Ireland

I’ve been promising (threatening?) to show some photos from our Ireland and Scotland trip, so here you go.

In case you didn’t know, Tammie, her parents, and I took a two week trip to Ireland and Scotland. They’re very beautiful countries and I hope I get to go back again. We saw merely a fraction of each country, yet we were on the go constantly. In Ireland, we basically covered Dublin, and the South and Southwest.

Dublin didn’t do all that much for us. It was a city, a little dirty. We went to St. Patrick’s cathedral, but didn’t get a chance to go inside. We did do a pub or two and the beer was very, very good. As you may know, Guinness is one of the major food groups in Ireland.

Of course we had to do the tourist thing and go to Blarney Castle. It was not what I expected. I figured it was just an Irish tourist trap complete with large plastic leprachauns pointing the way to the cafeteria where you can buy a Shamrock Burger with Cheese. It was nothing like that at all! The castle was kept in its beautiful ruined state, and you had access to every room and all the surrounding grounds. You may not able to tell from the photo on the right, but it’s a very tall castle. I’ll have a photo coming up to give you a better idea how tall it is.

At the top of it was where you can find the famous Blarney Stone. It’s no secret that if you kiss it, you get good luck. I forgot where that legend started. We heard three different verions as to its origin. We also heard that some Irish people pee on it because they think it’s funny that so many want to kiss it. I just chalked that up to urban legend, because I still planned on kissing it.

Like I said, you have to be at the very top of this tall castle. To get to the Blarney Stone, you have to lay on your back (see photo of me on the left), hold on to some rails, and have someone hold onto you. They have someone up there who will do this for you. The guy who was assigned to do it, took a break, so some tourists decided to hold each other’s legs. The lady in charge was very upset at this and called them a bunch of "stupid Americans." Luckily, the guy came back from his break soon, so I didn’t have to endure the slinging of her verbal barbs.

Where was I? Oh yeah. I had to lay down, facing away from the wall, and the guy held me. Then I leaned over a bit, and looked down very far to the ground through this opening (which is covered with grates so you can’t fall to the ground if someone lets go of you). The Blarney Stone is the slab you see in the photo above that opening. If you have a fear of heights, you could get a little scared. Hey, after climbing all the stairs, I didn’t care. I needed some good luck! I kissed the Stone twice.

Tammie couldn’t get over her fear of heights, but she definitely wanted to get into the spirit. So she naturally decided to kiss the Blarney Wall instead, as you can see in the photo above. We are very proud of her ingenuity. And, of course, we’ve had nothing but good luck ever since.

To give you an idea oh how high it is up there, the next photo below was taken from the top. This wasn’t from a helicopter, but from the same floor where we kissed the Blarney Stone. There were a lot of stairs to climb to get this point. But when you see a lot of castles and cathedral towers, you do a lot of stair climbing.

As you can see from the photo, the grounds are lush and gorgeous. We spent over an hour just checking them out.

Click here to view a larger version of this photo (about 60K). The download time will vary depending on the speed of your modem.

If you want any history on Blarney Castle, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. I don’t have any recollection on its history, but you can click here for a link to Ireland’s castles.

I highly recommend you visiting Blarney Castle if you find yourselves lucky to have the chance to go to Ireland. If you go in May, you get nice weather (at least we did), plus all the rates are off-peak season — a definite bonus for cheapskates like me! There’s lots of good travel books (and websites) too.

There’s not a lot of good public transportation to get to different tourist spots, so you may have to rent a car. And driving a car in Ireland is an adventure unto itself! (One travel book said that if you’re from Boston, you should have no problem driving in Ireland. That should give you a good idea of what Irish drivers are like!). The lanes are very narrow, the road signs aren’t easy to read, and you have to drive on the left side of the road.

But enough of all that. I didn’t plan this page to be a travel advice page. So would you like to see some more photos? Okay I have three others I can show you from the Blarney Castle grounds.

This first one is obviously a Druidic Circle. (How did you guess?)

I have no additional comment on this one.

And the last one for now is some boys busking around an ancient tree. “Busking” means to perform for money. (And, no, what Divine Brown did for Hugh Grant doesn’t count as “busking”!)

That’s all the photos for now, but keep checking in to see if I’ve posted some more

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