Ireland in five days: Day 1, Taxi, Ferry, Bus, Tram, Sleep

This was to be our longest day of travel yet for Matt and I. It began with an early morning taxi ride from St. David’s to the ferry port of Fishguard. Though it was ‘rush hour,’ we barely noticed any other cars on the road. We were sure to leave plenty of time to check in and find a comfy seat on board. Well, it was certainly enough because they weren’t even open when we arrived. In fact, we had to wait over an hour in the lounge area which consisted of a few hard plastic benches with a separate room for an abandoned snack-bar, two early 1990’s arcade games, and three other foot passengers. We eventually found our way on board and settled into our corner table with four attached-to-the-floor chairs. Luckily for Jess, it wasn’t too bumpy a ride. Overall, the 3-hour ride was rather uneventful though we did witness a giant Curious George propose to an older Irish woman with a gummy-ring (Wow, it was weird typing that sentence).
Once we docked at the Irish port in Rosslare, we waited another 30 minutes for our bus that would take us to Dublin. This time, it was a real bus and the ride wasn’t as harrowing as the one in Wales. However, it did feel a bit tedious and certainly longer than the 3 hours it actually took. We all dozed in and out as we wound our way up the eastern portion of Ireland through back-road towns until we reached the major motorway 50km outside of Dublin. We arrived in the city only to find more transport to take us to our hotel. It took an hour and a half to travel 4 miles on Dublins’s Lua Red Line. So tired...
By the time we had reached our hotel and checked in, we all decided we would rather just have dinner at the hotel and tuck in for the night. Tomorrow would be another day and we wanted to be rested for our adventure in the city. Perhaps, a bit of time in the pool/spa would help relax us. Well, maybe it would have, but it wasn’t happening for us that night! It was closed by the time we gathered ourselves and our swimsuits. Yep, tomorrow would be another day...

Wales & Ireland

Ireland in 5 parts...er, days: Day 0, Wales

In addition to my affinity for the Queen, anyone who knows me well will likely know that when I travel, I like to pack in as many things as possible, especially historical landmarks. Therefore, we decided to make the most of our time and see a little of Wales along our way to Ireland.
We began our trip via train from Paddington station (think: Paddington Bear when he arrived from Darkest Peru). Our first taste of adventure came when we couldn’t collect our train tickets due to some credit card changes. Note to future self: always call the train company if you lose the card you purchased your tickets with. What seemed to us to be an easy “Matt can just go up to the customer service desk and collect them via his identity card” turned into “You must first call the security phone number and alert them to the change of card, wait for them to change it in the system, then come back to this desk where I will need to see your new card, your reservation numbers, and your identity card.” It’s a good thing we were an hour early for our departure because it took 45 minutes to collect the tickets. Ah, red tape.
Finally on the train, we chugged along through the English countryside toward Haverfordwest, Wales. Just one change of train, comprised of a manic dash across the tracks and down to the other platform, and we arrived at the tiny, rural train station by 3pm. We waited [somewhat] patiently for our bus to arrive which would take us to the lovely village of St. David’s. We had no idea of the exhilarating, sometimes death-defying, journey we were about to embark upon... and how travelling to St. David’s meant you should also be praying to him along the way. The bus was not so much of a bus as it was a glorified van, though it did have plenty of seating for the 8 passengers getting on. The driver masterfully (or fortuitously) negotiated the sharp curves, steep drops, and narrow lanes of the rural roads at a fear-inducing speed. Sometimes he stopped in the middle of a highway to pick up another passenger at some unmarked bus-stop. It was a strange ride, but about 40 minutes later, we were in the centre of St. David’s – home of St. David’s Cathedral, a site founded in the A.D. 580s by St. David (obviously), the patron saint of Wales.
We quickly checked into our hotel, which was just across the street, and raced down toward the cathedral to get our peek inside before it closed. As noted, St. David is the patron saint of Wales (apparently, I was born on St. David’s day and, therefore, should have been named Davina, but no matter). He was a native of Wales, was well-known for his asceticism, and was buried on the site of the monastery he founded (now the cathedral). Though the cathedral has now been around for hundreds of years in various versions, the city was just officially given ‘city’ status by the Queen in 1995 [NB: In the UK, you need to have a cathedral in order be deemed a ‘city’ – picky, picky]. St. David’s cathedral is certainly a grande and beautiful cathedral. I’m not sure any of our pictures convey its true personality.
After seeing the cathedral, we thought we might want to mark the day with a geogache or two. We soon realised that this would be nearly impossible without cellular service, but Matt Metras came to the rescue with his non-cellular-based GPS device. However, we still needed the phone to actually look up the coordinates. Eureka! I was so overly organised, I had actually written down coordinates of possible geocaches we could hunt for on the trip. Yep, it’s grande travelling with someone like me. ;) With a little teamwork, we found the tricky little cache and set out to find some food. Before the food, we found some very amazing ice cream. This was special ‘Welsh’ ice cream made with clotted cream and a range of liqueurs... mmm.
Real food meant pub and of course, it was quite yummy; between the four of us we had what seemed like a feast of ‘stick-to-your-ribs’ comfort food, perfect for preparing us for one last geocache. This one took us down a narrow footpath that followed a high hill/cliff down to the shoreline of the Irish Sea. The path was easy enough in the daylight, but proved slightly tricky as the sun set and the field became darker and darker. Sadly, the dark completely overtook us with yet another mile to go and we just couldn’t manage it. We made our stumble-trip walk back to the hotel and prepared for our trek to Ireland the next morning.

Wales & Ireland

The Metraeii visit

We’ve been looking forward to this for a while: The Metras’s visit! We planned to go to Ireland and Wales with them for a combined six day trip. Beckie took it upon herself to plan this trip in exquisite detail and no one seemed to have a problem with it.
The day they arrived I immediately took them into the city and marched them around the Kensington area. We stopped by Harrods and then meandered through Kensington and Chelsea. We walked to the nearest pub, The Tea Clipper and then up through South Kensington. We passed through Kynance Mews, Saint Mary’s Church and somehow found our way to the South Kensington station. I took them some bizarre alley route that didn’t quite pan out. They were quite tired at this point, since they didn’t really sleep on the plane, so we went back home. Then had some pies at the Red Lion.
We loaned them our membership cards for their tour around the city and let them enjoy themselves. Of course there was the obligatory stop at Crazy Homies for some tequila!
The day before we left for Wales and Ireland we all went to Windsor Castle, which would be Beckie’s first time as well. Along with visiting the castle we took a tour of royal kitchen. Let’s just say the castle kitchen was quite huge, well stocked and friggin' clean. The copper cookware was stamped with the initials of the palace it was originally made for. It was raining off and on so we took time out for tea at The Crooked House of Windsor…the Metras duo really liked it. We strolled through the rest of Windsor, did some caching along the Thames and made a quick stop for a pint, or was it a half, at The Royal Oak. We left the next morning for Wales and Ireland so made our way back to Ealing so we could have a relaxing evening.

Metraeii Visit

Cambridge

Next on the University tour circuit is Cambridge. It was kind of a last minute idea, last minute being about 2 weeks, and we only went for the day. As with most of the travels around the UK, we took the train up to Cambridge on a rainy morning. Amongst the many things there are to do in Cambridge (most of them being museums), we definitely wanted to go on a punt tour. We decided to go take the tour before 11am while it was still raining and keeping the hordes away. Luckily, right when we started off on the tour the sun broke out. The tour was strictly relegated to the River Cam through “The Backs.”
For those who don’t know Cambridge is a university town and the River Cam travels through the backs of the many universities whose property entails the river. The university properties are closed to the public, or walkable for a fee, and therefore the general public doesn’t get to see the picturesque landscape. The physical footprint of the universities is rather small so when traveling the traditional backs, one can easily pass through 10 universities. The tour guide was quite splendid and knew a lot about all the different universities and shared some delightful stories. One story is about the pranks of the mountaineering society at Kings College. In addition to climbing the bridges over the River, they fancied climbing the spires of the chapel and placing items on top. One year a traffic cone was placed on top of a spire and the college spent two days building scaffolding to get near it; the next morning, they found the cone on another spire further away. Halfway through our tour, many more people decided they wanted to be on the water. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them were inexperienced and playing bumper punts in the water. The schools along the water had private use punts the students could take out. It was nice to drift down the river and imagine going to university here. There was a definite school-town energy about but trumping all of that was the centuries of history these schools emitted. The sheer stature, architecture, and age of the universities conjure romantic images of college life. As we passed by Trinity College one of the many facts shared was it multi-billion dollar endowment.
After the hour-long punt we were dropped off at the Anchor Pub, where Hawking frequents and Pink Floyd used to play, and had lunch. The sun was out to stay and people were flocking for the punts. From there it was off to just explore the town. As mentioned, there are quite a few museums there and a lot of them catering to many academic pursuits, but we made the tough decision to steer away from them. Visiting one would have us wanting to visit all of them. There were plenty of people here on a Saturday so walking through the town market and center proved very entertaining and hard to not be in someone’s picture. There were a fair amount of tour groups floating about the city as well as campus visitors. We stopped into Mr. Simms Sweet Shop and picked up some munchies for the walk around town.
Although bicycle-centric, the town didn’t seem as nearly so as Oxford. Outside of St. John’s there was a small craft show where we picked up a small hand made milk carafe for our tea set. Unfortunately, all the colleges want to charge for walking their grounds but understandably so because otherwise their small campus would be hounded by flocks upon flocks of tourists. Unlike Princeton where on reunion weekend (comprising of over 60 years of reunions) their humongous campus swallows up everybody and doesn’t look the worse for wear.
We made a stop into a tea shop for tea, meh, and moved on to check out more nooks of the city. We were fascinated by the sheer size, design, and history of the chapel at Kings College so we made sure to stop inside. Construction on the chapel began before the War of the Roses and was completed by Henry VIII. It has the largest fan vault ceilings in the world and, like a proper university, had a complete demonstration on the physics of fan vaults. Also inside is an organ Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn donated with their initials all over it. Purchasing entrance to the chapel allowed a limited walk around the small campus. During our walk, we heard students talking about how broke the college is but despite that it certainly isn’t bankrupt on scenery.
After being funneled off the campus we strolled around the city some more and made sure to stop into some pubs-Baron of Beef, The Eagle and The Salisbury’s Arms. The Eagle was pretty special due to the RAF bar in the back (where WWII RAF crew burned emblems onto the ceiling with their zippos) and also Crick and Watson made their DNA announcement there. We made our own discovery that despite getting to town early it was getting fairly late and we needed to find our way back to the station. We weren’t sure how long it would take to walk the meandering mile plus through town to the station. Like most places we visit, we could’ve spent at least another day there.

Cambridge