A kind woman at Sweny’s Pharmacy warned us that Dublin’s airport was understaffed and we should allow extra time. Man, I’m glad we had that tip. We got in the airport four hours ahead of our flight. It took two hours and fifty minutes to get to our gate, which included going through a second set of security procedures for US flights and pre-customs. I’m very much looking forward to flying out of Toronto again because it is closer to Ohio than Washington, but being able to skip US pre-customs in European airports is now a nice additional reason.

The trip was a grand success overall. We got to six days of things we had not seen or done before, and this is our fourth trip to Ireland. My fondest memories are around people – the pub in Kilkenny and our guide in the Medieval Museum and our guide at the Rock of Cashel and Alex for the Dublin Literary Tour.  Having charming accents certainly helps.

The Irish people, as I had remembered, are very friendly and helpful, and are fairly easy to “chat up” (the Irish gas pump man notwithstanding, and even he loved talking). We were offered drinks on two occasions, and no one was the least offended when we refused (since we don’t imbibe).

We need to get back here for many reasons, if only to see more of Dublin. I’d love to see some of the museums here, and I’ve not explored much of the interior of the country. While we will keep surfing around Europe, I told Meredith we could have made great vacations by just alternating Italy and Ireland. How such small countries can have so much to see is pretty amazing to me. Here’s to exploring more.

But first, friends, family, and kitties await. And that slightly pesky job thing.

Some days of touring are highly inefficient. Today was one such day. The way things are with Covid, combined with my mistakes, costs time. That is international travel for us.

We started the day by walking to Merrion Street by aiming for Merrion Square Park. We were meeting Alexander, a local guide, at 10:00. I plugged the destination into my phone, and away we went. We walked quite awhile, and I was getting a little worried about being late, when we saw the square. Only it wasn’t the square – it was St. Stephen’s Green, which is a good ten-minute walk from Merrion Square Park. My phone had locked up, and so I had overshot the correct place. So much for technology. We hightailed it to the correct place and met Alex, only being five minutes late.

Alex was our guide for a three-hour (which turned into almost four hours) tour of Irish authors. I figured Mer would love it, which she did. We met at Merrion Square because our first author, Oscar Wilde, had lived there. Alex told us of the background for Wilde’s life and his complicated family and personal life. Alex’s personal take is that Wilde had a self-destructive tendency in his life that drove some of his art (especially The Picture of Dorian Grey).

We then walked over to the National Galley of Art to visit GB Shaw’s statue, which is placed there since Shaw was a major contributor of art and money when the museum was opening. Alex told us of how Shaw was highly political, and how Shaw moved from a position of believing that people were basically good and would continue to get better to a later position of believing that people were chaotic and irrational.

Our third author was William Butler Yeats, and we went to the National Library, where there was an exhibition on his work. We learned how Yeats was probably the most influential writer in Irish history, since he was writing around the time of Irish Independence. Yeats also was dedicated to preserving and creating a distinct Irish culture separate from England’s. Yeats essentially created his own religion/spiritual world view, and had complicated relationships with his wife and several other women, especially a woman whom he viewed as a type of muse for him.

We then walked back to Sweny’s Pharmacy to talk about James Joyce. We learned that Ulysses was banned in Ireland as obscene until the 1960s, forty years after it was published in France.

On to Samuel Beckett and a theater named for him on the campus of Trinity College. Beckett was obsessed with Joyce, and struggled to find his own voice for many years. Beckett taught French at Trinity, and eventually moved to Paris, and there he found he was able to write well in French. He is credited with saying, “Joyce has written about everything; therefore, I shall write about nothing.” Beckett is best known for Waiting for Godot, a play in which nothing really happens; Beckett believed that there was no absolute God-given point to existence and that the world tended toward absurdity.

We finished at the Abbey Theater, where we heard about Lady Gregory, one of the founders of the place (as was Yeats). Lady Gregory took the time to learn the Irish language, and then she set about preserving and translating the local folk tales.

We walked over to the Dublin Writers Museum, but the doors were locked. So Alex took us to a pub for a late lunch (it was 2:00), and we said goodbye to him and to an interesting tour.

Now more inefficiencies began to creep into the day. By the time we finished lunch, it was about 3:00, and so we hiked the forty minutes back to our room because we had to make sure we had time to take our Covid tests that are required to get back into the United States. By the time we had that all wrapped up and the passing tests printed out, it was almost 6:00. I had plans for us at 8:00, so off we went. Forty minutes. In the now-raining and cold outside. To get to about four blocks from where we had been. To go to a storytelling session at the National Leprechaun Museum. To find out I had booked the wrong date for the tickets and the show was sold out.

A rather long walk back to our B and B area ensued. But at least the rain stopped along the way. A good supper helped, but it had meant that our touring for the day essentially ended at 2:00 – not the best bang for the buck. But still, a good tour today, and the rest of the vacation went off stunningly well, especially with the weather – today was the first time we actually got rained on in six days In Ireland in the spring. That is not statistically likely, and we are grateful for our time here this week. What a blessing to get to travel here.

So we are off early to Dublin Airport tomorrow, where staff shortages seem to be creating long lines and other inefficiencies. We are going to aim to get there and have the car returned by 9:00 for a 12:30 flight. After that, here’s hoping we have smooth travels back home.

Since we have spent so much time around the year 1200 this vacation, I decided we should continue that trend. This morning we went to Kilkenny’s Medieval Mile Museum, which houses artifacts and historical items for Kilkenny, starting around, oh, let’s say 1200 (although it was a smidge before that, but who is counting?).

We had booked a guided tour, and I am very glad we did. It was just Meredith and I and our enthusiastic guide Sharon. She took us around the museum, which is housed in a church from 1200, and she explained what we were looking at and why it mattered. Some of the items she shared with us:

• A collection of clay pipe heads used for funerals, a tradition which still continues. She also told us the Irish wake comes from “wake up,” which occasionally happened to the “dead” before modern medicine came along. The tradition of sitting with a body for three days was to make sure the person was dead.
• A rebels’ coin minted from coffin hinges to make money for when Kilkenny was under siege and needed food and weapons.
• The tops of doorways now just peeking out of the floor. Over the years, seventy thousand people were buried in the church itself, which raised the floor level about ten feet.
• Examples of carved crypt covers that became more elaborate over time, showing Kilkenny’s growing size and wealth.
• She shared the fun fact that early Kilkenny would have spoken French because of the Anglo-Norman settlers of the city.

On Sharon’s recommendation, we then walked up the street about five minutes to go to St. Canice’s Cathedral, an actual non-destroyed church that is still in use. It’s probably because it is a modern church, finished in 1285. Happily, the church has an intact (except for the cone on top) round tower from around 900, so it gives it some legitimacy. And the tower is only one of two in Ireland that you can still climb. So we had to do that.

There is head knowledge, and then there is experience. My head knew the towers were very tall, joined by multiple ladders, and there wasn’t much space inside them. It’s another thing to experience climbing six separate ladder-like sets of stairs in a slowly shrinking conic cylinder. The last ladder was very steep and very tight. It certainly would have been a terrible place to be trapped by enemies, and the towers were only used as a last resort for that. You are able to climb out on top of the tower, by climbing five uneven tall stone steps. Meredith and I both managed it, and she enjoyed it as much as you can on a forty-degree day with gusting winds at the top of a tower. I huddled in the middle of the safest area for a minute before retreating to the safety of the uneven steps. I was able to keep my head above the tower to look around.

The cathedral itself is pretty and has a long history. The two objects I liked best were a set of intricate carvings on top of tombs for an important family (next to the list of the family line going back to about 1150 – the current duke/lord/whatever is the twenty-third one), and they have a stone chair that has been used to install bishops since something like 1000. And you are invited to sit in the chair.

After lunch, we drove the hour and a half back to Dublin, where I managed to park the car in a small spot, where I can leave it until Saturday morning. That was a relief. After a quick dumping of stuff in the room, we walked the twenty minutes into the city, passing through the northern part of St. Stephen’s Green. We got supper in the Grafton Street shopping area, and then went off to the surprise of the evening for Mer – we walked up to Sweny’s Pharmacy.

Sweny’s Pharmacy is a place that the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses goes in the book. The pharmacy is now run as a Joyce landmark, and on Thursday nights, you can go into the very small shop and take turns reading out loud from the book. This seemed like something my English-teacher wife should do, and I was right – she loved it, after she got over the confusion of why I wanted her picture in front of a random small store.

The gentleman who organizes it is a gentle and hospitable man who also happens to teach six languages at Trinity. He offered us wine or whiskey and chatted with us for some time. He had a dry sense of humor and made us feel important. He may have given Dale, Meredith’s late father, some competition for the title of my ideal professor stereotype. He seemed like he would be a don at Oxford (if Trinity has the same title). The reading went on for about an hour and a half, and we were joined by about fifteen people in the shop and about ten people online. Not everyone was a native English speaker, and it amazes me that anyone would tackle such a difficult book in a second language. It was a joy hearing the Irish, British, American, and other accents all reading.

That wrapped up the day for us – we walked back to the B and B. From 1200 to 1920 – we’ve had a long day. Time for bed.

Some days I am confronted with getting older. That can be in healing slowly or having minor pains in back, neck, and elsewhere. But more and more it means being clumsy (dropping things and tripping) and forgetting things. Like forgetting to get gas.

We set off happily this morning from our B and B, headed to the supposed-to-be impressive Rock of Cashel. We got a little bit of a late start, but I wasn’t on a strict timeline, so that was okay. Until I glanced at the gauges and suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to get gas last night. I figured we would pass a gas pump at least (if not a full station), but back lane Ireland is really rural. After not seeing any place to get gas, I told my GPS to find a station. It did. Five miles away. Which would take twenty minutes. Sigh.

We did make it to the pump (not a station). There was a man filling a two-gallon container while talking to another man leaning against a car. We waited. The leaning man drove off, and we pulled up. The attendant (it was a full-serve pump) and I had (roughly) the following conversation:

Attendant: Cead failte mile!
Me: Ummm. Hello.
Attendant: Easel or undead?
Me: Ummm. (waves keychain in air that says “Unleaded only”) Unleaded?
Attendant: Tan or twenney?
Me: Ummm. Twenty?
Attendant (pumps gas): Sinead O’Connor mulligan lucky charms erin go bragh guinness craic gob my left shoe U2 bork bork bork. Heh! Ha!
Me (nervously): Ummm. Yeah. (laughs nervously, gets back in car, and drives away with a modicum of gas in tank)

We did eventually get to the Rock of Cashel. Even from the parking lot, it looked impressive. We got out of the car, and I reached for my camera. Enter old-fart moment number two. I had no camera. It was an hour away in my B and B room. Sigh. Happily for me, I did have my travel smartphone with me, and that filled in for my camera for today. Still, not an encouraging moment. It goes down at the third time I’ve blown it with my camera (not charged for Venice’s Burano island, forgotten for Seydisfjordur in Iceland, and now forgotten for Cashel).

The Rock of Cashel looked like to me like a castle, but it is not. The Rock is the rocky hill on which a fortress-looking church complex is built. It used to be a fortress of the king of Ireland, but in 1100, he decided to move his court. But, since his family had taken the Rock from another family, he did not want the other family grabbing it and trying to set up a rival kingdom. So, in a savvy political move, he gave the entire Rock to the church. He gets favorite-son status with the local church, and his rivals can’t try to take the Rock from the church. The church started building a chapel almost immediately.

That is a remarkable church, too. It’s from around 1200, and it is the first Romanesque church in Ireland, and remarkably, it is intact to this day. It had to be refurbished a few years back because the sandstone of which it is made had become waterlogged over nine hundred years. The Office of Public Works built a temporary roof over the whole church for five full years, and that let the stone dry out. They then tore the roof off stone by stone, and replaced twenty percent of the roof’s stones with identical ones, and put the whole thing back together with a thin waterproof lining underneath. Slick.

We were able to go inside the church on our pay-for tour, and while the inside is simple and small (it was a private church for the archbishop), it is nine hundred years old, and there are still small pieces of frescoes on the ceiling, and the carved decorations are still intact. That kind of age is a bit mind-boggling.

After the chapel tour, we took a tour of the rest of the buildings, which are mostly the roofless cathedral (from around 1200) and an intact round tower (which may be as old as being built in 900). The guide said the cathedral was small even by the standards of the time, but all of Ireland only had half a million people. It didn’t need to be big. I thought it looked huge.

We found out about a bishop of Cashel from the 1500s who somehow managed to be both a Catholic bishop (for the north) and a Protestant bishop (for the south). He was finally excommunicated after ten years, but he still somehow managed to have three wives and twenty-seven children (that we know of). He was described as a tall and handsome man. Seems he used that to his advantage.

After the tour was over, we drove an hour back to the Kilkenny region to go see the Jerpoint Abbey. Yes, another ruined abbey. This one is well known for the carvings left behind by the monks who weren’t supposed to have carvings (they weren’t all allowed by their order). No one is sure if the monks just disobeyed the rule or if the rule eventually got relaxed, but the many of the carvings still survive. It is also a large church, and we had it to ourselves, which was pretty fun.

The last stop of the day was…wait for it…another ruined abbey. We went to the Kells Priory complex (not that Kells – another one). It is simply huge, and it is free to see, and we had it to ourselves except for one woman walking her dog on the other side of the complex. I’m not sure what all they did at the Priory, but it involved a substantial defensive wall and dozens of buildings. Mer and I think we found the main church, but it was small compared to the size of the place. It was windswept and lonely and quite marvelous, and as a bonus, we got to see dozens of frolicking lambs in the field through which we had to walk.

We went back to the mill restaurant at which we ate last night, since it was only a mile away, and then got back to our B and B early. We may head out to see if we can find a pub with music, or we may use the evening to get some rest. Either way, compared to what we saw today, I’m feeling pretty young.

Shocking postscript – I went out on the town, in the evening, voluntarily, until 11:00 pm. We went to a tiny pub called The Hole in the Wall in downtown Kilkenny. What a gem. Mer and I walked into the downstairs of the pub, which had about eight seats. We were the only customers. Although I was looking for music, it was too cozy a place to pass up, so we sat down and started chatting with the owner, who is also a cardiologist. While we were chatting, a local couple came in and joined in. We were then eventually joined by four Swedish college students. That was it, for the entire evening. Eight of us and the owner, all chatting, until the Swedes offered to sing. They sang a song in Swedish, and then did an enthusiastic Irish song. We ended up with someone providing music (including Meredith leading “Amazing Grace”) for the rest of the evening. I sadly called our evening over at 10:30 pm. I would have happily stayed until closing. What a pure joy the night was. If you are ever in Kilkenny, please look up The Hole in the Wall – it’s a little tricky to find (it’s down an alley), but it is worth it.

Off to bed. Oh – for those keeping count, ten abbeys and one castle on this trip.

We woke up this morning to the sound of seabirds and the sight of fog. Not a big deal – we were right on the ocean, and I knew the day was supposed to be fine. We got ready, went out for a quick breakfast, and then headed thirty minutes south to Powerscourt House and Gardens.

We got to the gardens about 9:45, and things were still fairly fogged in. We went in to buy our tickets to the gardens, and the women selling them apologized for the weather. We all agreed the fog might burn off later. What was the fuss for fog in a garden?

Powerscourt was voted (by National Geographic) as the third “best” (whatever that definition is) garden in the world, after Versailles and Kew Gardens in London. The garden is pretty fabulous, but what sets it apart is the formal nature of the garden set against the background of the Wicklow Mountains, and especially Great Sugarloaf Mountain. Or so we were told. We couldn’t see the mountains at all – we could barely see across the full length of the gardens. But we could see the section of garden we were in, so off we went.

As an aside, Powerscourt does have a villa, but a fire gutted it in the 1970s just as it was about to open to the public. It has been partially restored for use for weddings, but otherwise is not open to the public.

We spent a happy couple of hours wandering the gardens. There is a formal garden with flower borders (the longest double border in Ireland), and a rhododendron garden, a pet cemetery (that was a new sight for me), a gorgeous Japanese garden, a castle tower (complete with small canons), and a fine main area with grounds that stepped down to a lake with a large fountain. All the while, the fog slowly started to lift. We had lunch, and by the time we were done (toward 1:00), we could see the mountains. They were hazy, but there. That was a happy sight.

Since the fog had largely burned off, the ticket ladies strongly suggested we drive over the Sally Gap in the Wicklow Mountains. I had planned on doing so anyway, but had started wavering, thinking it might be foggy up there. With the encouragement of the native women, I decided to try it. I’m glad I did.

The roads in Ireland range from modern mega highways to (usually) paved cow paths. One of the women asked if I was a nervous driver. Narrow roads winding into mountains with possible sheep and cyclists while I’m driving on the left side of the road? Why would I be nervous? It turned out to be okay – the Wicklow Mountains are largely bare of trees and hedges, so the narrow roads have pretty good sight lines. That allowed me to make sure I could find a pull-off area before oncoming cars, which were rare, got too close.

And the mountains are beautiful. They are bare of trees and so look a lot like heather-covered mountains in Scotland. There are no people about (with the exception of the Guinness family estate, which is fairly distant from the public road). There are lakes up in the hills that are picturesque, and all of this was mostly in the sun. It was a worthwhile forty minute drive to….

Glendalough. Glendalough is the home to a monastic settlement with buildings from the tenth to twelfth centuries, although the monastery was founded in the sixth century. There is a complete hundred-foot round tower, a complete small church, and the ruins of a large (for the time) cathedral. It also has a large Celtic cross, and is all pleasantly situated next to a stream and surrounded by mountains. We strolled through the settlement area, but then also hiked a path up past Lower Lake and on to Upper Lake. Upper Lake was serene, and we just sat on a bench there for some time before heading back to the car.

We drove to our B and B on the outskirts of Kilkenny in the south of Ireland. Our hostess recommended the Kings Mill Restaurant, an Italian place that was in an old mill, complete with waterwheel. That sounded fine to us, and while the food was good, the setting was outstanding – next to a small, beautiful river and downstream from a very pretty bridge. We had a very friendly young waiter who chatted with us a bunch (it was near closing, and so slower). He told us about things to see in the area, which we will probably do if time and the weather cooperate.

And so to help lift my own personal fog, I’m off to bed. For those keeping count, we are now at one castle and seven abbeys in three days.

Sometimes coming up short on time is a huge help. Today, we got launched from Navan around 8:45, which was fine. We had 10:15 admission tickets to Bru na Boinne, the home of the Newgrange and Knowth chamber tombs (as well as many other smaller tombs). I had calculated we had time to go see another ruined abbey, one that has two of the finest high crosses in all of Ireland. What I hadn’t remembered was that I had made all of my time calculations from the village of Slane and not Navan, which is an added difference of twenty minutes. When we actually got to Slane, I decided we had to skip going to the former monastery, and I reset our GPS to Newgrange.

Computers are funny things. When you tell a GPS to get you to Newgrange, it will do that. What it won’t tell you is that you can’t get in to see the tomb without a ticket from the visitors’ center, which is across the Boyne River. Happily, we can read signs, and made the discovery after only a couple of miles (and before we got all the way to the monument). I corrected the GPS by asking it to take us to the visitors’ center.

Computers are funny things. When you tell a GPS to take you to the visitors’ center, it will do that. What it won’t tell you is that the cow path of a road it wants to take you down will indeed be a slight shortcut to the center. We chose to follow the signs on the main road instead.

The Bru na Boinne (Newgrange) Center is a pretty great little museum. It has displays and videos explaining about the tombs and (a little) about the people who built them. You can go through the entire exhibit in about forty-five minutes, which is good, because that is all the time we had before our small bus left to take us to the sites. The quick lowdown on the tombs – there are three major passage tombs, but one is mostly unexcavated. The tombs are all about five thousand years old. The tour includes the two open ones, Knowth and Newgrange. We know little of how or why the people built the tombs, but some of the rock came from thirty miles away or more, and some of the stones weighed more than five tons. Knowth is a larger site, with the main tomb and several smaller tombs. You are allowed on the top of Knowth; since there has been a fort on top and a farm, I guess they figure it’s okay to let tourists on the boardwalks up top. Newgrange has the attraction of your actually being able to go inside the chamber.

We left the center and walked across a very pretty pedestrian bridge across the Boyne River. A short walk led us to the parking lot, and there we met our bus. It took us out to Knowth first, where we spent about forty-five minutes exploring the grounds, which included going to the top. The tomb is surrounded by heavy skirt stones, some of which are decorated with geometric designs. From the top of the mound, you can see in all directions, and signs at the top told you what you were looking at. I found a distant-looking Hill of Tara and a very close Hill of Slane. I was much more excited about seeing the Hill of Slane from the mound that I had any right to be. I never actually recognize things from signs posted on hills or tall buildings, so I kept pointing it out to Meredith. She is a patient wife.

The bus then took us to Newgrange, where we spent another forty-five minutes on site. Meredith and I got to go in the tomb with the first group (of two), a tour of twelve people. You have to stoop in places to continue, and a couple of places are quite narrow, but we ended up in a small chamber shaped like a cross. The three small rooms used to hold human remains of important people. There were many designs etched into the stone in this section. Newgrange is famous for being built such that the interior of the tomb chamber is lit by the sun for a few minutes on the winter solstice. Our guide demonstrated it using a light bulb, and even that was impressive. You can go on the solstice to see it actually happen, if the weather is good and if you win a lottery of ten or so tickets out of thirty thousand entries.

The outside of Newgrange is highly decorated with white and grey stones. The decoration is an interpretation from an archeologist who worked Newgrange in the 1970s. He found all the stones on the ground, decided they’d fallen from the outside of the tomb, and took an educated guess on how they might originally have been arranged. It created some controversy, but I like the effect myself. It looks more imposing and regal than just a mound of grass.

We headed back to the visitors’ center, where we ate a quick lunch (at 1:00). We were then off to the town of Trim. Trim got on my touring radar from having a fairly intact castle in it from around 1200, as well as having an interesting river walk. When my brother mentioned how much he liked Trim’s castle, it firmed up my determination to go see it.

Trim’s castle was built by the Anglo-Normans as a power move, to firm up their rule of eastern Ireland. They started with a central keep/tower space, and eventually added outer walls and a moat. The grounds are free to tour, and a minimal fee gets you a forty-five minute tour of the interior, which included the roof. We did that, of course. The tour was interesting, and the views from the top were great on a sunny day like today. We both loved the tour.

We then followed a walking tour from Mer’s favorite guidebook writer, Rick Steves. We followed the Boyne River for a ways, until we got to the ruins of a large Gothic church (all after having met two older gentlemen who talked to us about considering becoming Catholic – it is Ireland, after all). The ruins of the church were impressive, but so was the old (and still in use) cemetery surrounding it – it had huge trees growing all over, and many Celtic crosses for tombstones. It was a pretty spot, for ruins and a graveyard. We weren’t done being ruined yet, though – we continued on a little bit to a ruined church/hospital complex from the thirteenth century. We returned the way we came, and fit in one more quick ruin – the tower of an abbey destroyed by Cromwell; the tower used to be seven stories tall. It is still impressive even standing in ruins.

So, if you are keeping ruins count, we’re up to six ruined abbeys and one castle, in two days. We would have seen even more in this area, but sometimes time is short.

For weeks I had been trying to figure out what I wanted to do with Meredith over our spring break vacation. I kept looking at places to go in Europe, since Mer loves traveling. But I kept running into ever-changing and sometimes hard-to-understand Covid-related restrictions and requirements. Finally, about three weeks ago, Ireland announced it was dropping all Covid entry forms and tests. I booked our tickets the same day.

We flew out of Dulles (Washington) for the first time; driving six hours saved us about eight hundred dollars on airfare. It was a bit tense leaving Ohio when we hit a heavy snow squall that lasted about thirty minutes; I was afraid we were going to be driving at thirty miles per hour for a long time and so we would miss our flight. Happily, the snow stopped, and after an easy and uncrowded airport experience, we ended up at our gate almost three hours early. I’ve agreed that next time we can try leaving thirty or forty-five minutes later.

We arrived in Dublin this morning (Sunday), and we had our car and were off on our first day of touring by 7:00 am. That meant we had about five hours of touring to do before we could get into our B and B and get the three-hour nap that we do to try to break jetlag issues. We were fairly tired, but excited to be in Ireland.

Our first two stops were the Hill of Tara, a series of five-thousand-year-old mounds that were used for burials and other unknown uses. Later, Tara became the place where Irish kings were crowned. We stopped there twice because the visitors’ center didn’t open until 10:00, and we needed a restroom break. Off we went in search of a gas station, and then we returned.

The Hill of Tara is a very broad hill. Meredith and I both had pictured some small but dramatic mound towering over the rest of the landscape. Not so much – it is a very large site. You can walk around and even on the mounds, but they are hard to appreciate fully from the ground since the scale of them is so large. Arial photos help (on info placards at the entrance), but what our guidebook said really helps is the visitors’ center and tours offered from there. Which was closed for two more hours. Still, we were glad to be able to picture the hill for when it comes up in literature or history.

We then drove on to the larger-than-expected town of Navan, where our B and B is located. I thought Navan would be a village, but it is a town of thirty thousand people. I drove out to north of the town down a very narrow road to go see Dunmoe, a ruined castle. What none of the websites at which I looked told me was that the castle is in the middle of a field, surrounded by barbed wire for livestock. I didn’t see an obvious way in, and there was nowhere to park, so I turned around. One minor tourism failure.

I drove back through town to whence we had come, to go down a wider back road full of Sunday bikers out riding. We pulled up to an actual parking lot for the Bective Abbey, which is a ruin of an abbey that was destroyed by Henry VIII. It overlooks the Boyne River and so is a very pretty place to wander about. After we were there for about thirty minutes, we walked down to the Boyne and the pleasing stone bridge that was built over it. A nice man gave us permission to walk right down to the river, and he told us that a Ben Affleck film had used the bridge in a movie a year or two ago.

Back in town, we pulled up to a street that seemed to be a little in disrepair (closed businesses and shuttered homes). I wanted to check out the Lighthouse Church, and the address was for this street. We found it, only to discover that it was the offices, and the church itself met elsewhere. But it wasn’t posted in the window of the office.

Enter new-to-me technology. For years we have traveled with friends who have smart phones and use them to aid in solving various things that pop up when traveling. I hate phones myself, but I caved enough for travel to get a Google Fi phone that I can deactivate when we aren’t on vacation. I used it in this case, and found that the church worshipped in a hotel a couple of miles away, and we had just enough time to get there.

It is a lively and active church. The announcements were full of listings of ministries and Bible studies (including one in Portuguese). The music was contemporary (and loud), but was well done and enthusiastic. The pastor preached on witnessing and how we all have unique (and therefore important) stories to tell. He used three women from the book of Acts as examples of ordinary  women whose stories are still being told – one woman provided (was generous), one prioritized God by risking meeting with believers, and one woman persevered even when things were hard. It was a satisfying service full of cute accents, and the people were very welcoming.

I then got to use my phone again. After my GPS seemed to show that our B and B was on the next road over from the church (but with no street address), I used my phone to verify that this was the case. And it was. What a blessing to two people who had been up for twenty-six hours! We drove over and were able to get into our room, where we slept for three hours and showered.

Feeling much more human, we drove to the village of Slane to eat at a restaurant attached to a hotel. The food was very good and quite welcome to our time-screwed-up bodies. But we could have gotten food in Navan – I took us to Slane because I wanted Mer to see the Hill of Slane, which has a small (ruined, of course) abbey at the top.

Tradition holds that Patrick of saint fame lit an Easter fire on the hill, thereby making a local king mad. However, they made up, and the king became a Christian. The abbey was added much later and was finally abandoned in the 1700s. But it makes a wonderful place now to see a sunset on a gloriously sunny day. The cemetery located there is still in use, and many of the graves had fresh flowers on them; one grave even had a note to “Mum” because today was Mothers’ Day in Ireland.

I thought that was it for the day, but on the way back to the B and B, I swung in to one more cemetery since it was right off the road. It had a very intact round tower there, so we got to see that. Since the towers were places to hide during raids, the “ground” floor door is twelve feet off the ground, and was accessed by a ladder that could be pulled up after everyone was inside.

And then we really did come back to our home for the night. We should get a good sleep tonight and hit the ground touring tomorrow. At least we won’t be ruins after some food and sleep.

Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday, but, as hard as it is to believe, I stayed out until 12:30 am. Oddly, I didn’t feel like blogging when I got back to the hotel.

We left Charleston yesterday morning and had an uneventful four-hour drive back to Asheville. We had all wanted to see the Biltmore estate, which is the largest private home in the United States, built by the Vanderbilts back in 1890. Meredith and I had been in the summer several years ago, but a friend had told us the house was an amazing thing to see at Christmas. Plus, Dubbs had never seen it before, and we NEVER get to introduce the well-traveled Dubbs to anything new.

We hadn’t seen the Biltmore on the first leg of the vacation because while I was e-mailing back and forth with the guest services about what kind of ticket we needed, they sold out for our days. At that point, Dubbs leapt into action, finding there were a few tickets left for a 10:45 pm admission to the house, but only on Wednesday the 29th. So we extended the vacation by one day to fit the tour in, with the added bonus of turning a twelve-hour driving day (from Charleston) into a nine-and-a-half-hour day (from Asheville, which took us a little farther west than we needed to go).

We arrived to see the estate grounds during the day, getting to the house, after driving the two-and-a-half-mile driveway, around 1:00. The driveway was deliberately designed to be long and winding, in order to have guests to the house enjoy the surrounding nature. It used to take forty-five minutes to get to the house. Our hotel is a seven-minute drive from the entrance, but it took us twenty-five minutes to get home from the house. It’s a large estate.

In a fit of madness, Dubbs asked me what we should see, and I told her the pond was pretty. So we took off for the pond and boathouse, heading downhill for the water I had seen from the house. Although Mer and I had been here a few years back, the path did not look familiar to me, but I chalked that up to the assumption that we had taken a different way. Or not. When we got to the “pond,” it turned out to be the “lagoon.” And not so pretty as the pond. Ooops. So much for asking me what we should see. Still, it got me and Meredith to a place we hadn’t seen.

After hiking the long and uphill hike back to the house, we toured two of the gardens. They are a little underwhelming in late December, but a few things were still in bloom. We chatted with a gardener who said that the Biltmore could employ as many as forty-five gardeners, but they never had that many since the Asheville area cost of living was so high; people couldn’t afford to live locally and work as a gardener.

We did get to see a lot of blooming plants in the greenhouses, and some were very pretty. Meredith likes plants with leaves that have two or more colors, and there were several varieties of that, along with cacti, ferns, flowering trees, and more. The greenhouses are huge, and so we spent a fair amount of time there.

We took a quick detour to the gift shop; Dubbs had promised to pick something up for a mutual friend. By now, it was about 4:00, so we went to check into the hotel via the circuitous route of getting off the estate. Since we knew we had a late night coming up, Dubbs and I took naps while Meredith graded.

We got back to the house about 10:15, and got into the house right on time at 10:45. We grabbed an audio tour recording, and spent a happy touring time in the house, going through about thirty of the 260 rooms of the house. We got to see the main dining room, with the seven-story roof above, where multi-course meals were served to guests, with the entire dining experience lasting two hours, while the guests were dressed in evening attire (not sweats, as we might prefer by today’s standards!).

We saw the more intimate breakfast/lunch room, the main atrium, which houses an indoor garden, the grand staircase, Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bedrooms, some of the thirty guest bedrooms, the billiard room, the smoking room, the guest lounge area, the bowling alley in the basement, the indoor swimming pool (now dry since it leaks), the kitchen areas, and some of the plain (but comfortable-looking) servants’ quarters. All of the main upstairs rooms were decorated with Christmas trees, including a huge one in the dining room. All the fireplaces had (gas) fires burning, and despite the expanse of the house, most of the rooms felt intimate. It is a grand place indeed.

That ended the official touring of the trip, and we walked back to the car in the first real rain we’ve had on the trip. That was an excellent way to be reminded of how blessed we were to have sunny days and, with the exception of the first day, warm temperatures. Both Asheville and Charleston acquitted themselves very well. But I am ready to get back to my own castle now, and see my kitties, friends, and relations.

After breakfast in a cute nearby cafe, we headed downtown to the wharf, to catch a sightseeing boat for a ninety-minute tour of the Charleston harbor. It was a bit foggy, but we could still see Fort Sumter from the dock, and we could see the huge bridge across the river, so I figured it would be okay. The fog lifted during the tour, but it stayed overcast, which was fine with us since we were sitting on the top deck. Too much sun could have been hot, and certainly could have burned one or more of us pasty people.

The tour was mellow, but informative and often funny. The captain of the boat narrated as we went around the harbor, and we learned a bunch of things:

• The cruise ship dock is either going to get a facelift or a new one will be built soon. The current one is quite ugly.
• No building in downtown can be higher than the highest church steeple (about 240 feet).
• The first shot of the Civil War was fired from Fort Johnson (which is near Fort Sumter), which fired a warning shot that signaled other Confederate cannons to fire on Fort Sumter.
• Fort Sumter surrendered when its men ran out of supplies and after they had been hit by an estimated 45,000 cannonballs. No one was killed in the battle, although one Union army solder died after a gunpowder accident during the military honors that the Confederate army gave to the surrendering soldiers.
• For Sumter used to be quite a bit taller, but was knocked down by all the cannon fire.
• During the Revolutionary War, the British fired on a wooden fort in Charleston harbor, but the cannonballs just bounced off the local palmetto wood. The Americans went out and collected the balls and shot them back.
• The far side of the harbor is one of the most expensive places to buy a home in the US.
• Charleston shrimp are never frozen – they are sent directly to local markets.
• The huge bridge was built after one of the two old bridges received a safety rating of four (out of one hundred).
• The new bridge came in under budget and ahead of schedule.
• And we saw two dolphins playing in the wake of the prow of the boat. That was fun.

After the tour, we headed across said huge bridge to Mt. Pleasant, where we grabbed a quick lunch, and then drove to Patriots Point, the home of the retired aircraft carrier the USS Yorktown. It is also home to a destroyer and other military exhibits, but we only had time for the Yorktown.

What a ship. It is ginormous, and the Yorktown is small by today’s standards. We spent almost five hours on board her, and we still didn’t see everything (although we came very close). We talked to some Navy vets at the information center so we could ask them general questions about carriers, and then we set off touring the hanger deck, where aircraft used to be stored. It is now home to many displays, and the World War 2 aircraft that would have been on board. The top deck is home to the jets and other planes that were used on the Yorktown until she was retired in 1970.

We saw a good film that interviewed several (now older) members of the crew, which was informative and touching, especially when they were talking about the friends they lost. The movie also spliced in original footage from World War 2.

We took self-guided tours of the guts of the boat. The ship was home to three thousand men, and so became a small city. It had three dentists on board, a police staff, a brig, a snack shop, regular doctor office hours (twice a day), a laundry, a machine shop, electronics repair, a kitchen capable of serving three thousand men four meals a day (counting “midrat” – a meal a midnight for men on duty). The kitchen had ingredients set out to make ten thousand chocolate chip cookies.

I loved going all the way down to one of the engine rooms. It is full of huge machines and is very cramped, and when running, it could get up to 130 degrees. The ship ran off of steam generated by oil-fired boilers. There were four engine rooms each driving a fifteen-ton propeller. I think the fastest speed I saw listed was thirty knots (thirty-four mph) if all four were running full-out.

On the other end, we got up to the flight deck, and then were able to climb up into the bridge. The views of the area were grand, and the sun had come fully out.

The Yorktown was involved in the first carrier versus carrier battle in which the fight was all carried out by planes – the ships never saw each other. She was also involved in the battle for Midway (after having been patched together in seventy-two hours for repairs that should have taken weeks).  The Yorktown survived the war and was in service long enough to be the recovery ship for Apollo 8, which was the first Apollo mission to orbit the moon.

It was a fascinating afternoon. Dubbs waited patiently while Meredith and I finished up by getting into a flight simulator (which was fun, but really just an amusement ride), and then lying flat on our backs in a mock-up of Apollo 8 to see film of that mission. And so, we closed the museum out.

After Patriots Point, we headed what I thought would be a short distance to an amusement place with mini-golf and go-karts and games. It turned out the map I was using didn’t have an obvious scale, and it took about twenty minutes to get there. We waited about thirty minutes total to ride the go-karts (they only had seven). I had thought it would be fun to take advantage of the warm evening, and it was, but I hadn’t anticipated such a long wait.

We ended the evening by trying to find a restaurant that was not where the GPS said it would be, followed by one that was out of business, followed by one that was short-staffed and took about an hour to get us our food. There, the waitresses were nice and comped us almost all of our bill, so although it was a bit of a wait for the food, at least we got in an inexpensive meal.

And so ends our tour of Charleston. We will head back to Asheville tomorrow to go see the Biltmore Estate, and then head home on Thursday. Charleston was highly recommended to us, and it turned out to live up to expectations. Fun city.

Dubbs was in charge today, and after a quick breakfast (the place was open, but Meredith’s first choice was sold out, so her eatery streak continues), we headed over to Boone Hall Plantation, which is just outside of Charleston.

Boone Hall Plantation has a dramatic entrance, with a three-quarter-mile long dirt drive lined with huge live oaks. The oaks frame a classic-looking brick building with tall white columns holding the roof of the porch, but as classic as the house is, it was only built in the 1930s, replacing a rather ordinary-looking farm house. Still, the drive and the house are sufficiently picturesque that they were used in the 1980s mini-series North and South and also for the movie The Notebook. Both shows used the exterior only – the inside is very nice, but smaller than most people would expect from a “mansion,” as it only goes back a little ways (one large room wide on the main floor).

We got there about 9:30, so we hung around the house for the 10:00 tour. We passed much of the time wandering the flower gardens flanking each side of the front of the house. The gardens had brick paths that wound through many flower beds and trees, and while one side was being prepared to be planted with winter flowers, the other side was already done and so was largely in bloom.

The house tour took about thirty minutes, and only covered three main rooms on the ground floor. The house is still privately owned, and the family lives on the second and third floors. We saw a large library (with two grand pianos), the dining room, and a very pretty enclosed porch connected to the men’s smoking room. The entire downstairs was decked out for Christmas, and all smelled of pine from the multiple trees in the house. It was very pretty.

After the house, we made our way over to the the eight houses remaining from the slave quarters. They are now all small museums, showing how slave life was on the plantation, moving though the Civil War and emancipation into the Jim Crow laws of the late 1800s and 1900s, and then moving though the Civil Rights movement. It was very thoughtfully done.

We finished our time at Boone by taking a “trolley” ride (carts pulled by a tractor). It took us on a tour of much of the rest of the seven hundred acres of land the plantation still owns. The property is the oldest continuously worked farm in North America, having been settled in 1681. The land didn’t have enough fresh water to raise rice, which was very profitable, so they raised cotton instead until the late 1800s, when bigger and more modern plantations drove the price of cotton too low. The farm then switched over to pecan trees, and became the biggest pecan orchard east of the Mississippi. Pecan trees, it seems, have a shallow root system, so the grove was mostly wiped out by two hurricanes (one in the early 1900s and one in the 1980s). The farm now grows a variety of crops, employing ten farmers, and hosting multiple “U-pick” crops each season.

We drove back into downtown Charleston to go to the Gibbes Museum of Art. It is a small but well-laid-out museum of three floors. The top floor was given over to a featured artist who experimented with abstract paintings and collages. The second floor was largely given over to landscape artists who worked in and around the city, and the first floor was largely made up of portraits. There were a couple of rooms of French Impressionists as well. We spent a little over an hour at the museum.

We walked down the road a bit to try the dessert place Meredith had wanted to go to last night, and this time it was open. All three of us got fancy ice cream sandwiches, which we ate outside on a bench in the warm sunshine. We took advantage of the nice day to walk over to the main semi-open-air market, which is four blocks long, in roofed-in buildings. Inside, people were selling jewelry, food, clothing, toys, hats, art, and more. We may have taken advantage of fresh mini donuts (about the size of a quarter).

We headed back to the car, but got distracted by the Circular Congregational Church, a large circular church built in 1890, but with congregational roots back to the 1690s. I saw a still legible tombstone from the 1790s, so there has been a church here for some time. We spent a lot of time wandering around the churchyard trying to read inscriptions on tombstones.

That was about it. We went back home to rest, and then went out for pizza, where the guy warned us the wait time was about forty minutes because he was so busy. There only seemed to be two people working, and last night we were turned away from a half-empty restaurant due to staffing shortages. It made me wonder if this is going to be the way things will be for a time with the latest Covid surge. Still, we got fed, and the pizza was good.

That wrapped up Dubbs’ day today. I’m in charge tomorrow, which always makes me a little anxious to fill the day productively, but not exhaust us in the touring of things. It’s a fine balance to strike, but Charleston has been a fun and lively place to tour so far, so I think things will turn out okay.