Ew I stepped in bog sh*t

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Happy Mother’s Day! March 22 is mother’s day in Ireland. Weird - their dates are a little different than ours for certain things. Daylight Savings is also different - they do have it, but they’re a couple of weeks off from us. The time difference from there to here is normally 5hrs, but has been 4hrs for my whole trip because we’re in that couple week period between us springing forward and them.

Sunday morning I woke up early (8:00 should be early for anyone!). A quick shower and I was downstairs enjoying the best breakfast of my time in Ireland. It was just the traditional Irish breakfast, but everything was very well done. I then picked my host’s brain about where I should go that day. With my bible in hand, he told me Rick this and Rick that - mostly about how bad Rick Steve’s maps are. He also didn’t like his route of Connemara. I only had 2 days left in Ireland, and my options were limited. We planned out a route that would show me the highlights in Connemara, a few sights in the north, then stay in Derry (or Londonderry) for the night. My next and last day would be spent seeing a little more of the North, then Belfast, and ending with the night in Dublin in preparation for my flight (where I sit as I write this).

The weather was absolutely gorgeous. The perfect day to take in the countryside. County Clare, and especially Connemara is mainly known for its natural beauty. I skipped many of my book’s recommended stops in favor of a more direct route with just the highlights. Instead of his mapped loop, I took a leg of it and kept going north. I timed it pretty badly, though, because there was a marathon running right through where I needed to go. There aren’t that many roads in Ireland (if you look at google and see very few roads, it’s not because they haven’t updated google…), I just happened to have the misfortune of needing to be on the same road as the marathoners. I’m not sure what kind of marathon it was since there were people running at different paces over the entire 26miles. It’s as if they staggered the start times - probably just to frustrate me. At least I was going in the same direction as the runners, so they were taking up the opposing lane completely, but my lane was free. You just had to watch out for oncoming traffic and the runners, not to mention the townsfolk who decided to drive alongside their buddy who’s running. That got old really fast. It ended up adding an extra half hour to hour onto my trip, but I guess it could have been worse.

Along the way, I stopped at a peat bog. Peat is a kind of dirt that’s dug up in bricks, dried, then can be burned for heat or fuel. It’s a very cheap kind of coal, basically. Now it’s protected, but they still harvest it in parts of the country. As I was driving along I saw many piles of stacked bricks of peat. I stopped by one of the many peat bogs to get a closer look. The peat bogs are supposed to be so spongy that if someone else jumps up and down on it 15ft away, you can feel it. They were pretty spongy. But they were also very wet and soggy. I didn’t realize it, but within a few feet, I sunk right down, half-submerging my little ballet flats in muck. I never did get the chance to smell it burning (they say it has a very unique and memorable smell), but I bought a little incense kit with little bricks of peat. I’ll get to smell it when I get home.

Most of my drive through Connemara was just to see the countryside. I stopped at a little town called Westport for lunch and to figure out where I was going next. This was my last stop in Connemara. The Panini I had at a little café there was probably the best Panini I’ve ever had! A little café called O’Cees inside the Supervalu grocery store, it was the perfect bite. I grabbed a scone for the road, and after consulting my book and GPS, decided I still had time to hit the Strokestown museum before going north.

The Strokestown museum is a local (very small) museum dedicated to the famine. Mainly it was dedicated to the family who owned the large plot of land that the museum was on. I figured that since I hadn’t learned much about the potato famine yet, it might be worth a visit. Overall, I did learn about the famine, but probably would’ve made better use of my time by just looking it up online and skipping the museum. However, since I went, here’s what I learned. There have been many famines in Ireland over the past thousand years. Every couple hundred years there was a famine, some with reports of cannibalism to survive. I don’t think it came to that this time, but you never know. The most recent famine (THE famine to everyone who’s heard of it) was in the 1840s. They think it was caused by a fungus that infected the potato crops and caused them all to rot in the ground within hours. They tried for a while to come up with a way to combat it, but it wasn’t until the mid-1900s that they found this mixture that would protect the crops, and that’s what’s used today. If only they’d known back then… There was other food at the time, but the potato was the main ingredient in their diets. As a sole food to rely on, it’s pretty good - provides most of your vitamins, minerals, and calories. Even though a very large proportion of Ireland was considered extremely poor, they were the most nutritious poor throughout Europe (people commented on how tall and strong they were despite not having much to eat). They used to eat 14lbs of potato a day!! Holy crap. So with the famine, there were many people starving. That combined with loss of jobs led to massive emigration (and deaths). With malnutrition comes disease, and typhoid and dysentery began to assert themselves. They had workhouses all over the land, which were places for the people on welfare (they didn’t call it welfare, but that’s what it was) to live in. They were much like concentration camps, only it was voluntary to go there, and it wasn’t quite that bad. It was thought that if you give out money and food, they should have to suffer to get it so they’d work harder to not need it (or stop needing it if they were there). I’m not sure if it worked, but the workhouses sounded pretty miserable. The men and women were separated, they were made to wear a uniform, had very little to eat, and had almost no privacy or comforts.

Those that didn’t go to the workhouses may have sought transportation to other countries (America, Canada, Australia). Sometimes the landlords would pay for them to go so they’d reduce their number of mouths to feed. All landlords at that time were responsible for the people who lived on their land. The ships they took, though, were so bad they were called “coffin ships”. Between not enough food and rampant disease, about 40,000 people died on the ships. I spent way too long in this tiny little museum, but was on my way north by 4:30.

My ultimate destination was Derry (Londonderry) in Northern Ireland for the night, but was going to go by way of Yeat’s grave in Sligo. It wasn’t really out of the way, but the drive along the northern coast is said to be amazing, and unfortunately I was doing it at night. I stopped in Sligo just long enough to jump out, snap a few pics of Yeat’s grave, and keep moving north. It’s pretty random, really. He’s from Ireland, but died in Paris. He told them when he died in the 1930s to bury him there, but then to have his body moved later to Sligo, where he was buried along side his young wife. There’s nothing fancy about the place he rests now, just a church cemetery. While I was in the bustling town of Sligo (which means there was about ½ km of houses and stores on the strip), I grabbed some gas (50euros to fill up!! That’s like $70!) and availed myself of their free wi-fi (how nice! Ireland is more connected than the US - internet was free almost everywhere I stayed, even in the gas station! They would’ve charged an arm and a leg for it in the States). I also had a tasty ice cream cone, which would be my dinner.

Just up the road I stopped at a pay phone and called one of the places in my book for a room for the night in Derry. There were a few recommended places there, mostly B&Bs, but there was one hostel. Since I wasn’t planning on being there long (just a place to stop for the night, and at that rate I wasn’t getting there until about 9:30), I just wanted a place to stay with internet. For 12 pounds I found it in Paddy’s Palace (haha nice name, I know). Since Northern Ireland is actually part of the UK (the source of the whole political mess and violence in Ireland), they still use pounds as currency. They also use miles per hour. In fact, the only way I knew that I had crossed into Northern Ireland is because all of a sudden the speed limits were in mph (but they looked EXACTLY the same, just a lower number with a little note below the first one I came to that reminds you it’s in mph not kph). Technically it’s an international border, but there’s no markings or checkpoints whatsoever. A few months ago it would have been extremely expensive to take a side trip to Northern Ireland since the dollar was only worth about half the pound (so everything’s twice as expensive!). Now it’s about $1.45 to a pound, so it’s almost the same as the euro.

I arrived at the hostel without any problems. Thank God I have navigation. The street signs are pretty good (every intersection has a sign with all the major towns that are next up, but you need to know which town is next). The hostel was actually pretty decent. I was able to find parking right in front, and the hostel was nearly empty - one of the HUGE plusses to going during the off-season. I ended up getting a 6-person room all by myself. Thankfully, this hostel supplied the sheets, all I had to do was pay to rent the towel. It had wireless internet, was quiet, and would’ve been a nice place to stay if I was there longer. There were a bunch of young people (like my age young, not necessarily 18). There were an awful lot of Australians for some reason. Anyway, if I were there longer, it would have been a nice community to hang out with. As it was, I was pretty tired from a long day, long drive, and not enough sleep for several days in a row. I opted instead for a quiet night in my room looking at my book and trying to plan out my next day.

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Photos

Peat Bogs
In Connemarra. They cut them out, pile them up to dry, then burn them for warmth. The bogs are very spongy, but unfortunately wet.

Connemara
Gorgeous views

Connemara
The lake.

Peat
This is what peat actually looks like.

National Famine Memorial
A tribute to all who died on the "coffin ships" during the mass emigration of the 1840s during the potato famine. Those are skeletons flying around a ship.

Lobster bisque?
From the Strokestown Park famine museum. Just before the famine, this was the cook's recipe for a lobster soup. mmmmm

Strokestown Park family
The museum is only half about the famine, the other half seemed to be to try to clear the name of the ancestor of this family, who some claim didn't care about his peasants and let them starve.

Bluestone
The potato famine was because of a fungus. If only they'd known about bluestone it could have all been prevented...

Soup
A cheap soup recipe devised during the famine. Unfortunately it also had little nutritional value, so was useless.

Yeat's grave
In Drumhill just north of Sligo. The inscription is a line from his poem: "Cast a cold Eye On Life, on Death. Horseman, pass by."

Hostel
It was actually pretty decent. The whole room was mine.