May 7-9, 2011 - Dublin, back home

On Saturday, we took the bus into Dublin. And Lorne and I completely forgot our camera in the hotel room. These pictures are either stolen from Bill (the nice onces) or taken on Laurel's cell phone (the crappy ones).



On the bus to downtown. I look like some sort of weirdo hipster.



The general post office. This is where the revolution began in 1916. While the general public wasn't necessarily in favor of what happened during the uprising, they were pretty pissed off about the treatment of the rebels afterward. They didn't actually succeed in breaking apart from the British Empire then, but it sowed the seeds.



Lorne and squinty Will in front of the River Liffey, which flows through the center of Dublin.

We went to Trinity College to look at the Book of Kells. I'll just refer you to that there link, because I kept getting (and continue to get) the dates all screwed up. But anyway, it's super old. After you leave the room where they store the book, they kick you out into this super old library. While we were there they had an exhibition of old medical instruments/the history of medical teaching. Will and I waited for everyone else in the old library and spent a good deal of time talking about a drawing of the muscles of the face, and what muscles are, and how they help you move your mouth and eyes and everything, and how yes, that guy had a weird eye in the picture. (No pictures allowed in library or book area.)



Then we watched a cricket game for a bit. I attempted to talk to Will about the differences between cricket and baseball, but as I know very little about cricket, I said a lot of very insightful things like, "The guy doesn't stand still to pitch the ball like a pitcher in baseball, he runs at the batter." ("The guy" is actually called "the bowler." A nice Irish man sitting next to us told me that, after saying, "So, you're not familiar with cricket, are you?")



We walked around for awhile, then looked at the outside of the castle. We decided not to go in, as a tour wasn't leaving for another 45 minutes and you have to go on a tour to look around.



We walked down to Christchurch Cathedral instead. I didn't get to look around a whole lot; Evie was super fussy so I took her to the bathroom in the crypt and fed her.



After we walked through Temple Bar and had a couple snacks from the farmer's market there (including some amazing millionaire's shortbread), we went to Porterhouse Brewing to taste some Irish craft beer and have some more snacks.



We shared three tasting flights between us (the adults, anyway) and tasted all their beers. The three dark beers were clearly the best (in my opinion). They just do dark beer right in Ireland.



Will ate some ice cream. He also kind of had a meltdown. No nap, lots of walking, very tired. Then we went back to the hotel.

Lorne and I went out on a date though. We took a long, meandering walk through downtown, had a drink at The Duke (where Oscar Wilde used to hang out, back in the day), then finally ended up at The Farm, a farm-to-table place that was absolutely amazing. We totally lucked out for just randomly wandering into a restaurant when we were tired of walking in the rain. Then we had another beer, then took the bus back to the hotel. Lovely first day in Dublin.

On Sunday, we forgot the camera in the hotel room again. Idiots.



This dude was blowing giant bubbles on the main shopping street. Will was enthralled.





Then he totally knocked down his bucket of bubbles. We felt so bad. We had Will give him, like, 7 euros. Then he thanked him for the bubbles, then we all sheepishly walked away.



We walked to Guinness. Woo! Guinness! It really does taste better in Ireland. Science says so.



Will enjoyed playing in the barley. I swear, I'm not already drunk in this picture.



Silly Will.



I don't think they had this when I went in 2002 - you can go learn how to pour the perfect pint of Guinness. Here is Lorney, pouring his pint.



My pint and Lorney's pint, settling.



250+ years of Guinness.



This magical pen kept Evie happy for quite awhile.



Will and Lorne at the Sky Bar. You can see pretty much all of Dublin from here.



After Guinness, we walked further west to the old Kilmainham Gaol. Will and Evie promptly passed out in the stroller. We had questioned whether we wanted to bring the beast of a stroller, but I'm pretty glad that we did.



Or we would have spent a lot more time in Ireland doing what Lorne's doing in that picture there.



The jail is one of the first to have this design, which is now pretty common. They remodeled it sometime in the 1800s when prisoner reform was a big thing. The jail was decommissioned in 1924, after the Irish Republic became its own nation. Most figures in Irish independence were jailed here at some point.



After the jail we took the bus back downtown and ate dinner. The chef (and perhaps owner) sensed our son's impending hunger meltdown and headed it off at the pass with a bowl of marshmallows and a glass of milk. This was one of Will's favorite parts of our trip.



"I'm just kind of hugging the bowl, but not really, because I don't want them to spill."



We picked up some souvenirs on the way out (though no one bought one of the Obama or O'Bama t-shirts) and headed back to the hotel.

On Monday, we went to the airport and flew home. Again, the kids were pretty awesome, except for a brief Will meltdown over Angry Birds somewhere over the Atlantic. He was so loud that the flight attendant came up and talked to Will for a little bit and calmed him down. That was nice. Super, super, ridiculously embarrassing. But nice. Anyway, here are some pictures from our five hour layover in Chicago.

May 6, 2011 - Jameson and Rock of Cashel

On Friday, we left Killarney and drove east. Our first top was Midleton, near Cork, to see the Jameson Distillery.



We are good parental role models, yes?



Will and Grandpa Bill learn about the history of whiskey, while Will sits on a whiskey barrel chair.



Will, in front of an old delivery truck.



Will on a copper kettle.



Evie and Lorney in the barrel storage room. You may be asking yourself why Evie is wearing a sweater around her legs, and why her feet are bare. Just before the tour started she somehow managed to poop. Not in her diaper, but out the side and into the leg of her tights. ????



Then Gail and I volunteered for a whiskey tasting. We made some new friends at the table and talked for awhile.



After Jameson we drove up to the Rock of Cashel. This is where St. Patrick converted the King of Munster in the 5th century, though the buildings are mostly 600-800 years newer than that. The scaffolding is pretty recent.



St. Patrick's Cross, from the 1100s (I think).



The ceiling of the chapel. My architecture teacher in London liked to tell us that you could always tell a ship-building society by the way they built their roofs - you could turn this one upside down, caulk it, and set sail.







Will, shortly before he bit it in some mud on the grounds and ended up with mud all up and down his back, legs, and arms.



Evie found the Rock kind of boring. She was more interested in her teething biscuit.



Lorne spotted this broken chunk of stone in the corner of the graveyard. The carving on the stone is the same pattern he used when he designed my engagement ring.



Here is a terrible picture of me trying to illustrate the design on my ring and the design in the stone.



This is the ruins of Hore Abbey, just at the base of the hill that holds the rock. It was built in the 13th century.



The town of Cashel.

After we were done touring the Rock of Cashel, we headed down to the cars to change Will out of his mud-caked clothes, then had late lunch/early dinner (linner? dinch?) at a restaurant in town. Then headed up to Dublin for the remainder of our stay.

May 4-5, 2011 - Cliffs of Moher, Dingle, Killarney

On Wednesday, Lorne's conference ended at noon. We got some supplies, loaded up the cars, and headed south towards Killarney.



Lorney drives the awesome rental Peugeot. If this car was available in the U.S. we'd totally buy it.



That's Bill and Gail's car. It's tiny, yet takes up most of the small road. Oncoming buses were kind of terrifying.



I kept taking pictures of the hills while we drove. I couldn't get over how green everything was.



We stopped at a pullout at the top of a corkscrew hill (narrow roads + hairpin turns + steep + tour buses coming at you!) and ate some lunch. Evie had her first bites of cheese (Irish cheddar) and loved it. Will was completely, totally passed out in the back seat.



We stopped at the Cliffs of Moher. It's a 1,000 foot drop into the Atlantic. Awesome.



It was cold and rainy, so Evie wore her gnome hat.



This is how Will kept warm - shirt + sweater + sweatshirt + knit hat + hood over hat + sweatshirt pulled up over his mouth.



When I came in 2002, there were no walls and no steps. Basically nothing preventing you from walking up to the edge and falling to your death. My friend and I were stupid enough to sit on the edge to get our pictures taken. The EU recently gave them a bunch of money to fix it up though, and you can no longer tempt fate for a neat picture.



The cows can do as they please, however.



That first picture at the cliffs was taken from the top of O'Brien's Tower, which was built in 1835. I'm pretty sure its restoration was part of the "make the cliffs less deathtrappy for tourists" money from the EU.

After the cliffs, we headed further south, across the Shannon river, to our cottage in Killarney.

On Thursday, we took a drive around the Dingle Peninsula and spent a little time in the village of Dingle. Dingle Peninsula just sort of dangles (dingles?) out in the Atlantic Ocean.



This is Inch Beach. It was funny, I stopped here on my backpacking tour with my friend in 2002, but I didn't really remember it until we drove by. As soon as I saw it I was all, "Holy crap, I've been there!" I had similar experiences throughout Ireland. "Hey, I totally ate here once." "Hey, that's the hostel where I drank too much."



This is one of the beehive huts. They've been there since the Iron Age. Seriously.



This is one of my favorite pictures, ever. Off to the left of Will is the Blasket Islands. The Rick Steves book told us that people lived on the islands until 1953, and then Ireland was all, "Dude, you can't live here anymore, your way of life is not sustainable." In earlier times, farmers would put their goods in a boat, row 30 minutes to the peninsula, then walk miles and miles to Dingle to sell everything. Nuts.



Will and some sheep.



Our kids need posing lessons. Perhaps we should send them to Barbizon.



Lorne and Will walking up to the Gallarus Oratory. It was built sometime between the 6th and 9th centuries. Monks used it as a chapel. The stones fit together so well that it's waterproof.



Will's Oratory dance.



Ruins of an old church from (I believe) the Middle Ages.



Lorne and highly annoyed Evie in Dingle.



Will was all, "Take my picture at this big door!" (The door to a church.)



The best thing about Dingle: it has the highest per capita ratio of bars to residents. Why? Because everything is a bar. There's a bookstore/bar. There's a music store/bar. But the best thing is the hardware store/bicycle store/bar, Foxy John's.



We went to a music shop and Gail got to play a bodhran, an Irish drum.



There's this dolphin that lives in Dingle Bay, Fungi. He's lived there for awhile, so he's all famous now. Will picked out a book about Fungi to take home with him, so we told him to get a picture with the Fungi statue. But he was totally skeptical. This is actually really close to the face he makes when we watch the dolphin show at Sea World. (Which he kind of hates - as soon as the people get in the water with the dolphins he starts shaking his head, making that face, and saying, "That isn't right." We don't go to the dolphin show anymore.)

We went to Killarney to find some dessert. We (unknowingly) went to Ireland's most expensive ice cream shop, Murphy's. But it was super yummy. Then we walked a little, then went back to our cottage.



Thatched roof! What what. The beige car is the Peugeot that we liked so much.



Will totally posed this picture. It's on the landing of the stairs in the cottage. He told Grandpa Bill where to put Evie, then climbed up and gave her his stuffed Thumper and sat next to her with Mr. Lion.

Then Lorne and I went to the local pub and had some beer, but we took no pictures of that.