UK 2011 day 4

Day 4

• Drive Belfast @ 8:30am

driving time – 1 hr.

est. arrival – 9:30 am

address to park – Chichester St (parking lot), or Great Victoria St.(parking lot), or Bedford Street (metered parking) or Dublin Road (parking lot).

cost – € ???

• Walk to the City Hall and The Linen Hall Library.
• Check out the Oldest Book in Ireland and the Oldest Newspaper still in circulation.
• Take the City Hall free tour @ 11am

cost – Linen Hall Library entrance is free. Tours of the City Hall are free

• Lunch @ Nex D'Or
• Drive to Dublin @ 1:30pm

driving time – 2 hrs.

est. arrival – 3:30 pm

address to park – Cook St., or at Heuston Station, Usher's Quay or Thomas St Parking Lots. Other Parking Lot at St. Stephen's Green Shopping Centre accessed from Mercer St Lower.

cost – At Cook St - free parking after 7pm. Others - ????

• Walk to St.Michan's Church. (Upper Church St, between May Ln and Hammond Ln.)
• Try to spot the Famine Memorial along Liffey River, on Custom House Quay.
• Dinner at The Brazen Head (20 Lower Bridge Street, Dublin 8, Ireland)
• Drive to Dublin Airport @ 9pm. Return rental @ 9:30pm
• Arrive in Liverpool @ 11pm.
• Taxi or Shuttle to The Holiday Inn Express.

[On day 4 I was looking out the car window and thinking what a great thing that we had already lived so many experiences and it was only day 4. What a beautiful thing to be on vacation.

In the morning we met this couple that had just arrived and they were from America, but they were of Irish descent. They told us they stay at that BB often and that time they were there celebrating their anniversary. They suggested we tried the porridge served there, but it was too late for us. we were saying good-bye that morning.

What did we not like about the BB? One thing only - we didn't get much of the promised free internet in our bedroom. So, to call home we had to use the cell phone - or you could always drive to mcdonald's. Other than that, the place was great.

We left that morning with a bunch of names of places to go to. Names of churches and localities. Names we had gotten from the people we visited the night before. We got really confused with all the localities because they did not follow regular regional divisions we are used to here in America.

We visited a bunch of churches with burial grounds and I cried my eyes out.Babies, some times even without names, just a note saying their family will miss them. Young children and young people taken by some disease or tragedy... 

Cemeteries always make me melancholic. Thinking that all of our lives are now bound to a miserable dash between two numbers. That is all anyone will ever know of us. If anyone can even read our gravestone. We visited some gravestones destroyed by the weathering. Who are those people. Who were they? What did they do? Who did they love? Who did they hate? What were their passions and fears? Nothing of this matters to anyone anymore. All of that is now just an insignificant dash ... at times like these I wish I were famous.
We went to this place called Pomeroy to look for the specific church of Dean's ancestors. We stopped by this vegetable truck and inquired the sellers about the family's last name, after explaining what we were doing. They gave us a very straight forward direction, "you don't want to go to the church up the road, you want to go to the church down the road."
"Why?"
"The one up the road is a catholic church and the family you're looking for were all presbyterians." Wow.

We wanted to make it to the Titanic on this day, so part of me wanted to tell Dean we had to get down to Belfast.... We still had to make it to the St. Michan's tombs and to Book of Kells which we didn't make to on Sunday.

Anyway, we left with lots of tomb pictures in our cellphone.

We made to the Titanic doc and we got to see how big that thing was... We went in to the suvenir store and bought a few magnets and had a snack. No we did not eat at the Nex D'Or, which is supposed to be this very local, not very fancy,not very clean, not very made for exportation place, the kind of place Dean likes to try. We had no time. We wanted to make to St. Michan's church in Dublin. so we traveled down to Dublin and got to St. Michan's to see their Mummies.
On the Ireland website, the girls in the St. Michan video make it sound like this is some quaint and unknown place, but it is actually a turisty place, with guided and paid tours. Our guide was neat, he knew my soccer team and he claimed the Beatles were actually Irish...
We decided to walk to the Book of Kells and we got there just ten minutes after the last group had been allowed in... a terrible foreshadowing of the rest of our trip.
Fine, let's walk back to the Brazen Head, the oldest pub in Ireland. ... There I tried the famous Guinness, and we had typical Irish meal. Dean was always going for bangers and mash - I wanted to try all different stuff like stews, and pies, and anything that sounded different. I had a pie this time.

Returning the car to the airport was the easiest thing, since the clerk had given us very clear directions on how to do it. Ah, I was in love with Hertz and absolutely hating Alamo.

From John Lennon Airport we got a cab back to the inn because we were cold and tired and it was only 5 pounds... and there we learned that people in England don't like to get pounds made in Ireland. The driver was not very happy that we handed him a Scottish pound, even though the Irish the Scottish and the English pounds are all the same value.

At the inn we got our luggage from the storage and check in again for one last night in Liverpool.