December and the first Sunday of Advent are right around the corner, but I'm not ready to let go of November. Here is a flashback travelogue for our trip to Ireland to see our son who is spending the fall semester at University College Dublin.
Travel to Ireland from the west coast is not easy. We left at 6 am on a Tuesday PCT time to drive to LAX for a flight via Toronto, where we had a 4 hour+ layover, before arriving in Dublin at 10:30 local time. So travel time was just under 20 hours. I think there is some advantage for arriving in the morning to combat jet lag - we hit the ground running and powered through our exhaustion with lots of coffee.
I always question the decision to fly from LAX, when we are just minutes from the San Diego airport. We aren't much more than 90 miles from LA, but travel time can take up to three or four hours. Fortunately, our trip didn't take more than two hours, but I found myself trying to calculate whether the savings was worth it. In this case, tickets were $200+ x2 less, so yes, for the frugal traveler, the drive pays off.
Taking this trip felt like a luxury, although we did not travel luxuriously, and we planned months in advance to economize. And in the end, we were able to stay close to our budget. Travel needn't break the bank, and the memories are priceless. An interesting topic of debate is whether travel is necessary for wisdom - or to understand other cultures. I don't believe you HAVE to travel to have the ability to understand other people - or that travel necessarily results in insights. On the one hand, you have the Emily Dickinsons of the world, and on the other, you have the Lord Byrons.
But here you have the Cooks on the road. We once planned to go to Ireland for our honeymoon, but having no income yet at the time, we opted for a 2 for 1 flight to the San Juan Islands where we stayed for free with nuns. 21 years later, my husband and I finally touched down on the Emerald Isle.
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| Peeling my eyelids open after a short night on a plane. |
Traveling to Ireland lacks the complexity of visiting a country where everyone speaks a different language, but there were a few exotic customs to overcome, such as driving on the lefthand side of the road. I didn't do any driving because we didn't want to pay for extra insurance on the car, even though I have driven in England years and years ago. And we had the same kind of car: a Micra. But we gambled on not paying the additional $250 insurance policy. Then on our second day, my husband hit a curb twice - and we arrived at our destination sans a hubcap. After a quick internet search and phone call (easy and free with Whatsapp), we had a hubcap on order, and we gave Joe's friend money to pick it up when it arrived since we planned to go to Galway. Total cost was less than the insurance, so we came out ahead!
The next hurdle was finding our way to the college and meeting our son. We were running a little late, and our maps were insufficient and road signs nonexistent. But my preliminary study of maps of Dublin when I was booking the hotel and planning our itinerary paid off, and we were able to find the parking lot where we were supposed to meet after only two wrong turns!
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| We found him! Hurray! |
After a quick tour of campus, a peek at his dorm room, and a stop at the convenience store for bus tickets and a lunch snack, we hopped a bus for downtown Dublin. First stop: Trinity College, where one of Joe's friends from Notre Dame who is studying at Trinity got us in to see the Book of Kells for free as her guest. She didn't stick around long, although we offered to treat her to lunch, so we had more leisure to enjoy the exhibit and the Long Room, from whence come the iconic pictures of Trinity's old library, with its busts of famous writers, arched roof, shelves and shelves of old books, and display of a harp purportedly belonging to Brian Boru, the once high king of Ireland, but which only dates to the 14th or 15th century. (The same harp you see on the Guinness logo.)
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| On the Trinity quad |
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| No photos are allowed of the Book of Kells, but we have fun taking pics in the Long Room of the old library. |
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| With Will |
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| The harp of Brian Boru, dating to the 14th or 15th centuries, once stolen in the 1960s |
Like Washington, D. C., Dublin is home to several free national museums. We skipped the National Museum of the Decorative Arts and the Natural History Museum in order to visit the National Museum of Archeaology. This museum gives a good overview to Ireland's history, from ancient Celtic gold, Viking invasions, medieval illuminated texts, and the preserved remains of the bog people. These mummified remains fascinate, as well as cause moral anxiety- shouldn't they be buried?
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| On to the National Reading Room, once a haunt of James Joyce |
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| as well as the location of an extensive collection of Yeats family manuscripts and memorabilia. |
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| The Reading Room was right across the street from the National Archeaology Museum, where lie the remains of the Peat Bog people. |
Our tour across Dublin then led through St. Stephen's Green, the lovely park in the middle of the city, and over to Merrion Square, home of another lovely green space. Our destination was the O'Connell House, where the Notre Dame students meet weekly for communal dinners and classes in Irish literature and culture.
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| St Stephen's Green |
The O'Connell House has an interesting history - It was home to Daniel O'Connell, also known as the Liberator for his campaigning for Irish Catholic rights, which were severely limited around the turn of the 19th century. Now it is home to the Notre Dame Ireland program - prime real estate on Merrion Square with the bonus of having been home to an influential Catholic politician. And because the director of the program, an Irish historian, has connections, the house also has a nice wall of homage to Seamus Heaney.
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Not far from the O'Connell house is the Notre Dame Newman Center. A small chapel is being renovated by the University for use as a place of worship and study and mission outreach to young urban Catholics. Steve Warner, who, as the folk choir director, was well loved at Notre Dame when we were students there, is the head of liturgy for this new program. An opening Mass with newly composed liturgical settings was held this week, but we attended Mass there on Sunday evening and received a beautiful blessing from Fr. Enda, a local priest covering for the chaplain.
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| Crossing Trinity again at dusk. |
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| Study hard, students. |
As the sun began to set, we had a few more sites to see before dinner. These were mostly civic buildings on the north side of the River Liffey, which splits the city of Dublin into North and South, such as the imposing Customs House and the General Post Office, central to the Irish Revolution or Easter Uprising in 1916, led by political poets and writers. And I wanted to walk back across the wrought iron Ha'Penny bridge, so we took a meandering route across the river, up to the GPO, and back across.
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| Night view of the harp bridge across the River Liffey |
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| I apparently don't have a good photo of the GPO, but this shot of the Customs House shows the busyness of downtown on a Wednesday evening. |
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| Crossing the River Liffey |
We had done all of this and it was still only about 5:30, but we were beginning to get hungry and had been tired. Joe had a pub in mind, The Brazen Head, purportedly the oldest in Dublin, so we started off in that direction, which took us past Christ Church, dating to the eleventh century, just as Evensong was about to begin. Delight! I was ready to sit and reflect while listening to the beautiful Church of England prayer service sung by the Girls Choir, but my husband needed fortification, so he popped into a pub across the street for his first Irish Whisky of the trip before joining us. The music was uplifting and the church awe inspiring, but no photos were allowed inside. We sat next to the tomb of Strongbow, a Norman lord of the twelfth century who helped restore and Irish king once ousted by the British (a long feud). The service was only sparsely attended, sadly enough - a reflection of secularization? busyness? no time for beauty and prayer?
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| Christ Church |
And then at last, food and beer! Exhausted and hungry, we decided we had the best beef stew and the most refreshing pint ever. This was my first beer to share with one of my kids, a milestone of sorts, I guess. He is not yet 21, although this son is responsible and moderate in most things. He was a little disappointed that we weren't up for staying at the pub another hour or so to listen to the live music, but after being awake for 30+ hours, we just couldn't. And we needed to rest up for the next few days, so we hopped a double decker bus (part of the fun), back to the south suburbs to drop off Joe and reclaim the car from campus. Thank goodness we only had to drive a little over a mile to our little guesthouse, which was very comfy and bright; sleep never felt so good.
