I love my wife. I’m very afraid of heights. Oddly, Vilnius brought those traits together today.  Read on.

We overslept a little this morning; despite both of us checking the alarm, it was still set for 8:00 pm instead of 8:00 am. I woke up at 8:30 and got us going. I had wanted to be touring at 10:00, and we managed 10:15. That was okay, since I didn’t have any timed plans until noon.

We wandered. I like doing that in a new city, especially when it’s a compact and well-defined old town part of a city. I picked what looked to be interesting and uncrowded lanes, and we wandered for an hour. We found a cute spa courtyard full of flowers, and we climbed to a high spot on our end of town (the south end) to spy out the lay of the land. After a quick stop back in the hotel to dump Mer’s jacket and use the bathroom, we headed north down the main street all the way to the other end of the old town, which is where the Vilnius Cathedral is located.

We hung out next to the impressive portico of the church, identifying huge statues of Abraham and Moses and the four Gospel writers. We poked our heads into the free-standing bell tower, but it cost money to climb, and we didn’t have time to do that, so we went back outside, where we waited a few minutes to meet Ruta (Ruth), our local guide for the next three hours.

Readers of ye olde blogge may remember that we highly recommend getting a walking tour of a new city, especially if you can manage a private tour. Locals always help put things in context. Ruta was our age (fiftyish), so she grew up under Soviet rule, and the saw the transition to an independent Lithuania, so she had a great historical context. Additionally, her PhD was in Vilnius architecture, so she was well versed in that. She was a great resource.

Some highlights from our three-hour tour (cue Gilligan’s Island theme music here):
– We learned that the cathedral had been rebuilt several times and was originally a pagan temple.
– Lithuania was the last pagan country in Europe, probably because of the difficulty of outsiders getting in the country because of its swamps and dense forests.
– The founder of Vilnius (seven hundred years ago this year) had a dream of a howling wolf, and the local pagan priest told him he would be a successful leader who would found a capital where Vilnius is (smart PR move).
– The founder didn’t use force, but instead used diplomacy to increase his lands and wealth.
– He was very tolerant and invited people from all over Europe to come (tax free). It worked.
– Lithuania grew in size through marriages and alliances to become the largest country in Europe at one point.
– Vilnius has one of the oldest universities in Europe (from the late 1500s), and it takes up about a quarter of the old town.
– The Jewish Quarter was prosperous and well tolerated, with Jews making up about sixty percent of Vilnius’ population at one point. The Germans came in 1941, and the Jewish population has never recovered here.
– All the churches in Vilnius have two towers (except for one church, which is in disrepair from the Soviet era) – it was part of the Baroque movement here.
– In a bend in the smaller of the two rivers of the city is the semi-independent republic of Uzupis, which is mainly made up of artists and other free-thinkers. They have their own constitution and government.
– A monastery next to Uzupis has a gorgeous chapel with tokens of thanks (for healings) that are mounted in a gilded setting on either side of the altar. It was quite beautiful.

That was our three-hour tour of the town, and Ruta even threw in a snack break at a place she loves. We also got to pet a very extroverted kitty in Uzupis. After our tour was over, I waded in the river to sit in a swing chair in Uzupis. You’re supposed to get a wish if you sit in it. Because of how it was tilted forward, I think my wish was to not fall into the river.

Mer and I walked back to the old town from Uzupis, and ate an early supper at a local Lithuanian chain. It was hearty local food, and we ate in an old wine cellar, so that was fun. We needed to be done with supper before our next tour at 6:30.

And here is where love meets terror. Mer was surprised when I shook hands with a man waiting next to a van and she read his shirt, which said, “Smile Balloon Tours.” I knew Mer would love an aerial tour of the city, and I knew I’d be terrified of hanging in a STUPID WICKER BASKET three thousand feet off the ground. Love makes us do stupid things.

We drove to a huge park on the outskirts of the city, where we were told to wander for a bit. There were ten balloons going up, and since they do climb up to three thousand feet or so, and since the airport is very, very nearby, they need to coordinate the launch with air traffic control. So we had a nice walk in the park for about forty-five minutes, where we got to see Vilnius at play. We got to watch as the balloons were inflated using giant fans, and then the pilot used the burners to heat the air to one hundred degrees Celsius. We scrambled into the basket and then held on as the gondola rocked around as the craft became buoyant. They released the anchor line, and we zoomed into the evening sky (it was about 8:00 pm).

It was somewhat alarming, even for Meredith, suddenly to shoot a couple of thousand feet into the air with no real sound of propellant. The pilot only hit the burner as needed, so much of the flight was silent. We had great views of Vilnius and the old town, and we drifted away from the city. It was startling how quickly the city became dense forest. And it was starling when Mer and I saw a smokestack suddenly appear right under us (we were facing backwards in the basket). My guess is it was an old coal-burning power stack, but it was really tall and right there where we were. Sheesh.

I alternated between tense and scared and terrified for half the flight. The pilot lowered us down to a few hundred feet when we got outside the city, and I was able to relax some then. It was great to see suburban Lithuanians come running outside as we passed – people do love hot air balloons.

Our group was diverse – two people from India, two from Belarus, two from Estonia, me and Mer from the US, and the pilot from Lithuania. And we all laughed as we landed in a field and bounced three times before coming to a rest. People are people.

We got our first-time-flight certificates and had a glass of champagne (or orange juice for us teetotalers) as the balloon got packed away. We got a ride back to the old town, where Mer and I elected to get out of the van at the cathedral so we could walk the main drag at twilight. We stopped at a cafe to get dessert to celebrate a successful flight and day in general. Sometimes love really does push you to new heights.

Usually I open my travel blogs with “Day 0”, or the day we spent getting to the airport and then on to Europe. But we had late graduation parties on Sunday, and we were leaving out of Newark Airport (a seven-hour drive), so we broke Day 0 into two days. Day minus-1?

On Sunday, we drove to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. I had picked it because it had an inexpensive hotel and was about half-way to Newark, but I was actually disappointed we didn’t have more time there. The town is very cute and has a very pretty, well-lit river walk that we drove by.

Monday was uneventful, except we were both surprised by a thriving old-school mall. We got off near Newark to find a restroom and figured there would be one in the mall right off the exit. We are used to malls closing in our area (at least some of them), so it was a surprise to find a huge mall where every storefront was full. It was clean and modern-looking, and was big enough that it took about ten minutes to find a bathroom. Malls aren’t dead. How very 1990.

We got to the actual airport about three and a half hours before the flight left, but breezed through check-in and security so quickly that we were still at the gate three hours early. Even when I plan things correctly, we still sit at the gate for hours. We took advantage of the time to have a meal at a restaurant.

The flight was largely uneventful (other than my having a very unhappy and active child in front of me), and I actually managed to get some sleep on the plane, which is very rare for me. We landed in Copenhagen Tuesday morning (today), where we had a five-hour layover. We again used the time to get some food, and read our books; I suspect I’ll actually finish my seven-hundred-page Harry Potter book before I get home.

The flight to Vilnius was also uneventful, and we were startled at how quickly we just walked out of the small airport, which looks like a train station. We were in luck – a bus going to “City Centre” was right there, so we jumped on, since our hotel was in the Old Town. It took me about thirty minutes to figure out that City Centre and Old Town were not the same in Vilnius, unlike in some European cities. That led to a one-hour trip to correct the mistake, but we finally made it to our hotel, just inside the Old Town. It is attached to a church, and so I think it is an old convent. It’s basic, but comfortable, and the location is just what we wanted. Like the beds. Even though it was now 6:00 pm local time, we did our usual jetlag-busting nap of a couple of hours.

Even though that timing was less than ideal, Europeans eat later than Americans, and so we headed out around 8:30, feeling much better for having slept and showered. Vilnius is far enough north that it stays light until well after 10:00, so we had a good view of the sun setting as we sat outside for supper. It was a short touring day, but we had a good meal in a pretty place, and we are here safely, so that is a win for the start of our Lithuania tour.

After a hearty breakfast at my go-to restaurant in Gatlinburg, Crockett’s Breakfast Camp, we headed out on the Newfound Gap Road, up into the park. We were headed to the Alum Cave Trailhead, which is one of the more popular hikes in the Smokies, so I was not terribly surprised when I found that the parking lot full – it was about 10:00, and my guess is that the serious hikers were on the trail by 7:00. We turned around and found a spot in a small lot about three quarters of a mile down the hill, and we hiked back.

Alum Cave Trail is a gem. The first mile of the hike is along a very pretty small river, and the river and trail are lined by trees and thick rhododendrons. The light in the park is always somehow magic, and it plays with water and leaves and even some kinds of branches in a gleaming way. I love it. After a mile, the trail starts seriously upwards, and there are some rough rocky parts, but nothing too extended. I let Mer take the lead so she could see the views without my being in the way, and we took our time. The trail was busy with hikers in both directions, but we still had lots of pockets of solitude.

We got to Alum Cave, which is less of a cave and more of a seriously impressive overhang, and we hung out enjoying the sunshine and the views. We munched a little trail mix I had brought along, and generally had a mellow time of it before heading back down.

The hike back down is easier, especially since we both used hiking poles (I think poles shine on downward slopes since they help take weight off the knees). And…wait for it…in Tennessee, in the middle of the woods, two miles from the trailhead, over five hundred miles from home, Meredith ran into one of her students. While he was not actively hostile, it wasn’t clear to me that he was thrilled to meet a teacher in the middle of his vacation. His dad was more animated. We continued on and got back to the trailhead and on to the car with no more close encounters of the student kind.

We drove back toward Gatlinburg, stopping once at a pullout to look at a great view of the mountains. Mer pointed out that the trees below us were starting to leaf out, while the ones higher up were not, making for a green line across the terrain.

Back in our temporary home, we regrouped and then walked down to the Skylift so we could explore it during the day. Mer did the Skybridge again while I sat in a glider chair looking out at the mountains. She came back, and we did the Skytrail (seeing a theme?), which is a trail that runs along the rim of the two small mountains, coming out at the end of the Skybridge. The walkway had several pictures and stories from the devastating fires of late 2016 – they completely destroyed the Skylift and its buildings, which had to be rebuilt. The pictures were sobering – they showed fire all over the mountain.

We rode back down into town and found a place to eat. We sat outside next to a small stream, which was a great way to relax. By the time we were done with supper, Mer wanted to see things from the mountain at night again, so we went up the Skylift for the third time. We got our money’s worth! She did the bridge again, and collected a now-fairly-cold me. We sat near a firepit so I could warm up, and went off to our hotel.

Today (Thursday) was an inefficient day. We got up at 7:30, but it took some time to get out into town, so we had a wait at Crockett’s. Then we had to go back to the room before heading in to the park, where I wanted to hike a trail leading from the visitors’ center, which was a madhouse. We got stuck there in not-moving traffic for ten minutes or more before I managed to get out of the parking lot, leaving the hike unexplored.

As such, we finally got into the woods on a “quiet walkway” hike around 11:00 am. It was peaceful, and after a steep climb up a side trail, we found an old cemetery. Most of the gravestones were eroded away, but a couple from the late 1800s were still legible, and there was a stone from 2019. It seems if you have a family plot in a cemetery, you can still be buried in the park. We continued our hike for a bit and turned at a stream that I didn’t have the shoes to cross.

That took us to our next hike, to the Little River Trail. We’ve both done this trail before, but we had to park in the overflow parking, which put us right next to the small main street of what used to be the vacation cabins of wealthy families. They are all owned by the park now (which acquired the deeds in the 1930s), but families were allowed to stay on for some time. The last cabin in use was used all the way until 2001. We had explored these cabins before with my sister and her family back in 2017, but we poked around a few of the cabins and spent a good amount of time talking to the volunteers on site.

One downside to hiking in shoulder season is that some things are closed. Like bathrooms. The ones in the cabin area were closed, so we hiked the half mile out to the nearest open ones, and then back again. We finally got going on Little River around 1:00.

The trail isn’t flashy. It’s a wide gravel road next to the Little River, and there are no sweeping vistas. But it’s a serenity-inducing trail with the sound of the river and the pretty of the many small waterfalls. We only hiked in about forty-five minutes because it was so late when we started, but it was a fine hike.

On the way back into town, we were slowed by traffic at one point as people stopped to take photos of a bear only a hundred yards from the road, so Mer got to have her second bear encounter in the park, even if only from our car.

In town, we showered and got ready. I wanted Mer to see the town in full, so we headed down the main drag. We found a restaurant at which to eat, and then explored all the nooks of the tourist trap section. We found a couple of little alleys down which I had never been before, alleys which were quiet and had some cute shops. We got to the end of the shopping gauntlet, and turned back, but took time to go into a surprisingly high-end clock store. It seemed odd to have a store with clocks costing upwards of eight thousand dollars next to t-shirt stores, but it was there.

That ended our evening for Thursday. We have one more full day in the park, and maybe a few hours on Saturday, depending on the weather. We’ll go back to our friend’s house in Louisville on Saturday, and get an early start for home (and kitties!) on Sunday.

Over the last few (non-Covid) years, we have tried to go to Europe over our spring break, and I had intended that we should do so again if we could find affordable tickets. Every time I would find a good fare online, I would go to check on it later (usually the next day), and it would have gone up by a hundred dollars or more. Happily, we had a backup.

In January, I went with a CVCA trip to Gatlinburg, my third such trip since 2017. I’d always call Meredith from Gatlinburg and tell her what a wonderful time I was having and how much I loved it in town after a day of hiking. This year, on one such call, she finally suggested I should bring her to the Smokies so she could experience it too. I had brought her here back in 2017, but only for a couple of days, and we had kids along in the form of my niece and nephew (and sister, but she’s a game soul). So, while we had fun with the family, we couldn’t do serious hiking and lots of tacky touristy stuff, especially when we were staying in a house outside of town. To experience the fun wonder of the main street of Gatlinburg, you really need to be within walking distance of everything.

So, given that Europe kept being fickle with prices, we decided to come to Gatlinburg. We decided to tag on a two-day stay with a friend in Louisville on the way. The weather all looked good, so on Sunday, after church, we drove to our friend Beverly’s house. Beverly is the epitome of hospitality – she took us out to eat on Sunday, made us breakfast Monday and Tuesday mornings, and took us to a cute college town, Berea, that is ninety minutes from Louisville. We had lunch at a swanky old tavern, and walked the college campus, and then looked around the art district, all in glorious sixty-five-degree sunshine. We hadn’t seen Beverly in seven years or so, so we had a very good time getting caught up.

On to Gatlinburg today. We got here and checked in to our downtown hotel, and drove over to the visitors’ center to pick up a new-this-year parking pass for the park (fifteen dollars a week). As we drove away from the crush of humanity at the center, it started to rain, so I modified my plan of hiking Laurel Falls Trail and changed over to driving an hour to Cades Cove, which is an old settlement area that still has eighteen buildings from the 1820s to 1930s. Both Beverly and my friend Jordan (a teacher at CVCA) recommended it, so that’s where we headed. The drive gave time for the rain to pass, so we were able to tour the site in good weather.

Cades Cove is an eleven-mile one-way circle, and we did the whole thing, although we missed a couple of buildings. Once you pass a building, your choice is to walk back, drive the whole circuit again (stuck behind people going eight miles per hour), or skip it. So we skipped a few. Our main take-away was that isolation is more important in the style of building than time frame. The houses in Colonial Williamsburg were built one hundred years earlier than Cades Cove, but looked more or less like modern homes. Cades was all log cabins until the 1860s, and even after that, some were still built. The Cove had had more people than I’d have thought, with about seven hundred residents in 1900. The national park bought up the area in the 1930s and 40s, and kept the buildings that are around today.

That put us back in town around 7:30. Trying to decide how to dress for the weather, Mer asked me if we’d be going up any mountains on the edge of town, and I assured her we would not. After a quick supper, we went up the Skylift chairlift to the top of a mountain on the edge of town. It was too good a deal to pass up – for two dollars above a normal ticket, we could get an additional day (tomorrow). That way, Mer could see the town at night tonight, and go up during the day tomorrow. Mer may have hinted that going up tomorrow night would be okay too. She had a blast walking a suspension bridge at the top. I got about a third of the way across before turning around from fear. I’m looking forward to the trail at the top tomorrow instead.

The plan for the rest of the week is to enjoy hiking in “the nature” and doing tourist tack stuff in town. I do love this place.

Having a younger person (Shelby) on the trip is always a good thing. She was our taxi-summoner as needed, and she booked us in on our flight from her phone yesterday. In the past, I’ve always avoided doing that since airport bag check machines always told me to see a desk agent anyway. Today, it worked very well – we skipped the very long line for check-in, and so got to our gate in about thirty minutes. Which put us here three hours early.

This was an excellent trip. We are inclined to think all Europe vacations are going to be excellent, but Ireland did well by us with the weather. Right before we left, the forecast was for rain four or five of the six days we were here. We had twenty minutes of rain over all the times were were out.

The food was quite good. I had heard that Dublin especially had gotten “foodie,” and we benefited. While we still had some good pub grub, we also had excellent American BBQ, good pizza, and yummy breakfasts, and in general ate too much.

The Irish and those living here were universally kind. I accidently blocked a parking lot because I thought I had to pay at the exit. The woman behind me didn’t freak out, and instead explained where the pay machine was, and she waited for me to come back (I did run to be as fast as I could). All of the service people in hotels and restaurants and museums were helpful and polite. It is an attractive trait to cultivate.

We did have some good “Irish” driving moments for the new folks for the first couple of days we had the car. We had to stop for a herd of sheep on one road, and another road was a two-way one-lane road with rock walls on either side. Good times.

Despite our having been in Dublin multiple times, there are still some things I would wish to see. The little village of Howth is at the end of the Dublin DART train line, and is supposed to be cute. There is a replica famine ship on the Liffey. Mer and I have never done the Big Bus tour of the city, which is an overview of the sights of the city. We’ve never done the art museum, and Marsh’s Library of old books looks great.

Shelby, Meredith (“Neuf”), and Regina did great. They kept a sense of humor and put up with the small mistakes that happen on trips. They are good travel companions. And Shelby is good with her phone.

So, Lord willing, we’ll be back in Ohio tonight, which is always a bit mind-bending. I’m looking forward to my friends, family, kitties, and routine, of which I am fond. And I’m sure I’ll be used to work again in a few days.

The fellowship of the Dublin trip broke up today, at least for most of the time. Shelby, Regina, and Neuf went off to do a dizzying amount of touring – the Marsh Library, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Little Museum of Dublin, the EPIC Emigration Museum, and a 90-minute bus tour of all of Dublin. I think they were using different clocks than we were.

Meredith and I got a late start, setting off around 10:00 to go to sites we had not seen before. We started at the General Post Office (the GPO), which is still a working post office, but was the main headquarters for the Easter Uprising of 1916. There is a museum on site now that only opened in 2016, so we wanted to check it out.

It was an excellent little museum. It framed the history that led up to 1916, with Home Rule a very real and near possibility for Ireland. Home Rule would have kept Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, but returned some powers back to the Irish, including an Irish parliament. Home Rule was almost a done deal when World War I broke out, which tabled the issue in light of the war. If the war hadn’t broken out, would Home Rule have passed, and if that had happened, would there have been an uprising? Interesting, if unanswerable, questions.

There were pro-union Irish who didn’t want Home Rule – they saw themselves as British and opposed the movement, even with some going so far as to create an armed group in Belfast. In response, pro-nationalist Irish armed themselves in Dublin, which created the armed group that rebelled Easter week. If the unionists hadn’t armed, would there have been a rebellion?

The nationalists were being supplied weapons by the Germans, and a shipment of twenty thousand rifles was intercepted by the British as it came into an Irish bay. If that had gotten through, would there have been more Irish troops in Dublin that week (instead, there were about fifteen hundred Irish versus twenty thousand British by the end of the week)?

The museum walked through each day of the uprising in an excellent film. Mer mentioned how strongly it reminded her of Les Miserables – the rebels kept hoping for a popular uprising. It was quite the opposite at first – the local Dubliners were irritated at the disruption. But, as the rebels held out against overwhelming odds for days, the mood began to change. The public swung over to the nationalist side when the British tried the leaders secretly and then executed them over the course of over a week. As information leaked out, outrage began to build, which allowed the nationalist party to get voted in during the next election. They set up their seats in Dublin instead of in London, which didn’t go over well in England, which didn’t help the mood in Ireland.

Eventually, a guerilla war broke out for two years, which ended with the English and Irish signing a treaty that broke off six counties in the north to remain in the UK, and the rest of Ireland would have local power, but still swear allegiance to the king. This compromise split the Irish, and a civil war broke out a few months later that lasted a year. The more radical nationalists lost the shooting war, but were eventually elected into power, which helped bring about the Republic of Ireland in the 1940s.

As you can see, the museum covered a lot. The recommended time to cover the material was forty-five minutes. It took us over two hours, and we skipped some things. We do love a good museum.

On the way to get some light lunch, we passed a free exhibit on the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. So, after lunch, we went back to it. It was one of those delightful surprises we run into when we travel. The exhibit had many original pieces that Heaney had donated to the national library, so we got to see some of his edits on earlier drafts. Many poems were reprinted or read out loud, and many of the phrases Heaney came up with were gorgeous. He often focused on ordinary things, people, or work, but expressed them in eloquent poetry that sometimes choked me up. Mer tried to tell me of one of her favorites that reminder her of her mom, and she couldn’t even recite it for the tears it brought. The man had a way with words. We stayed there for an hour, until they closed at 4:00.

That didn’t leave us a ton of time before most tourist things closed at 5:00, but the National Museum of Archaeology is free, so we went there for thirty minutes. I got to see the bog men, who were people who were killed and thrown into bogs. Their bodies (and sometimes hair and clothing) were preserved. It was timely because we had read about how the bog men moved Heaney to write poems about them that compared what was done to them to what was going on in Northern Ireland at the time. We also got to see a small gold boat about which Heaney had written – we stumbled across it without even knowing it would be in the museum. We saw the Brooch of Tara – Mer went to look up where it was when she realized we were standing in front of it. We also got to see a few hoards of gold that had been found in bogs over the years. It was an efficient use of thirty minutes.

We ate supper in the Temple Bar neighborhood, and then walked north of the Liffey to go to the National Leprechaun Museum for an evening of dark storytelling. We met up with the others there, so our little fellowship was reunited. The museum was a ton of fun – Mer and I had thought it would just be a matter of showing up to hear stories, but we kept moving from room to room, passing through a giant’s room (where we jumped on the furniture), and going through a forest and a mirror maze and a glen. At each stop, we heard stories about changeling children and brutal kings and leaders fighting, all told by a witty Irishman from the southwest of Ireland, who also had a grand singing voice. It was a fantastically good time, and a good note on which to end our trip.

Mer and I went back to the hotel to look up itineraries while Neuf and Regina and Shelby went to eat supper. One way to squeeze in half a dozen tourist sights is to skip supper. It was a fantastic trip, with surprisingly good weather over the week – we only got rained on twice, for a total of about twenty minutes. What wasn’t surprising was the good fellowship. We had a good group with which to roam about the old sod.

I am very thankful that modern life lets us travel to Europe quickly and affordably. International commercial air travel has been around less than one hundred years, and jet travel only started in 1958. Not too long ago, Europe would have been a month-long proposition, and very expensive. Now we can afford to go two or three times per year, and going for a week makes sense because getting here is so quick. It’s still a marvel, and I am grateful.

We took an Uber (taxi) today to start out because we were going to a fairly far-flung sight – Kilmainham Gaol. Kilmainham is a jail that was active from the 1700s to 1923, and it mostly was used to house petty criminals, but five percent of the prisoners held there were political prisoners, and so it has remained an important Irish site.

Meredith and I had been to Kilmainham back in 2000 or so, and I jokingly told our driver that I supposed lots of things had changed. He said, in all seriousness, that they had. It turns out the next-door courthouse that was active in 2000 closed down around 2008, and now houses information about the court, and is where tours meet. Between the jail and courthouse, a museum has been added, which focuses on the events of the Easter Rising of 1916, which led to Irish Independence in 1922, which led to the Irish Civil War in 1923. While most tourist tours dump you out in a gift shop at the end of the tour, Kilmainham tours end at the museum, so you have an excellent context for the displays in the museum.

Kilmainham had thousands of prisoners over the years, especially during the Famine of 1845-1850, when some thought it better to be in jail than to starve to death. But the most famous prisoners were those who were held in Kilmainham for their role in the Easter Uprising of 1916. The rebellion was badly outnumbered (about two thousand versus twenty thousand), and the leaders were caught and held and executed, except for one woman who was second in command of a brigade, who was released after a year. One man married the night before he was shot and was allowed to spend ten minutes with his new bride; they held hands and never saw each other again. One man was so badly wounded he couldn’t stand for the firing squad, so they shot him while he sat in a chair. While the rebellion didn’t have popular support, the public outrage at the execution of fourteen men enraged the public and led to strong Irish nationalism, which finally resulted in a treaty for independence in 1922. The terms of the treaty were controversial, so that sparked a civil war that lasted about a year, and some members of the anti-treaty group were held in Kilmainham, except this time it was fellow Irish guarding them. It’s a complex and important place for Irish history.

After seeing the jail, we walked through the pretty grounds of the modern art museum and the adjacent hospital grounds. It was a pretty late morning, and we took our time. We took another Uber back to the hotel, and then went nearby to Christ Church Cathedral to tour it.

Christ Church is the oldest surviving building in Dublin, with the crypt dating back eight hundred years or more. It’s an interesting building to me because it is the only cathedral I know of where the roof collapsed (I assume because of lack of maintenance, but I don’t know). The collapse damaged one wall badly, and a “temporary” wall was put up that lasted three hundred years, until the 1800s, when a rich whiskey distiller donated about (in today’s money) thirty million dollars to repair the building. The wall that stayed up was kept in place, but you can see that it leans out about a foot and a half. Those sorts of structural things interest me.

We ate lunch, and then split up. Shelby went to tour a whiskey museum, while Regina and Neuf went down to the river to see Ha’penny Bridge and then wander around the Temple Bar area, which is a neighborhood of bars and restaurants that is happening in a tourist-intensive sort of way. Mer and I walked twenty minutes over to The Little Museum of Dublin.

The Little Museum of Dublin was a bit of a mystery to me, but it was starting to rain, and I knew we only had a couple of hours if we wanted to get back to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in time for the evensong service. The Little Museum turned out to be housed in a Georgian house of a type that was common in Dublin in Victorian times, and it had two rooms filled with Dublin memorabilia. A guide joined us and gave us a thirty-minute overview of Dublin’s history, using the pictures on the wall as visual aids. Our guide was energetic and loud and had a corny sense of humor, and she was Greek (but spoke excellent English). Dublin is more cosmopolitan than I remember – as far as I can tell, we’ve not had anyone Irish wait on us in any service capacity in a hotel or restaurant, and not always in the museums, since we’ve been in Dublin. But our guide was fun, and it was a good overview of many of the things we had learned at Kilmainham during the morning.

We did make it back to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for evensong. It was a lovely service, lasting about thirty minutes. The excellent choir did all of the singing, and was largely made up of school-aged girls, although it did have a few older men for the bass parts. Shelby, Regina, and Neuf went instead to the 6:00 evensong at Christ Church, which they said was very beautiful.

We finished the evening looking for food. It took awhile to find a restaurant that had seating, but we found a BBQ place in Temple Bar that fed us very well, which we followed up with waffles and crepes at a gelato stand. Not a traditional Thanksgiving meal, but the gratitude was still genuine.

We like to make connections when we travel (and in general, actually). Meredith has had much fun this trip being in places where things happened that relate to what she has been teaching regarding literature during England’s Restoration Period (and on into the eighteenth century), when the monarchy was restored after Cromwell’s Commonwealth (which lasted about twelve years). Since Ireland was deeply affected by events surrounding this time (Cromwell is still reviled in parts of Ireland for his brutality), things pop up related to what Mer has been covering in class.

Today, we toured Trinity College, where Samuel Johnson got an honorary doctorate; he was also Mer’s featured author for the eighteenth century. The other day we were in Kilkenny, where Cromwell’s army damaged the castle wall; Mer had just finished teaching about Cromwell and the Restoration as background for the literature the class was reading. The connections come up when you travel in English-speaking countries and you teach English.

Back to Trinity. We took an actual student-led tour instead of a self-guided tour. We tend to find guides much more interesting. We were led around campus by a woman from India who was about to finish up her master’s degree. We learned several things over the hour we were with her:
– Trinity admitted women around 1900, and now sixty percent of the student body is women
– Only a thousand of the eighteen thousand students can live on campus – the rest have to find housing, which is difficult in Dublin right now
– The oldest buildings date back to the 1700s
– One building was made entirely of Irish materials, and the carvings on the building are all of Irish flora and fauna
– There are six libraries, and the best-known one (where the Book of Kells is housed) is about to undergo a three-year renovation to make it safer for the rare books housed inside

After the tour, we did get into the library to see the Book of Kells. Mer and I both remember it being in a display case on a counter in the main library. That is not the situation anymore – there is an anteroom where you learn about other illustrated manuscripts and how the Book of Kells was made. I was amazed it survived – the abbey in which it was housed was raided by pillagers several times, and fires seemed to break out every few years (the boards just listed ten or so years and ended with ellipses…). The book itself is in a huge case all alone in a twenty-by-twenty room. It was opened to a page of mostly text, with just a few individual letters being illustrated. It was subtle enough that Mer thought it was a different old manuscript and had to go back to see it when I pointed out it really was the Book of Kells.

The Old Library main hall is special. It is what a library should look like – lots of wood, space, busts of great thinkers, and shelves and shelves of books. It was quite a sight to see. And oddly, it dumped us out into a gift shop.

After Trinity, we split up – Neuf, Regina, and Shelby went off to see 14 Henrietta Street, a house museum about tenement life in Dublin. Mer and I walked over to the EPIC Emigration Museum, which is fairly new, having opened around 2016. It was founded by an Irish emigrant who managed to do okay by becoming the CEO of Coca-Cola; he wanted to tell the story of ordinary Irish emigrants, giving the reasons they left, and the impact they have had on the world. EPIC stands for Every Person Is Connected.

The museum is largely interactive, with twenty rooms laid out in a one-way path. Each room has a theme, and you can stamp your room passport in each room. A themed, one-way museum with stamps – it’s as if it was made for Meredith. She was pretty happy.

Some of the rooms gave reasons why people left (war, famine, poverty, unjust laws, etc.). Some talked about what the Irish did after they left (one room on “infamy,” where they talked about outlaws, one room on soldiering, one on discoveries and science, one on religion and social work, etc.) The room on music and dance was my favorite, while Meredith was thrilled that two whole rooms were dedicated to storytelling. In typical Riordan touring fashion, while the museum said it would take about ninety minutes to get through the rooms, we took four hours, and we even skipped some of the detailed interactive stories.

We walked back toward our hotel area, stopping at a cafe for a snack since we had missed lunch (it was after 3:00 when we left the EPIC museum). We regrouped and got more water at the hotel, before walking back to Dublin Castle to go to the Chester Beatty Museum, where we met the others.

Chester Beatty was a man who made a ton of money from mining, and he was an avid collector. He sounded like a generous and open-handed man, and before he died, he built a library in Dublin to house his extensive collection – mostly Buddhist, Islamic, and Christian texts and art. The collection includes the oldest known papyrus copies of  the Gospels and Paul’s letters, dating from the third century. He left everything to the Irish people on the condition that it be displayed for free (we did leave a donation).

The five of us took a highlights tour, which mostly consisted of old manuscripts from the three religions, but did include a dragon robe that only the emperor of China could wear. It seems Beatty collected eight of these robes. There was also a cool and huge printed panorama of 1700s London, showing from Westminster all the way past St. Paul’s. I loved the Christian material, of course, but the entire collection was interesting.

That left only supper, which we grabbed at a pub that had live music at 7:30. We stayed for over an hour, and the music was fun and entertaining, but the duo only sang a couple of Irish songs that I recognized, and neither of those were ones I knew well. I may need to try again tomorrow so I can make a better personal connection to the music.

Keen observation is key to good tourism. It helps you more fully appreciate art, scenery, local culture, and more. If observation opens the lock of tourism, I misplaced the combination today. Happily, good fortune, kind people, and some gracious mercy from God kept saving me.

After breakfast in Waterford, we headed out to Cashel, about eighty minutes away. We had no real difficulty in getting there, although my GPS sent us down some “real” Irish back roads that were narrow, so the others got to experience the joy of one-lane two-way roads. Meredith and I were at the Rock of Cashel last March, but this time we approached it in such a way as to be able to see it as we approached, and it was an impressive sight to which to drive up.

We bought a ticket for a guided tour, since we enjoy those, and it gave us about twenty minutes before the tour let us into Cormac’s Chapel. The chapel is the first and only intact Romanesque chapel in Ireland, and access is restricted to only fifteen minutes each hour to try to help preserve the (water-absorbing) sandstone structure. Since we had time, we went to see if the audiovisual presentation was running, and it was. That was new to me and Meredith since it hadn’t been running last March, and the part we saw ran through the local area history from about 1200 and on, with a focus on ecclesiastical efforts of ordinary monks since they interacted with ordinary people. We had to leave for the tour before the film looped back around to the early period of the Rock.

Cormac’s Chapel was fully restored over a period of seven years, with a roof being built over the structure to allow it to dry out, which took three years alone. It reopened for limited-number tours in 2017. It’s a small building, but the carvings in the rock, especially on the inside, are well preserved, and a few traces of 1100s paintings still survive inside. A larger chapel was built right next to (as in inches away from) parts of the smaller building about one hundred years later as something of a power play, as a bishop from a competing family wanted to show off his building over the older chapel.

With the exception of the round tower (from around 1100), the rest of the buildings on the Rock are in some form of ruin – none have full, if any, roofs, and the Bishop’s Palace is closed to tours since it is so caved in. But, on the top of a wind-swept hill overlooking beautiful countryside, the ruins are picturesque. The cathedral is surrounded by a still-used graveyard, but it was closed in 1930 to all except people who signed themselves and their children up in a register. There are still five people left alive who have the option of being buried on the Rock when they pass away.

After the tour and another circuit of the grounds to take photos, we returned to the car to beeline for Dublin. It meant skipping lunch, but Dublin was about ninety minutes away, and I could get us to our hotel by about 2:30 if we didn’t stop. That would allow me to try to get the car back to the airport before rush hour. Happily, the others agreed to the plan, and so we drove to Dublin.

Getting into Dublin was less troublesome than I had anticipated. I dropped the others at the hotel so they could tour while I took the two-plus hours to return the car and get back to Dublin on a bus. While I was away, the others went to the National Museum of Archaeology to look at the remains of people who had been preserved in bogs and to look at treasure hoards that had been found.

Meanwhile, I drove the leisurely way back to the airport, going right through Dublin. Some parts were very slow, with traffic backed up by cars turning, blocking other traffic. I made it to the airport area, and found a gas station to fill the car up, but had to wait for about ten minutes for the taxi driver of the car in front of me to meander back to his car to move it. I filled the tank, but there were no free spots in the parking lot where I could park to go in and pay my road toll I owed (you have the option to pay at gas stations), so I figured I’d figure it out later. Except I couldn’t find the rental return. I circled the terminal for a second time, and wound up back at the gas station, where one spot had opened up. I parked, paid my toll, and asked a taxi driver how to return my car. He told me it was in the Terminal 2 parking garage, which proved to be correct, despite the total lack of signs anywhere indicating that. I returned the car, only to discover that there was no one on duty in the garage, so I had to go to the rental counter to give the keys back. Happily, there was no line.

I was surprisingly efficient in finding and getting on a bus that was to take me back to Dublin. The trip was relatively quick, and because I carry a cell phone when I travel, I was able to text Shelby and found out they were at the museum. Based on that, I got off the bus a stop or two early and began following my phone directions to walk to the museum. I missed a turn that I was thinking of taking, but the phone dumped me out into Grafton Street, which is the shopping area for Dublin. It was all decked out in lights for Christmas. Mer and I have a CD with a song talking about how “on Grafton Street at Christmas time, the elbows push you round…,” so I texted Shelby a quick message on how “wow” Grafton Street was. She replied that they were on Grafton Street, outside a store called Pandora. I started to text back that I needed to look that up, as I would never find them in the masses of people, when Neuf walked up to me. I was standing directly outside the Pandora store, never having noticed it. That was happy.

We went and found a restaurant and ate, and then went back to Grafton Street to take in the scene and window shop. We then went to find the statue of Molly Malone, who is a woman from a folk song about a woman who sells mussels and seafood. I had wanted to find the statue back in 2014, but they had moved her, so I missed it. When we were here last March, we ran out of time. This time, we all found her and had a good photo op.

I wanted to see if a local pub had music on yet, so I went to look up where it was when the others pointed out we were looking at it. Another fine moment. Sadly, their music didn’t start until 9:30, and since it was only a little after 7:00 and we were all tired, we called it a night. We walked the twenty minutes or so back to the hotel.

We had another fine day of touring in Ireland today, at least by my observation.

Sometimes weather is crystal clear, and sometimes plans crystalize with the help of friendly people. We had both today, as the heavy rains of overnight moved out just before we got launched on touring today. We stopped at a cafe to have breakfast, and the manager took a friendly interest in us and our plans, and gave lots of good advice. On his suggestion, I made a higher priority of getting to Kilkenny to see the castle there – he said it was worth the drive, and so our afternoon plans were firmed up.

Out morning plans were the reason we were here in the city – to go to tour the Waterford Crystal factory. We got there around 9:30 and passed the time happily in looking around the showroom and store. The work there is exquisite. They had a violin, an Irish drum, and a Celtic cross, all made of highly precise crystal. If anyone has about forty thousand dollars lying around, I can spend it for you. I settled instead for a tree ornament for thirty dollars. The “regular” crystal bowls and glasses were gorgeous, and I was fond of several of them. I settled instead for a tree ornament for thirty dollars. My willpower was strong today.

The tour itself was conducted by a retired master cutter, who’d cut crystal for about forty years. Almost all Waterford crystal is cut by hand (eight percent is cut by a machine), which is done by craftsmen who have apprenticed for five years and then worked to become a master for two more years. The men to whom we talked on the cutting floor all had at least thirty years of experience. That apprenticeship model is in place for all of the stages of production – making molds, blowing the glass, inspecting the crystal, marking the pattern, cutting, and sculpting. Except that sculpting (hand-engraving, sandblasting, doing custom work) takes even longer. These people are dedicated to their work.

It was a fascinating tour. We got to chat with the cutters, and one of them invited us to touch his diamond cutting wheel, as it spun. We trusted him enough to try, and it was smooth to the touch and felt like a hard rubber, but it could do a number on crystal. Odd, but helped explain how his hands weren’t all scarred up.

Probably one of the two most memorable pieces on the floor was a carpenter’s kit made all of crystal – about fifteen hand “tools” all sculpted of glass. The other was a large crystal monument to 9-11, with the remains of the twin towers in glass with engraved firefighters in front of it. It was moving.

After a quick stop back at the hotel, we drove the forty minutes to Kilkenny. We ate lunch at a cafe on the high street, and then went to the castle. The castle has parts dating back to around 1100, but it had been restored by the government from 1970 to 2000 to look as it did during the Victorian era, based on photos that still exist. The castle was sold to the government for fifty pounds in the late sixties under the condition it be restored – no one had lived in it for thirty years, and the place had fallen apart.

The castle is missing the south wall (of four original walls) because Oliver Cromwell’s army caused so much damage to the wall that it had to be torn down. It now looks out over a pleasant grassy park. The interior of the castle is about what I would have expected from a Victorian great house – high ceilings, colorful wallpapers, carpets, portraits of family members, and a large dining room. It also had a former art gallery that took up a whole floor of one wing, with the interior roof and walls still fully intact, including the decorative paintings on the roof, which was a wooden-beamed affair that mixed Viking and Celtic design (Waterford was founded by Vikings). That was the most impressive space to me.

We popped out front to the rose garden, which still had some blooming roses. We then crossed the street to the former stables, where we strolled around a decorative garden being transformed into a Christmas wonderland (but still in process). Shelby found two craftsmen stalls open, where we got to talk to a potter and to two goldsmiths, all of whom were women “craftsmen.” I learned that the difference between a silversmith and a goldsmith is the scale of the work, not the metal – silversmiths work on larger pieces, like bowls, while goldsmiths work on smaller pieces, like jewelry.

By then, most of the regular shops and museums were closed, but we wandered around the high street and a few back alleys, popping in to some still-open shops. We walked all the way down to the cathedral to see if the grounds were open, but they weren’t; happily, though, the church and round tower were lit up, which was pretty.

We drove back to Waterford, where we found a pub that served good food and played eighties music. Neuf found that one because she liked that they had two large nutcracker statues out front. Nutcrackers equals good food, somehow.

That wrapped up a successful day two of our Irish adventure. For being on a short time constraint, I feel as if we have given Waterford and Kilkenny a good chance to give us a feel of the cities. Tomorrow we head back to Dublin (and return the car), via the Rock of Cashel, if I can see my way clear to getting there.