A trip to Ireland
| Travel |
By LeRae Haynes
It’s been almost a year since I got to visit Ireland and Scotland with my husband and his sister. What a great trip and a wonderful holiday!
Enjoying a trip to Ireland wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the roundabouts---the UK alternative to traffic lights. When traffic comes from four different directions to an intersection, everybody just drives around a big circle in the middle, like a wheel with spokes, until they figure out which spoke they want to take. It all happens at rapid speed, there are at least two lanes going in all directions, and the lanes are approximately the width of a bicycle tyre.
In Ireland, pedestrians are lower than pond scum in the food chain. We paused to let a couple of young pedestrians cross at an intersection in Ballycastle, and the motorists behind us immediately burst into a volley of horn honking and irate shouting. The young couple, pushing a baby in a stroller, glared at us with immense suspicion, as if we intended to kidnap their child and steal their packets of crisps, or something.The farms and hillsides in Ireland are patchwork fields of truly emerald green, rimmed by the deeper greens of the brush and bramble hedges. And always, running like a wonderful theme throughout the country, are the stone walls: in the cities, subdivisions, church yards, farms and school yards.
You see lots of people with gentle voices and few teeth and slept-in hair wearing oddly formal clothing.
We visited the museum in Derry, which was extremely interesting and well-assembled. One thing that really stood out is that, not only was the good-looking blond receptionist possessed of a killer sense of humor (slightly unexpected in a museum) but the two attendants, who wandered importantly about the exhibits to answer questions and give directions, took their jobs very seriously.
They actually followed people around throughout the museum, making sure that you visited the exhibits in the right order. I was jolted out of my reverie several times, immersed in reading and absorbing hundreds and hundreds of years of the history of Northern Ireland, when I wandered around a corner and came face to face with one of the diligent museum attendants.
“Did you see the two exhibits on the potato famine?” they would say, or “You did come around from the left, just now, didn’t you? You mustn’t miss the Civilian Casualty display!” And once, when I was skulking about, rebelliously skipping exhibits in an attempt to find where I had misplaced John and his sister, Rosa, an attendant actually leaped out from behind a horse-drawn carriage in which a near-sighted Earl allegedly shot his teenaged fiancé by mistake. “You’re not trying to leave yet, are you?” he said sternly. “You need to see all three historical films!”
The northern coast of Ireland is as rugged, wild and beautiful as you might expect, but there are also so many layers of history and tradition that go back hundreds and hundreds of years. I think you could spend a year in Derry, for example, and only come close to understanding how that city has evolved over the centuries. The thirty-year stretch of unrest, war and terrorism that they call the ‘Troubles’ had more influences than just Catholicism versus Protestantism, and there is still strong emotion when people talk about England and the independence of Northern Ireland.
You get a strong sense of fierce national pride. We wandered through East Belfast, the origin of world-renowned artists, playwrights and authors, and saw the remains of the wall that used to separate the unionists and the loyalists. It must be like visiting the remains of the Berlin Wall, and getting a sense of the powerful passions and beliefs that divided a nation for decades.
Some of the areas we explored on the North Irish coast were the rope bridge at Carrick-a-rede and the Giants Causeway. The Causeway is covered with hexagon shaped rocks that were formed by lava when volcanoes erupted. The hex rocks are so uniform and stunning----some of them rising like Kryptonite out of the earth 40 or 50 feet, and some on the ground like perfect garden stepping stones to the sea.
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