Since I am so good at keeping up on this blog these days...About a month ago my Mom (Jean) and Aunt Judy came all the way over to see us here in Dublin. It wasn't an easy trip for them, for a variety of reasons, but they made it and we were able to do quite a lot in a fairly short period of time.They were only here for about five days, so we had to try and get a lot in within only a few days without sending them both (or ourselves for that matter) to the hospital from exhaustion. To be completely honest, there's not all that much to do in Dublin. In a few days you could cover all of the major sites and get a good feel for the city. But, as I see it, most of the really great things about Ireland are not in the cities. I suppose it's a bit like Portland. Portland itself isn't loaded with weeks of interest, but you can get to a lot inside of an hour by car. So it goes for Dublin.
On Thursday they landed and I escorted them from the Airport to the hotel. Then I had to go to work. They were exhausted for the most part, though, so they were fine with just resting and getting their bearings for the hours that I would be stuck at work. That night we had a nice dinner at one of our favorite Italian restaurants and just called it early.
Friday was all walking. Mariah had to work, but I took the day off and we did the main Dublin sites: Stephen's Green, Grafton Street, Kilmainham Goal (Jail), the Spire, etc. We skipped a few things, like the Guiness Brewery, that weren't really of interest, and there was a lot of breaks for sitting and the like, but we made it. For the evening I took them out to our thumb stamp of an apartment (they stayed in a Hotel near Stephen's Green to save all of us from feeling like sardines in our place) and we had a great dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant, Diep (my favorite restaurant here so far).
Saturday I got up early and picked up the rental car so we could explore the outer reaches of the Dublin surroundings. So, Saturday and Sunday were spent driving all around the not so distant areas including: The Avoca Weavers Mill (something my mom, an avid fibers fan, really wanted to see), Glendalough, Powers Court Waterfall, Johny Fox's Tavern, and countless one-car-should-fit-here-but-lets-try-two-ok? winding Irish roads, flanked tightly by hedges and stone walls and...sheep... I'm not going too deeply into these places because most of them have been covered in one post or another on this blog previously, and I don't want to bore... You can see the pictures from this trip here if you need a refresher or you missed those posts.
The weather they got for this trip ended up just being amazing! It was bright and shiny. A series of consecutive beautiful spring days (though the Irish consider May the start of summer), so luck was on our side for enjoying the beautiful landscape without the hinderance of that wet stuff that falls from those big puffy gray things in the sky...Rain?...Clouds? For a few days there were able to forget what those were.Moday we decided to get passes on the commuter train that runs through the many coastal downs just outside of Dublin and see a few of those. Mariah and I both had this day off as a bank holiday (for May Day I believe...). Again it was a beautiful day, but this was going to turn out the way many an Oregon beach visitor might find the ocean's edge. There was a point on the train that it was nothing but glorious sunlight. Then the train passed through what must have been an invisible wall holding in some of the thickest fog I have ever seen. I wouldn't say fog is common in Dublin, so I was shocked. When we got to our destination (Bray, south of Dublin) the fog moved out a bit and we got filtered sun here and there, but the wind was cold and biting (like it always seems to be in Dublin). We took a short jaunt and then decided we would try another town. We headed north of Dublin to Howth (also featured on the blog previously). The weather was better, but not much. Starving by then, we spent most of our time standing in line to get fish and chips. We sat around where we could find sun, but this wasn't nearly as successful a day as some of the others. At least we had some nice views from the train, though. The funny thing is, just 20 minutes away from all of this in Dublin you were hard pressed to get out of the sun...
The next morning they headed back to the US having completed their European adventure. We went back to work...
Posts
