On Wednesday I took my Aunt Mary Ellen’s advice and booked a Wild Wicklow Tour for the day. I have to extend thanks in her direction for all the great tips for this trip, plus thanks to my friend Scott Sweeny who had lots of great ideas following his recent honeymoon in Irleand (and posted some great photos!), and finally to Mark Murphy, the son-in-law of one of the people I work with who is from Ireland and had a huge email full of ideas.
Booking online I was able to get a pickup spot at our hotel, so pre-9AM I was outside waiting for the bus, which arrived on-time. We had a nice ride through the city where the bus driver gave us the all kinds of tour-guidey facts about the city, and from there we headed to our first stop, Dun Laoghaire.
It was a cool morning so the stop was quite refreshing and I was struck with how similar the coast of Ireland looks and feels like the coast of Maine.
From there it was a quick stop at the Avoca Kilmacanogue store and cafe for refreshments before getting back on the road to head deeper into Wicklow. Our first mountain stop was to look over a magnificent valley where one of the Guinness estates is located. It was also during this stop where the driver cracked open the Jameson and gave tastings to everyone on the bus – before lunch!
Along our journey the bus took us through several small villages, up very narrow winding roads, past sheep, cows, horses, donkeys, and more sheep. Our tour guide told us about the area and share stories from the Irish past. It was during this tour that I learned the most about the Great Famine, I was surprised to learn that during the the 1841 census the population of Ireland was 8.2 million – today it’s just 6.2 million (both of these statistics include both the Republic and Northern Ireland). I certainly knew that the famine was a bad one, but I was never really knew quite what the scale of starvation and mass emigration out of Ireland was, or that even today the population hasn’t recovered.
Lunch was in the village of Laragh at Lynhams of Laragh. They have a carvery very well-suited to busloads of travelers, quickly processing the queue of hungry travelers and allowing us plenty of time to eat so we could be on our way in under an hour. I went with the Irish experience for lunch – half pint of Guinness and some Guinness and beef stew with mashed potatoes.
We wrapped up lunch around 2 and headed off to the longest stop of the day – the ruins of an old Monastic Village in Glendalough. I love ruins, always have. Growing up on the coast of Maine I had endless adventures in the old castle and military ruins at Fort Williams and it was honestly a dream come true when an exhibit opened at Two Lights State Park one summer that allowed you entry into one of the old underground WWII battery bunkers located there.
Exploring the ruins of this old monastery was fascinating! Our visit began with our tour guide giving us a quick tour of the grounds, explaining what each of the buildings was and was used for, and that the cemetery itself was still an active one, with about 5 or so family plots still open, but was expected to close in the coming years as those final spots are filled. Once the guided portion was finished we had over an hour to explore on our own, which is when I took the photos and then decided to take the long walk down around the lakes.
I put more photos over in my Dublin Flickr gallery.
We headed back toward Dublin around 4PM, arriving back by 5:30PM. MJ was still at work so I took the opportunity of a free hour to take a short nap before meeting up for dinner with MJ and some of his co-workers. Dinner was at The Schoolhouse Restaurant, which had been pointed out as an old school on the Viking tour on Monday. Amusingly this was the first of three times in Dublin we enjoyed refreshments in a building that had a previous purpose but was turned into a restaurant and bar. Instead of mixing things up, my dinner also ended up being Guinness, beef and potatoes – although in the less traditionally Irish form of a cheeseburger and fries.
Thursday ended up being full of Guinness, Jameson and prison, but luckily not in that order.