Dublin and heading to Belfast (Kinda)

This is the stone fence - note it going over the hill

The overflow at the dam

The marble - town newry in the background

Yesterday – or Tuesday as I will try and keep this as current as possible – we were in Dublin – not really knowing what we wanted to do there. A little bit of research found a few things that sounded interesting (mainly from trip adviser) and Andrew wanted to go to the Guinness storehouse (which after having gone to 4 brewery tours I went along for moral support. (after all I did take them to a few things that they didn’t really want to go to). But anyway, I woke up about 7 and finalised the things that we could do, and then mapped them out. The rain was still coming down as it was the night before, and there was water everywhere on the roads – making it take 4 times as long as the GPS said to get to places. Our first destination was the pearse museum, to which we were hallway there with 5 times the time it took to get there (seriously, it said it would take 12 mins and it was 35 before I pulled the pin and said lets go to our next place , and we weren’t even halfway there!) Our next stop was the home of Hurling and Gaelic football, which was corke park (spelt wrong) and arrived just on time! 11.00 for 11.00 start tour time. So we were taken on a very interesting tour by an Irish guy who told us all about the games of hurling (interesting points being

-          They don’t get paid for playing $0

-          From the teams, they are all volunteers (the coaches, managers etc)

-          There are teams that play in the Irish league that are from America, and the UK

-          All the shirts are made in Ireland (not in Asia))

There was other things that I can’t remember now, but it was cool, and they told us all about bloody Sunday and the English firing into the crowd in retaliation to 16 of their agents being killed by the Irish. (Michael Collins)
We then went from the stadium to the cemetery in Dublin, which the only reason we went was to because it was the no1 on trip advisor. I’m glad I went as well, because the guy was really interesting to listen to, he told great stories and let us know a huge amount of Irish history that we didn’t know. For 6 euro it was well worth it. We had a quick bite to eat at the café there and headed off to the Guinness museum – which wasn’t really interesting as I said above. The most interesting thing was how the Guinness book of records came about – guys taking about the speeds of birds, then thinking that there should be a book about it.  (a much shorter version than the original story but you get the jist of it)

Dinner and then we planned to go out to hear some Irish music. (traditional) Andrew didn’t come but mark and I found 2 nice places that had Violins and Guitars and one had a banjo! Well… it was a very fun night. Pity they didn’t have a tin whistle – but you can’t get everything.

We got home after it closed about 2am which was too late, but twas a fun night. The next morning was another early morning – and onto the pearse museum for ‘take two’. It took us 10 minutes to get there (after the hassle of walking 10 minutes to get our car from the multistory car park….) Me and mark then went into the the pearse museum which I thought but disappointing. I was hoping to find out some real information about what he did and why etc. But instead it was about the school he ran and paintings that he had created. So it was a little bit of a letdown.  WE then took off for Belfast, the only thing I know about Belfast is the rival in Belfast, I wonder if that is in the history books here, Will check it out. Anyway, reading on my computer in the car, the lonely planet helped me find a few places that were interesting (we went to Cloughmore stone which is in the Kibroney national park, which was a nice view over the town of Newry. (see picture of the boulder) . We then went to the Silent valley park which contains a dam where they tunnelled from one dam to another to sure up the water supply for Belfast – a pretty amazing feat considering that it had never been done before – except that we couldn’t see any of it! So they could have been making it up for all I knew! (I’m sure they weren’t) Mark and I also saw the a 32km wall of stones that was built over the mountains to keep the sheep and cattle together and out of the water catchment area. It was about a 3km walk from the gate to the dam and back without doing one of the longer walks. The path went  past the man who let us in for free! Yay to him!

We were going to stop by another place on the way but we had to make it to our next Couchsurfing host – John (and it was getting dark) There is a fair bit to see in northern Ireland, so we will be busy over the next few days before we head off to Scotland.