I have always wanted to visit Ireland, to see all the green stuff and to hear the cute accents. Jared and Katelyn were wanting to get another trip while it's still just the two of them in their family, so when we found $460 flights to Ireland, the four of us decided to book them.
On Wednesday, August 14, 2026, Sharon dropped us off at the airport, and we started our journey.
We flew over the Salt Lake and on to Chicago, where we boarded a flight for London.
Our flight to London was on a huge plane.
We flew over a cool castle on the approach to London, and when I looked into it later, I realized it was Windsor Castle.
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| Windsor Castle, Berkshire, England, while on final approach to London Heathrow Airport. |
After a four hour layover, we had one final flight to Dublin. We rented a car and then immediately parked it in downtown Dublin so we could check it out.
It was quite a party downtown, with people everywhere.
The first bus I noticed had a leprechaun and clovers on the side, so that was cute.
We walked over to the Ha'penny Bridge.
There were some rowers gliding by. Here's a quick video of that.
In Ireland, it is common to have dinner at a pub, and my research told me that The Temple Bar in Dublin was one of the happeningest pubs around, so we went there for dinner.
In preparation for our trip, we researched the "top ten Irish drinking songs" so that we could learn the choruses and be ready to sing along. Sure enough, the pub we went to had a live band, and they sang several of the songs from our list, including
and so on.
It was fun to sing along with gusto, along with most of the other people.
Here's a 1 1/2-minute video of us and others singing along with the "trad music" (Traditional Irish music) while we were there.
And we had some tasty pizza while we were there.
I had heard that Murphy's Ice Cream was excellent, using cream from "Kerry cows", which are happy, grass-fed cows from County Kerry on the west coast. They were eager to give us tastes of lots of flavors, so I tried the two local specialties:
I didn't actually love those that much, so I got lemon, raspberry and mint, all of which were excellent.
As we exited the ice cream parlor, the Temple Bar pub was all lit up like it was Christmas.
After that, we had a thrilling drive on tiny Irish roads. We agreed that if you were to sum up driving in Ireland in one word, that word would be "sketchy." The lanes are really narrow, there is no shoulder, and there is often a sharp curb or stone wall (with plants) right at the edge of the lane. On a good road, there is barely room for two cars going in different directions, but they still do so at full speed. On even smaller roads, there is really just one lane, and when you meet up with someone else, one of you has to squeeze into a slightly wider spot (sometimes backing up to get to one) so the other person can squeeze by you. Often one of you needs to scrape their car into a hedge to make room. And you're both going 60kph around blind, winding roads when you come across each other. It was like a video game! (Except you only get one life).
The tendency for right-side drivers is to drive too far to the left, so I had to discover the trick of looking in both rear view mirrors to see how many inches I had on each side until I could get a feel for where to position the car. It helped to think of "hugging the center" (which also translates well when you get back to right-side driving).
But while I was getting used to all of that, I did hit a curb once (oops), which fortunately did not cause any damage.
Finally, we arrived at our Home Exchange near the tiny town of Glendalough.
The key was left for us in a certain spot and guarded by this spider.
Inside, I got hit in the face by a cobweb and we found that there were many, many cobwebs and spiders all around the corners of the house, shower and elsewhere. So we grabbed a broom and swept up at least 80 spiders. On the plus side, there were no other bugs, so those spiders must have been doing their job!
The place was more of a cabin than a house. All the books and interesting trinkets (and daddy long legs spiders) reminded me a bit of our old home in Oregon.
The beds were comfy, and after traveling for 24 hours (and being up another 9 hours before that), it felt really good to shower and sleep.
In the morning, we left our car at the house and walked across the field in front of the house, past the smaller house that a forest ranger lives in, to go explore the area.
We crossed the stream using the fun stepping stones.
Apparently hikers are supposed to go to the left, and druids to the right. We were hikers, so we went left.
There were blackberry bushes all around Ireland, and we found at least some ripe berries every time we looked. This also reminded me of Oregon.
There were some souvenir shops as we got into the tiny town, and these hats reminded me of Dad. (According to his DNA test, he was 25% Irish).
We had some burgers and such at a little stand outside the main hotel there, and it was really good.
There was a monastic settlement founded in Glendalough in the 6th century A.D. by St. Kevin, not long after St. Patrick introduced Christianity to Ireland. The surviving buildings such as these arches were probably built between the 10th and 12th centuries.
There is a beautiful round tower there, which was probably built about a thousand years ago (!). The conical top was rebuilt in 1876 after it was struck by lightning. It used to have six timber floors, though they have rotted out over the centuries, so you can't go in it now. The old word for it translates as "bell tower," so it was likely used to call people to worship, and perhaps as a lookout.
A guide adopted our group and told us lots of interesting things about the history of the area.
He pointed out that this gravestone had some upside-down engravings on the back of it, indicating that someone ordered it, couldn't pay for it, but since it was expensive to make, they apparently re-sold it for cheaper to someone who was willing to use the other side.
He said that when King Henry VIII couldn't get the pope to agree to let him divorce his wife, he rejected the Catholic church and destroyed a lot of Catholic church buildings, including burning this one down.
The guide also told us that the traditional Irish cross includes a cross, obviously referring to the cross Jesus died on, and also a circle, representing eternity.
They're really into building rock walls in Ireland. This one appears to have some mortar, but most are just fit together pretty well from loose stones. This one also has some stone steps built into it, which allows people to be able to easily cross the wall without sheep being able to do so.
These tombstones have leaned over so much that they formed a little tunnel.
Katelyn and Jared brought fancy cameras. (For some reason, pictures of people taking pictures with fancy cameras make them look cool, while pictures of people taking pictures with cell phones makes them look lame. This picture was taken with a cell phone.)
The shamrock (young clover) is a symbol of Ireland, and it is said that St. Patrick used it to teach people the concept of the holy trinity, consisting of God the Father, his son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost.
After leaving the monastic settlement ruins, we walked a short distance to the lower lake. "Glendalough" (glen-dah-lock) means "Valley between two lakes" (kind of like "Interlaken" in Switzerland), and there is an upper and lower lake there.
At the upper lake, we skipped a few rocks.
Some Irish kids were playing there, and at one point I heard one of the kids say to another, "I dub thee...." I thought it was cute that kids in that part of the world would pretend that way.
There was a beautiful path around the right side of the lake.
These trees were amazing.
We weren't sure if this sign was saying "No monsters are allowed to swim here," or "Don't swim here, because there are monsters."
The weather was nice for us. August is the warmest month in Ireland, and it still has an average high temperature of 65ºF (18ºC). But the average high in the coldest month of January is only 45ºF (7ºC), which isn't that cold. Apparently the warm waters flowing up from the Atlantic help to moderate the temperature.
There were a couple of machines and some piles of rock left over from when this area was used for mining lead, zinc and silver from the 1790s to 1957, with 2,000 miners at the peak.
At that point, we started climbing up a rocky trail to where we could look down on the lakes.
There was a little creek that formed a pool partway up the mountain. Katelyn really wanted to jump in, but contented herself with dangling her hand in the water.
As we continued up the hill, we eventually crossed the stream.
We saw quite a few deer on the grassy mountain.
There were old abandoned buildings along the way. People have been in Ireland so long that almost everywhere you go, you see evidence of stone dwellings from centuries past. This one has square enough bricks that it probably wasn't too old.
I had expected to see black-nosed sheep, but I was surprised to see purple-backed sheep! Apparently they tag their sheep with colorful dye, which washes out when they clean the wool.
This deer was really close to the trail!
There was a narrow boardwalk (with round staples in it for traction) that went up much of the hill, since I'm sure it gets marshy when it rains.
From this gap, we could see some of the mining areas on the opposite side of the valley. The rockslide areas looked like waterfalls.
From here you can see the large upper lake and the small lower lake of Glendalough.
I call this a "Photographer's Roadblock".
At the top of the mountain, the views were gorgeous, and it is hard for pictures to do it justice.
So here's a little video clip showing the view from up there.
Here you can see the creek winding its way down towards the river.
And there was a convenient log to sit on at one of the overlooks.
The lower lake sits near the monastic settlement, with its graveyard and tower.
Linette found some more blackberries as we descended the mountain.
Many of the trees in this area were decorated with moss.
This is the Poulanass Waterfall. It hadn't rained too much recently, so it wasn't raging, but it was still pretty.
Finally, we got back down to the lake area.
There we saw what looked like a bear with a rag mop on its back, but I think it's actually a dog.
I thought it was interesting that someone had stacked these stones up for some reason, but so little was left, it was no longer apparent what it was for. (Unless there's a treasure stashed behind that round rock. I forgot to check...)
We hiked the "green" and "white" trails around the two lakes, for a total of about 12.5km (8 miles) and 400m (1200') of elevation gain, plus another 2 or 3 miles walking to and from the house and around the area.
After all of that, we were pretty worn out.
We walked back through the cemetery and past the tower.
And back through the arches, which apparently used to be a 2-story gate to the settlement.
And we had a nice dinner at the main hotel there. They didn't have room inside, so we ate outside. That was pleasant except for the infamous "midges" (biting gnats) that plague the area. Fortunately, our Home Exchange had repellant we could use, so we didn't get bit much—just a bit annoyed when they started to fly around us towards the end.
I tried the traditional Irish stew there, and then we finished up with some warm apple pie a la mode.
Some deer were grazing in the yard in front of the hotel as we walked back to our house.
It was starting to get dark and spooky on the way back, as evidenced by this picture I captured of a ghost! (It was actually darker than my iPhone made it look, and the night mode blurred the moving figure).
The river was so still that it reflected the trees like glass.
It was fun to walk across the stepping stones back to the house. We got to meet the ranger who lives in the smaller cottage (and play with his dog).
We had fun listening to a few of their 70s and 80s CDs, like Fleetwood Mac and Eric Clapton.
We played a couple of games around the little table before calling it a night.
In spite of the spiders, we enjoyed our stay at the cute cabin, and especially loved hiking around the historic and beautiful area around Glendalough.
In the next episode, we travel across southern Island, visiting castles and a magic well along the way.