Eire Sights

Since our main purpose Ireland was to locate people who might be related to us, we didn't spend too much time doing traditional sight seeing. We spent a lot of time in cemetaries trying to decipher gravestones. We were fortuante to meet the local undertakers who called up everyone they thought might be able to help us. At first weren't sure where to start, we were wandering aimlessly around the village of Upperchurch when we came caught sight of this sign. We should have known that grocery stores and grave digging went together.



We did take a couple days off from the genealogy project. One day we went south to the Rock of Cashel, a historic site of very cool crumbling buildings, and then down to Cobh, one of the ports from which boats left Ireland during the potato famine (none of my relatives left from there though). Cobh is a beautiful little coast town where you can see the effects of the gulf stream currents in the palm trees growing along the sea wall. We visited the Cobh Heritage Center, a nice museum with all sorts of info about the emigration. A little farther west along the coast is Kinsale, "the fine food centre of Ireland" , where we went to eat lunch.



I had been told to go to Crackpots but it was closed, so we ate at the Cafe Blue, which has a nice cozy interior and the food was tasty if not spectacular.

On another, very rainy day, we took the trian up to Dublin. We rode around on one of those hop-on, hop-off tour buses and we went to check out the Guinness Storehouse and Kilmainham Gaol. The Guinness Storehouse is kind of like a Disney-fied presentation of the beer brewing process. It's a cute exhibit but the best part is the bar at the top of the museum where you get to drink your complimentary pint and look out at the 360 degree view of fog blanketing the city.



Kilmainham Gaol, on the other hand, was very affecting. At first I had wanted to go just to look at the building. When we got there we found that you have to be excorted by a guide and I was so glad that we were. I had only been vaguely aware of how important its role had been in Irish history. The thick stone walls keep the place chilly and damp, but you get an extra chill when you find out all the things that happened there.