European Vacation Day Three

Day Three, June 6th.
We went to the dining area for our continental breakfast and then packed up our kit and made our way toward Dublin with a few scheduled stops before we get there. The first stop was at Blarney Castle.

The old castle and house stands on very manicured area with an abundance of flowers and gardens. One of the more interesting gardens was the Poison Garden which did feature a marijuana plant standing about 4 feet tall. Nightshade and Mandrake were just a few of the plantings in the well kept garden that had interesting embellishments of glass faces and signs with skull and crossbones.

We made our way to the castle before the crowd and began the narrow winding stone staircase heading up the the top of the castle where the famed Blarney Stone is precariously perched to grant the gift of the gab to anyone who will recline and invert themselves head down over a 90 foot drop straight down the castle wall.

That's Me!

Of course this act was a little more daring in the past before the installation of the iron bars a couple feet below the stone. We toured the ground making our way to the Rock Close and visited the sites called Witches Kitchen, Druids Cave, Wishing Steps and Sacrificial Alter. Needles placed a coin on the Witches Stone as so many before had done with the rock and surrounding ground covered in coins. As we made our way out of the castle grounds we noticed that the line to Kiss the Blarney Stone had grown by a few hundred people. On to Barney Woolen Mills Hotel where we would grab lunch. Needles had pizza and I had a chicken wrap. We did a little souvenir shopping before making our way back to the bus and down the road.

Our next stop was at Rock of Cashel (being renovated). Supposed sight of where the King of Munster was converted to Christianity by using a shamrock to show the holy trinity of the father, the son and the holy spirit giving rise to the nations symbol of a shamrock. A large rock jutting out of the ground with several religious structures perched a top. We hopped back into the bus and traveled down the road to Dublin and to the Abberly Court Hotel in Tallaght. When we arrived at the hotel off loaded our luggage and met back down to go to the Belvedere Hotel for Guinness Stew followed by a towered cheescake for dessert.

When we got back to the hotel our guide suggested a walking tour of Dublin's O'Connell Street and a pub crawl. He took us by some of the statues and structures in the city and made a stop by the Post Office where history was made. This site is where the Easter Rising of 1916 and was the location of an uprising of some of the leaders calling for a free Irish state. The old facade of the once destroyed building that was rebuilt still bares the scares of bullets on the pillars of that uprising.The rebellion was squashed after six days and the leaders were executed. This act bonded the nations spirit to get out from under British rule and brought about the Declaration of Ireland's freedom in 1919 that set off the Irish War of Independence which lasted until 1922 when Ireland became a free state. We stopped off a three pubs on our crawl,

I had a Guiness at Mulligan's and a Smithwick Pale Ale at Kehoe's before part of our group was kicked out of the The Palace for not drinking. We ended up calling it a night and then returned back to the hotel. The tour guide the next day would tell us the origin of the word pub was the shortened word public house where you could go and not even drink and stay and enjoy each others company... I guess not so much.