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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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