My Ireland: History, Whiskey and Beer

The stars are where we spent the nights

I loved my trip to Ireland! If I were to be totally honest, in terms of frequency, my experience was not quite the order I have it in the title. It would more accurately be Beer, History, and Whiskey, but I went for the lovely rhythm. It's kind of the Irish way.

This was my first trip with this set of folks. We had my Boat Partner (BP), her husband the history guy (HG), and their good friend, Mr. Irish Boyo. (IB). I have spent a great deal of time with BP, sometimes in unpleasant or difficult circumstances, so I knew we were likely to be compatible for travel. Since they've been married for 40+ years, I also know HG, and while we are totally different people, I like him quite a bit. IB was an unknown quantity, but he came highly recommended.

I did none of the planning - it was primarily a scouting trip for future forays by IB, who was in the role of our native guide. He has a lot of Irish heritage and feeling, but had only been in-country for a two week tour twenty years ago, but that made him a comparative expert. So he laid out a suggested itinerary and asked for feedback and help scheduling hotels. The idea was to hit certain specific historical and cultural points, with as many different pubs and beers as could be worked in. It all worked fine.

Lovely green countryside

We flew non-stop from Newark to Dublin, the cheapest non-stops available when IB booked the flights six months ago. (IB spelled my name wrong in the reservation, an error I didn't have a chance to discover until we got to the airport, and I spent an unpleasant hour with Air Lingus customer service getting it fixed, but it finally worked out. Note to self: make sure to double check oneself, don't rely on others. And arrive early at the airport.) The flight arrived at 5 am local time, so we got some coffee and our first Irish scones at the airport while we figured out transport into town. We opted for the local bus, and were in downtown Dublin at 6:00 am. With our not-insignificant baggage, standing on a deserted street corner, every business in sight shuttered We couldn't get to the AirBnB until the afternoon. As a result, we dragged our luggage around quite a bit (had to stop for more coffee and scones) before we finally found a place to store them. Hooray for the app Luggage Hero! 

BP, IB, HG, and me in yet another pub

Our biggest difficulty was very few things were open early. This turned out to be the case everywhere we went. Restaurants listed under "breakfast" opened at 8:30, 9:00 or even 10:00! Even some hotel restaurants started serving at 8:30. Because we wanted to cover so much territory, we wanted to be up and out each day. We found that there was the occasional coffee shop open early, and while they looked like pastry-only places, to our delight most of them served the "Full Irish Breakfast" that we soon loved. Fried eggs, "bacon" (looked like ham), my very favorite Irish sausage, black or white pudding (don't google it), baked beans, and toast. Luckily, we found such a coffee shop the first day (for what by some counts was Third Breakfast). We also found during our road trip many gas stations that had surprisingly good cafes inside - fresh baked goods, good coffee, hot cafeteria-type service (more sausage!) We didn't try them for anything other than breakfast, I have doubts about how good they would be for dinner.

From left: IB, BP, HG, and me

By noon on our first day we were ready to get to the Guinness brewery. They have a six-story "visitor experience" building, not tours, but it was well done. We also learned how to pour a pint with a perfect head on it, and sample some of their other beers. This was a good launch for the Beer portion of our tour. IB is a real beer guy, with a tap room in his basement that displays his collections of stolen beer glasses and coasters, and an app to keep track of everything he's tried with notes. With a brief quiet chat with the bartender, he added to his display collection right off on the first day.

Every dinner, and a few lunches, were in pubs, and were very good. There was a sameness to the menus, generally hot sandwiches and chips (fries), fish and chips, usually something more ambitious such as broiled fresh fish, sometimes other traditional Irish food such as lamb stew. I liked it all. The chips were especially good, and just chips and beer could be dinner some nights. I managed to find a few afternoon ice creams, but generally sweets were not in our plans, as most don't go so well with the beer. The first thing we'd do upon entering a pub was to scan the taps. Guinness was always there, along with their related brands, plus Coors and Corona and an Italian beer often showed up. But often there was also one or two taps dedicated to a local brew, and that usually became our choice. I learned what I liked, but didn't stick to it. Experimentation was the name of the game.

Early morning in Wexford

Walking through the cities is one of the great pleasures of traveling. Sadly, I am out of condition and feeling my bad knee. The first day, according to my fitbit, we covered nine miles, much of it hauling around our baggage. None of the other days hit that total, but still there was enough walking to double my average steps from the previous month. I went slow, and I sat whenever I could, but I got everywhere I wanted to get. Many of the ruins and castles we visited had hills or stairs, and the stairs in particular slowed me way down. When we were at a history stop or in a city, we often split up during the day, and I could amuse myself with my camera and not feel like I was holding anyone back. We learned how to take buses in Dublin --google maps to tell us what to look for where, excellent real time signage, all fares 2.60 exact change -- and BP and I rode in the front seat of a double decker all along the river front, big fun. Taxis were available to flag down, and Uber had an arrangement so the app would summon a taxi (with roof light and meter) and you would pay through the app like usual. I guess there aren't drivers using their own cars there.

Wexford waterfront

We picked up a rental in downtown Dublin the second day and headed out of town in the pouring rain. IB was our driver, and BP his co-pilot. Those first few miles, with a lot of traffic all on the wrong side of the road, we were all helping co-pilot, as we got used to traffic circles and cryptic road signs. We had phone-based navigation, which took us on all sorts of roads, including narrow tracks with signs saying "oncoming traffic in the middle of the road". It was fun watching IB learn to drive, and BP learn how to help him out. We checked off each new accomplishment (passed someone on an expressway! passed someone on a two lane road! 15-point turn on an unpaved lane with ditches!) By the end, when we returned to Dublin, IB was relaxed and confident.

Just a random ruin we stopped at

Our group dynamics also grew more relaxed and confident. I realized that HG was going to zig and zag as he saw a new squirrel to chase, and he couldn't pass anyone without striking up a conversation (I said we were very different.) IB and I grew more relaxed as we got to know each other. I knew we were doing OK, though. On the third morning, we were cranky (annoying hotel, no breakfast yet, changing plans on the fly without discussing it) when IB smashed his finger during the daily assembly of the 3D puzzle that was our luggage in the small car. He said (I paraphrase) "fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck FUCK". As we got in the car, someone said, in a small voice, "fucking luggage". Someone else said "fucking hotel". Someone else said, "no fucking breakfast". "Fucking small cars." "Fucking hotel clerk". It went on, and we were all dissolving into giggles as we hit the road. 

From the outside, the castle-ie-ist castle on a city street

We made bunches of history stops. There were ruined castles everywhere, many of them open to be explored. We stopped at battle sites and markers and a museum for the Irish rising in 1798. HG had created and is marketing a board game about the conflict, after meticulous research (everything hinged on whether or not the French landed their army). In Cork, we visited an island that had served as a fortress and prison in the 19th and 20th century. IB's grandfather escaped to America from Cork during the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, but would have ended up in that prison had he not run in time. I don't know so much about the convoluted history of Ireland, but had done enough reading to understand how Ireland was England's first colony, and served as a testing ground for many colonial policies used elsewhere in the empire. 

Big 19th century house repurposed as contemporary abbey

Much of the preparation I had made for the trip was reading novels with Irish settings and scenes. I was happy to find connections. I read This is Happiness, by Niall Williams, set in a small village in 1950. It's your basic coming-of-age story, but the backdrop is the coming of electricity to the village. I was thrilled to read a display in a museum about Rural Electrification in 1950's Ireland, and to see many of the dynamics that played out in the book be reflected there (maybe the author had seen the same display?) In a still-functioning but open to the public abbey, I read about how suppression of the Catholic orders and indeed education for Catholics from Henry VIII through Cromwell and right up to the twentieth century led many religious orders  to establish Irish foundations in France and Spain. This abbey had finally moved back to Ireland from France during the First World War, but they walled up their precious relicts in the catacombs back in France. This was, indeed, a plot point in a book I read that takes place during the First World War! 

We toured two whiskey distilleries, Tullamore DEW, in Tullamore, and Jameson, in Dublin (they don't actually make whiskey in Dublin anymore so it was another "visitor experience"). The Tullamore one was fabulous! Irish coffee to start, a complete tour including a sample right from the barrel in the aging warehouse, and more samples and guided tasting. Jameson was cheesy, but fun, and also included guided tasting. 

Our very own castle!

We stayed in two AirBnBs and the rest hotels. Often we had a hotel on the outskirts of town (much cheaper), so the Uber/taxi was useful to get us to walk around towns and visit pubs. One AirBnB was a castle! We had the whole castle to ourselves, seventy-five steps high to get out onto the battlements. It was basically a square tower, with one function for each floor, so not only did we each get our own bedroom, but we had our own floor! There were great handholds available for the spiral staircase, and especially for the transition required from staircase to floor at each level - it involved a bit of jockeying for me, to make sure I stepped up with my good leg each time. The castle was in the middle of nowhere, so we stopped at a grocery store and bought food and drink to carry us through. It could have been cold, but both the flooring and the bed were heated. We met the hosts outside in the morning (they live in a cottage nearby) and heard a bit about the restoration. They are booked almost always, so hopefully their labor of love / investment is paying off.

My castle bedroom

My castle bedroom also came with its own canon

All of the castle details were exquisite

Castle stairs, with rope for handhold

One comment on Irish wiring. They use the UK electricity plugs, and each plug also had an on-off switch, sometimes some distance from the plug itself. Both AirBnB showers had a distant on/off switch on a wall outside the bathroom, and then an electrical unit inside the shower with an on-off switch that created the hot water and water pressure. Never saw such a thing before, but I have read in novels about British old houses with retrofitted bathrooms with "geysers" to heat the water for each bathtub. I guess this is the latest version of that.

Cobh, from the island in the harbor

My favorite stop was Cork, and the associated small town of Cobh. It was a very sweet small town (very accomodating to tourists). This is where we went out to the island in the harbor for a half day. I spent my time outside, climbing the walls and taking in the views. The island had many small focused little museum exhibits, about its time as a fortress and its time as a prison, but I skipped most of that. (The guys were mostly in there.)

 

 

 

Scenic Cobh

A beautiful day to be outside-Spike Island in Cork Harbor

When we got to Cork for the night, we rode a taxi from our outskirts hotel to downtown, and followed the advice of the taxi driver. First, a brief stop at the English Market, then some gift shopping, then to a local brewery, a different local restaurant/pub, and finally to yet another pub where we finally encountered trad (traditional) music, one of our quests. These were musicians not exactly hired by the pub, not a band, who came in to play. There were four fiddles, a flute/penny whistle, and an Irish piper. The talking and noise of the pub went on around them, but I was fortunate enough to eventually get a seat by them and really listen and observe. There was a young woman who asked questions and got kind direction from the older guys. It was really sweet. 

Busy pub!

 

We had extraordinary luck with the weather - the only rain was our first couple of days in Dublin and down to Wexford. It may have actually rained other days, but not what you would really call rain. Just some extra thick wet air. But we were blessed with a lot of clear skies and beautiful views. And the rain is what makes everything so very very green.

Ruined abbey

Abbey from the inside

Vista along the Ring of Kerry- rough west coast

I took many pictures of the intimate details
This is on a rock wall outside a graveyard

We got many recommendations for restaurants from TripAdvisor, and all of the tours we took asked us to review on TripAdvisor. So it seemed fair play to me, and I did.

Final pub night

Ireland Picture of the Day

 Not goin’ to write yet, but here’s a picture I took. I think it would be a great photo to use for a jigsaw puzzle. 

City of Cobb, Cork Harbor

Cleveland Going Dark

 In the paper this week there was a headline: Book now for next year's total eclipse! 

It wasn't an advertisement, it was an article about the total eclipse of the sun that will pass in a great diagonal line across much of the United States on April 8, 2024. People are already making plans to be in the path of the totality. Prominently mentioned was how Cleveland would be a prime viewing spot. I've been in the path of many partial eclipses in my time, but never a totality, and given I may not have a lot of other opportunities, I decided to seize the day and go for it. 

During a partial eclipse, small openings
for sunlight show the progress of the eclipse.
The effect through dappled leaves is dazzling!
Each crescent is replicating the eclipse.

It turns out a lot of downtown Cleveland hotels were already sold out, so I checked into AirBnbs. There weren't so many downtown locations available, but there was a cluster on the western border of Cleveland near the lake. As it turns out, that is exactly where I lived, once upon a time. Somehow, I was more comfortable going for the neighborhood I knew a little - even if it was 40 years ago - than picking any other place at random. I ended up booking a whole house - two bedrooms, sleeps five - and it is just a block from my old apartment building. It was also brand new on AirBnB, no reviews yet (though the host is a superhost with other places). Most importantly, I can cancel up to 48 hours before.

Looking at available places kicked me off on a whole nostalgia trip. I spent quite some time on google maps and street view wandering around. I found my old building, still there, and still with a McDonalds in the back yard. Where I lived was in the town of Lakewood, just one block
from the Cleveland border. The street that formed the city border is a commercial strip, with today many more fast food places than the single McDonalds from when I lived there. Online, with my iPad, I browsed restaurants, places to shop, the lakefront, taken up by a wholly unexpected cascade of memories.

The time I spent in Cleveland, starting in 1982, was the most urban period of my life (so far). I had had a hard time finding a job after grad school, and I finally took a job at a steel company, working actually in a steel plant in a small town in the middle of industrial rust belt Ohio, south of Akron. I had steel toed shoes, my own hard hat with the prestigious brown burned spot on the forehead from leaning into the furnace to admire the molten metal, and some incredibly unattractive prescription safety glasses. After two years, I loved the work but I was done living in this small, backwards town, and actively seeking other jobs when I was offered a promotion to headquarters, in downtown Cleveland. I jumped at it!

My apartment was an old apartment building (turn of the twentieth century) with a common layout. A brick building with four apartments, two up and two down, each apartment with the same long, narrow, floorplan. In front, a parlor with a balcony overlooking the street. Then the main bedroom, a dining room, and sharing the back wall, a small bedroom and a smaller kitchen, with a back balcony and outside stairs down to the parking places behind the building. The ceilings were high, there were blocked off fireplaces in the parlor and the dining room, and there were beautiful glass fronted builtin cabinets in the dining room. There was a smoke alarm, newly required and very sensitive. Because the ceilings were so high I couldn't reach it to pull the battery out when it went off, not even when standing on a chair, and so I went to the Radio Shack around the corner, bought a button switch, and wired in a way to cut off the noise from ground level whenever I was broiling something in the kitchen. 

Where I lived was on the border, not only of Cleveland and its closest, oldest suburb, but also the border between the relatively wealthy lakefront and lake-adjacent blocks and the solidly blue collar interior of Lakewood, trying hard not to slide down into poverty. Most of the buildings in my town were two-flats, up and down, in woodframe houses. I lived just part of a block away from the richer side, but my neighbor buildings were the two-flats. The folks I saw every day were a real mix. I don't think even on the lakeshore there was the wealth I later found in a very similar Chicago suburb, Evanston - also the closest suburb to the city and along the lakeshore from a different Great Lake.

The view behind my office building,
downtown Cleveland, 1982

In Cleveland, my office building was connected to the central rapid rail station, and via some other tunnels, to the old time downtown department store. If you have seen the movie "A Christmas Story" you have seen my office building. (It was filmed while I worked there. The filming was a very big deal in Cleveland.)  In the mornings, I would walk from my apartment around the corner to the main street, where I caught a bus that poked along, taking at least half an hour to drive the five or so miles right to my office. In the evenings, I would instead catch the Rapid (metro rail) which was much faster than the bus but dropped me off a half mile up the main street and I'd walk past all the run down businesses home. If I worked late, which was rare, I would take a taxi home as neither transit option felt safe. Often at lunch, I would go by tunnel to browse in the department stores, and more than once was mistaken for a sales person because I had no coat, even in winter. 

Industrial sailing, Cleveland, 1982

I liked the urban vibe, and the rusty vibe, even though it was not a happy time in the industrial midwest. To me, Cleveland felt a bit more "eastern" than midwestern, and it had a Great Lake and thus sailing opportunities. Cleveland's waterfront was almost entirely industrial, not yet experiencing the waterfront revivals other old cities were just starting then. But there was a small marina where I signed up for sailing lessons as soon as the weather permitted. From that contact, I was feeling my way into a sailing scene and thus a non-work social life, when my life was disrupted by the company being bought. I worked in corporate finance for my steel company, and actually worked on the merger / buy analysis, the only time in my life I had genuine "insider knowledge" where I could have made my fortune if only I had had money to invest (and didn't get caught). Our little financial analysis group were the first to realize that we were in exactly the kind of jobs where the masters of the merger would expect to find efficiencies, ie redundancies. So, in those pre-internet days, every Tuesday when the Wall Street Journal published its "help wanted" section, the six of us would go through the ads together. It was my boss who pointed out the airline ad ("Do you have an MBA? We want YOU!") that I applied for and got. That job took me to the suburbs of Chicago and back to a life behind the wheel of a car. (It also took me all over the world but that is a story for another time.)

Reclaimed lakefront, Cleveland, 2010

I never went back to Cleveland after I moved, until 2010 when I took my oldest boy to college in Ohio. He was in Oberlin, about 20 miles away from Cleveland. I stayed a couple of days with him, moving into and setting up the dorm room, attending parents orientation sessions. But there was a point where my boy didn't want me around for a bit, and there was a pause before an important session I needed to attend about maintaining his scholarship. I took a three hour self-guided tour of Cleveland. I went to the downtown, and the waterfront, which had been greatly transformed. There was the grand Rock and Roll Hall of Fame right on the water. There was a place to stroll along the lakefront. There were The Flats, an industrial area along the river (the river that famously caught fire). Notionally, back when I lived there in the early 1980s, they talked of turning The Flats into a new-urban-style place for loft-style apartments, bars and restaurants. Thirty years later, it was a reality, though without the polish seen in the high-end waterfront developments here in DC. There were still freighters using the river and railroads hauling ore and coal, right in the middle of this urban playground. Still the rust belt, but one with some attempts at polish.

Watching a partial eclipse on the National Mall, 2017

So I'm going back to Cleveland again next year. Plenty of time in the next 11 months to invite someone to come along and see the total eclipse- Whole House! Two Bedrooms! Sleeps Five!