish word for grove), and continuing on to the town’s being an ecclesiastical center, to the town’s being sacked a few times by Vikings, to the town’s being razed by an Irish lord who had been pro-English until a change in policies ticked him off, to the area’s being settled as a “plantation” (a deliberate plan of foreign settlement), to the rise of the walled town, to the siege, to the debate about Irish Home Rule, to the creation of a Republic of Ireland and a separate Northern Ireland, to the Troubles, and to the peace of the last twenty years. Whew. It was fairly complicated, and a man to whom we talked in a pub called it whitewashed and simplified. I’d hate to see the hard history, then.

We went up to the top of the tower (of the Tower Museum), where we had a great vantage point to see the city, although the rain had smeared the safety glass all around the viewing area, so the sights were diminished a bit. We wound our way back down through four floors of the story of finding and excavating a Spanish Armada ship. I had not remembered that after the encounter with the English, the ships retreated east and north up around Scotland and then tried to go around Ireland, with many ships sinking along the way from the English navy or from running aground.

Back outside again, we ducked into a cute area with craft stores and had a late lunch at a cafe set in a recreation of a cottage. Good food in a pretty building with friendly staff made for a good repast.

At my insistence, Meredith and Julia and I finished the last two hundred yards of wall walk while Sydney went home to rest for a bit. The three of us then walked down to Bogside to look at about ten murals commemorating issues around the Troubles. There were murals on peace, and some showing defiance, and some remembering the victims of Bloody Sunday (when fourteen unarmed people were shot by a British regiment who thought they were under fire) or innocent bystanders like a girl shot by crossfire. The murals are all large, with most taking up the end of a building. Along the way, we saw a memorial to ten men who died of a hunger strike while in prison, protesting for the right to be treated as political prisoners. We also saw a memorial to the victims of Bloody Sunday.

By then it was quite dark and cold, so we walked back to the B and B to regroup and get more clothing. We all then decided to go to the Guildhall, which acts as a town hall, which has an exhibit on the English plantation (settlement) system and how it failed to deliver on the ideal plan promised to investors (push out all the Irish, make a ton of money, and convert everyone to the Anglican church). The building itself was quite beautiful, and as an added bonus, we spent about twenty minutes talking to Lucy, a young woman from Derry. We chatted about the Troubles (they aren’t taught in the now-mixed Protestant/Catholic schools until seventh year) and Lucy’s studies (nursing) and about life in Ireland and in the US. She was friendly and kind, and I enjoyed talking to her.

We went to a pub for supper and with an eye out to playing a pub quiz at 9:00. Pub quizzes are trivia games, but are taken very seriously in the UK, and we thought it would be fun, even if we were terrible (we don’t get many UK pop references). It turns out that there was an important soccer match on tonight, so the pub quiz was pushed back to 10:00, which was way too late for us. But we got to talk to the man working in the pub who looked to be about our age. He had a terrifically thick accent, but with some context and concentration, I managed to follow most of what he was saying. He told us about Derry and growing up Catholic during the Troubles. We talked for about forty-five minutes before we excused ourselves and headed home for the night.

So between two museums, memorials and murals, boots on the ground, and two town natives of different ages, I now have a slightly better understanding of the Troubles and the history of Derry. That’s worthwhile, but so were the dozen or so interactions with very friendly people today. Understanding that people are people is a very worthwhile reason to travel.

We certainly have much to be thankful for – this is our sixth trip to Ireland and our sixth Thanksgiving trip to Europe since 2016. It’s an abundance of cultural riches, and we love it. This time we are traveling with our CVCA colleagues Julia and Sydney.

We left, as we do most of the time, from Toronto because of the cheap airfare that tends to be about half of what it would cost to leave from Cleveland or Detroit. We had a smooth go of it, leaving at 8:00 am for a 5:30 pm flight. We got to the airport at 2:00, and we were at out gate by 3:00. The flight over was fine – I managed to get a bunch of fitful naps while Meredith graded, and we got to Dublin over thirty minutes early. We picked up the car and drove the three hours to Derry, with much of the drive in the dark. Welcome to a northern country in the late fall. (I will use the name Derry instead of Londonderry because A) Derry is shorter, and B) all of my Irish songs call it Derry, and C) we love the show Derry Girls.)

We arrived at our B and B at 9:00 am, and while one of our two rooms wasn’t ready yet, we were invited into the breakfast room and encouraged to help ourselves to various foodstuffs. There is a film festival in town this week, so I met and talked to a German filmmaker who has a short film showing on a German man who decided to go fight with the Ukrainians, and the reaction of his family. It was an interesting conversation.

We stowed our gear in our one available room and headed out to explore Derry. We walked down to the Foyle River and walked across the very pretty Peace Bridge, which was built in 2011 and joined together the Catholic and Protestant sides of Derry. There’s a riverside park on the other side that we checked out because it was full of tall poles as an art installation – they are supposed to be lit up at night to cast interesting shadows, but it was still day.

We walked back over the bridge and up past our B and B, past St. Eugene’s Cathedral at the top of the hill and over to a smaller church – the Derry Donegal Christian Fellowship. It was a good service, with a couple of speakers giving short meditations, and music for about thirty minutes, and a sermon on how Paul debated with the intellectuals of Athens, and how all the philosophies discussed there would not have offered the hope and peace that Jesus promises and gives. The people were very friendly, and for a small church, it had a ton of kids and was also very multicultural (for example, after the service, we were invited to coffee by a Romanian man, an invitation we had to decline for jetlag reasons).

After church, we went back to the place that will be our home for the next few days and slept for three hours and showered. Then, back out again. We went down to the river again, where we tried to check out a craft fair that a woman at church had recommended, but the fair was closing down by the time we got there. We ate supper at a nearby Chinese restaurant, and then walked along the river, past the Peace Bridge, to the next car bridge, where we wanted to see a sculpture of two people reaching for each other over the river. It was in the middle of a car roundabout/rotary, so we couldn’t get right up to it, but it was worth seeing even from a distance.

We headed from there up the hill to the old walled city. The walls still exist and are about one mile around. We went into the old town, and to a small square where there is a WW I and WW II monument that was decorated with dozens of wreaths made from poppies. We’ve seen that often at British monuments – it seems that WW I in particular still has a place of remembrance in the British psyche.

There look to be a ton of lights strung for Christmas all through the old town, but they weren’t on yet. I’m hoping we’ll get to see them before we leave on Thursday. We walked down out of the old town and back to the area where we had supper, and then back home. It was only 8:00, but an early night on the first day isn’t a bad thing. It was a fine day of touring, and the rain even mostly held off (at the end of the day, there was a light mist for which we didn’t even need umbrellas). I’m thankful to be back in Ireland again and looking forward to tomorrow while happy with what we did today.