The Wilsons in Europe

We got back from our trip to Ireland a couple of days ago, but it's been too busy to post any pictures. It was a great trip, and a true vacation for us...Ian only checked his email once! (It was difficult to do email there, so that was a plus for a vacation!)

We flew into Dublin on Ryanair...quite an experience. They don't assign seats or even groups to help with loading, so it's really a free-for-all. On the way there, we got two seats together, but not three. We learned our lesson and pushed our way through on the way back to get three seats together! It definitely is a no-frills airline, but for the price we paid for three tickets, we can't complain.

We arrived in Dublin at about 1am, and immediately crashed in our hotel room. The next morning, we were up to go see the sights, but true to Irish weather, it was rainy and quite miserable. We got a lot of indoor pictures, but very few outdoors ones because of this. We started at the Trinity College library, where they have a museum about the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript from the 9th century. No pictures were allowed, but you can follow the link to see some of what we saw. They are quite amazing...

After that, we headed off to lunch at a pub, where I was so happy to have a pint of cider on tap! Ian tried true Guinness and confirmed that it does indeed taste different in Ireland than when it is imported. :-)

We headed off to the Christ Church Cathedral after that (mostly because it was rainy and cold outside, and we wanted to be indoors quickly!). It was a nice surprise, and we ended up staying there for quite a while. (And in the meantime, my favorite umbrella was stolen!) This is where most of our pictures were taken in Dublin.

The floors were absolutely amazing...I won't bore you with the millions of pictures I took of them, but they were unusually tiled. These are pictures of the aisle leading to the altar:



I also noticed that the church had some other amazing details when I bothered to look up from the floor:

This is the iron case for Laurence O'Toole's actual heart. Laurence O'Toole was the archbishop of Dublin beginning in 1161 and then was made a saint. He died in Normandy, and they brought the heart back just for this purpose. A little gruesome, I know, but interesting nonetheless.

I took the opportunity to light a candle for peace:

Some more views of the church:




Strongbow's remains were there as well, although it turns out that this isn't really his lid...his lid was destroyed somehow, and they stole this one from another sarcophagus!

There was a crypt (that didn't really have any remains in it except for a mummified cat and rat found in the organ pipes years ago...weird!), and so we descended. The most interesting part of the crypt for Sophie were the stocks:

When we got outside, it had stopped long enough for us to take some pictures of the outside and to walk back to the city centre.



O'Connell Street, one of the main streets of Dublin had a pedestrian area between the two sides of the street full of statues and memorials. This one is to Jim Larkin, a prominent trade-union leader in the early 1900s.

And one for Charles Stewart Parnell, one of the people responsible for Home Rule in Ireland:


The Garden of Remembrance (which was closed that day), dedicated to all those who lost their lives in the pursuit of Irish freedom.


O'Connell Street had several of these very interesting motion "statues." Here's a video of one. (I can't get it to rotate to be right-side up, but I'll try to get Ian to fix it and repost it later.)

I'll try to start posting pictures of our trip to Northern Ireland tomorrow!