Week 7 London

7/5
We got in  fairly late the night before but thanks to the wonderfully fast Heathrow Express, we reached our hotel in the Paddington area in no time.
The next morning, we grabbed a quick breakfast on the way and headed over to our first stop for the day, Buckingham Palace. When we arrived, there were already massive crowds outside and we soon knew why. The daily 11:30am guard change was going on which apparently attracts the most crowds every day.

From the palace we walked through St. James Park and the Horse Guards Parade and eventually to Westminster Abbey.

We then walked past the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben towards the waterfront.

We crossed the bridge to the Southbank and soon found food and drink ;-)

Our next stop on the list was the Tate Modern museum. All public museums in London are free of charge....amazing!

We spent about 2 hours in the museum and then kept walking East on the waterfront, past the Shakespeare's Globe Theater. Since it's a reconstruction for tourist purposes and I read enough from and about Shakespeare during my English Lit degree, we had no intentions to go inside. 

The face of London really has changed quite a bit over the past ten years. The financial district has seen a massive surge in new modern constructions, often high rises that have shaped the skyline of the city in new ways. I feel like every year that I come to London it looks differently. 

Once we were done with our little sightseeing tour, we took a train further out of the city to have drinks and dinner with our very dear friend Matt Eyre. You may remember him as one of the speakers at our wedding reception. After a few pints he took us to his favorite Indian place, which did not disappoint. 

7/6
Today was going to be our only day with Chris and Staci Wiech, who had just landed around 7 am from Atlanta. After a quick English breakfast with them, we strolled around the nearby Hyde Park and Kensington Palace (no Will and Cate home).

Chris had lived in London for a bit in College and took us to Camden Markets, a fantastic part of town that is part punk, part rock, part hipster....either way, the beer was delicious.

After a few pit stops, we decided to pay Primrose Hill a visit for an amazing view of the city,

From there we then walked through parts of St. Regent's Park towards Abbey Road to the famous crosswalk from the Beatles cover.

It wasn't hard to find as there were dozens of tourists waiting to cross and take a picture, much to the dismay of the people in their cars and buses that just tried to get trough the street.
We then went back to the hotel for bit of downtime before dinner. I had remembered a quirky restaurant in London that I first discovered through a business dinner for SEGA. It is called Inamo, has two locations - one in Soho, one in St. James. It is an interactive asian fusion restaurant, where your table becomes your interactive menu, gaming device etc. You use a touch screen pad to explore the menu that's projected onto the table, with images of the food and all, then press order and it'll be delivered shortly. You can also change the background, play games on it or watch a live cam of the kitchen.

Once we were done, we strolled around Soho a bit more before ending the night at a bar near the hotel.

And that was our last night of our epic, 7 week, 11 country vacation in Europe. Our flight left the next morning at noon.

Week 7 Ireland

6/30

We had gotten into Dublin fairly late the night before. Our flight had landed around 10pm and then it took a while to get our rental car and make our way into the center of Dublin. What we hadn't anticipated was that the hotel I had booked would end up being on one of the biggest party streets in all of Dublin. Even at 11:30pm on a Monday night, it was packed and there were lines of people waiting to get into bars with live music. We were exhausted and thankful for the wonderfully fluffy hotel bed in the newly renovated part of the hotel that they gave us.

We woke up the next morning and were immediately greeted by sunshine and 75 degrees, a welcome change after the cold and rainy Scotland. We started our explorations right across the bridge from the hotel

One thing I immediately noticed in Dublin were the strange clouds that were forming. Really interesting patterns that I hadn't seen before.

Dublin is obviously known for Jameson and Guinness, both of which offer very popular brewery/distillery "experiences." We didn't feel like going inside nor do we like Whiskey so we skipped both ;-)

 In a country as staunchly catholic as Ireland, it was no surprise that we encountered a LOT of churches.

We finished our walk through the Liberties district and then eventually came by the Dublin Castle.

Right next to the castle was the Chester Beatty Library, the late mining magnate's extensive collection of ancient books from all over the world, some of which have extraordinary historic value.
No pics allowed inside, though. After the library, we hit up a BBQ joint that served legitimately good BBQ.

After lunch, we continued our walk further Southeast through one of several parks and eventually back up towards the river.

We were pretty exhausted from the day in the sun and, after relaxing for a bit, hit up a craft brewery bar near the hotel for dinner and a few nice pints.

7/1

We had a day of driving ahead of us so we got into gear fairly early and just grabbed some Starbucks on the way out.
Our first stop was the cute little town of Kilkenny. It is mainly known for it's large castle that is still in great shape and a good place to visit when in town.

After finishing the castle, we strolled through town a bit, had lunch, visited an old church and eventually made our way back to our car for the next leg of our drive - Killarney.

Killarney is also extremely cute, probably even cuter than Kilkenny. It also seemed to be very focused on the upcoming 4th of July holiday as the entire town's main street was decked out in US flags and we saw they had a big parade planned. Overall, we noticed the presence of US flags in Ireland. I can only assume that this is due to the large amount of immigrants from Ireland that founded the US. Our friend Matt Eyre also mentioned that Ireland celebrates the US Independence Day with particular fervor because, historically, anything that put the Brits in their corner is a good thing.

When we arrived in Killarney it was pouring down rain and we were dressed in shorts. We braced the wet and ran with our stuff across the parking lot, down main street and reached our guest house, Murphy's with wet suitcases. It seemed like fate was on our side that Murphy's was not only a small hotel but also had a great restaurant and bar with live Irish music downstairs, so we never had to leave it again until the next morning.

7/2
We didn't have breakfast included so we seized the early morning to just grab something from a deli on the way and get on the road again. We had our longest day of driving ahead of us....or rather I had my longest day of driving ahead of me.

We rode down Killarney main street and towards the Ring of Kerry. It was a beautiful drive around the ring, with plenty of great views and overlooks. I just wish we had planned it differently because we really didn't have any time to stop anywhere for more than a quick picture because we had to get all the way up to Galway that same evening.

It took us about 4 hours to drive the entire ring and once we arrived back at our starting point, we made our way up towards Galway via a stop at the famous Cliffs of Moher. We just followed the GPS but about one hour from the cliffs, our navigation system suddenly brought us to a waterfront and simply said, "in one kilometer, please take the ferry!" We were both dumbstruck as we had never actually checked where the GPS was sending us. It turns out it took us on a smaller road that required a ferry, instead of sending us around on the bigger road. We weren't really in a position to turn around as we would've lost too much time so we just got on the ferry.

After a little bit more driving, we finally made it to the beautiful Cliffs of Moher.

The cliffs really are absolutely stunning and fascinating. I wish we had had more time to hike along them for a day or so.
We continued our drive until we reached Galway around 8pm. It was the cutest little B&B and definitely the best B&B we had on the entire trip.

We quickly dropped off our stuff and headed to the "Lower Salthill" waterfront for dinner.

7/3
We another packed day ahead of us and started off by exploring Galway for about two hours. The main attractions are the giant cathedral and the fish ladder.

We then left town and headed towards the East Coast again. On the way we stopped at various interesting monuments. The first medieval monastery was a bust as we simply couldn't find it, no matter how hard we tried. There were no signs were the internet said there would be etc. So we finally gave up and drove to the next one, also a historic monastery, called Clonmacnoise. It was first founded in the 6th century but what we see today is from the 10th-13th century actually because the older version was made out of wood and didn't survive the times.

From Clonmacnoise we made our way to the town of Trim, which is well known for its castle. The castle was used in the movie Braveheart as the town of York. Unfortunately, it was already past opening times when we arrived but walking around the grounds on the outside gave us plenty of opportunity to explore.

We were starving by the time we got back to the car and noticed an Indian restaurant next to the parking lot so we hopped in and had a fantastic dinner there.

We still had a bit of driving to do to get to Drogheda where we'd spend the night but wanted to get in one more stop on the way - the Hill of Tara. It's one of the oldest neolithic monuments in Ireland and Western Europe in General and pretty fascinating. Thankfully, it was just a park and walk up kind of place, no tickets, no opening hours. It is literally just a big hill that has these crazy burial and ceremonial grounds underneath, the outlines and shapes of which you can see despite being overgrown. It was apparently the seat of the High Kings of Ireland in the late Stone Age. They also built a passage tomb there among other ceremonial buildings, like the giant banquet hall.
It's probably one of the highest elevations in the area and you have a fantastic view from it.

The passage tomb was constructed approximately 3,400 B.C. so we're looking at something more than 5,000 years old.

I've added this picture from Google on here so you get a better sense of what this hill looks like from above because the on the ground pictures don't really do it justice. 

This was our last stop for the day before falling into bed in Drogheda.

7/4 
Our flight wasn't until 8:45pm that night so we had a full day to continue our explorations of Neolithic Ireland.

We drove back close to the Hill of Tara to visit the Newgrange monument. We followed the signs for the visitor's center and realized upon getting there that you can't explore Newgrange or the nearby Knowth monument on your but have to go on one of the scheduled bus tours that take you there. We were a bit annoyed by that at first but the quality of both tours really made up for it. It was all very well organized and very informative.

We started off with the lesser known Knowth. Even though there's more to see than at Newgrange, because you cannot go into the actual burial chamber, it is probably less popular.
Knowth was built approximately 2,500-2000 B.C, meaning that it was built when the Mammoth still roamed the earth and humanity hadn't invented the wheel yet, nor discovered iron or any other metal as a tool. That's a pretty impressive fact considering the incredible engineering task that must have gone into building these perfect passage graves.

From Knowth the tour then took us to Newgrange, the more well known one of various passage graves in the area. It was built approximately 3,400 B.C., so also during a time when Mammoths still existed and no wheels had been invented. These graves are also older than Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids.

At Newgrange you could enter the tomb inside in small groups. Not for the claustrophic and unfortunately, no pictures were allowed but here is one from the internet. What's so interesting about Newgrange in particular is that the interior chamber is aligned with the winter solstice. On that day when the sun goes up, the light hits perfectly through a passage above the entrance and illuminates the otherwise pitch black burial chamber.

After these two amazing megalithic monuments, we made a short visit to another abbey in the area before heading towards Dublin.

Once we reached Dublin, we still had a bit of time to kill, so we decided to visit Phoenix park which was a bit too far out for us on our first day in Dublin but easily accessible now that we were coming in from the outside. The park features herds of wild deer, which is pretty weird to see roaming around in a city park. But the park is pretty massive so you almost feel like you're somewhere far outside the city.

We also found a polo match going on in the park and watched for a good amount of time since we both had never seen live Polo before. 

After that it was time to head out to the Dublin airport for our late flight into London and the last leg of our trip.