Dublin

Yesterday was spent between Sligo and Dublin.  The Sligo hotel was the most mundane so far, but had beautiful landscaping (you know, I'm not sure how much of it is landscaping and how much is just plain interesting stuff growing everywhere in the UK and Ireland).  Much of the bus rides are through countryside.  Both Irelands have more cows than Scotland (hence the excellent butter and cheese), and few stone fences but many hedges.  Farms appear more prosperous than those in Scotland, and I see a lot more new, what I would call "American style" houses.

We stopped at Mullingar House to see the house (built as a summer house for the "wicked earl") and gardens.  The best part of the house interior was a couple of gorgeous plaster ceilings that had obviously been extremely skillfully done by hand in wet plaster, like playing with cake icing but upside down.  This does not do it justice:

In the center, the four winds blow in all directions.  Somewhere along the garlands is a fire-breathing dragon.  Outside the house the highlight was a folly: the earl (who accused his wife of adultery and locked her up for 31 years, possibly inspiring the story of Jane Eyre) didn't like his brother, whose house he could see, so he spent 10,000 pounds in the 1700s to build something that looks like the ruin of an abbey, but is basically a spite fence:

You can see it in the distance.  The walls are full of holes that have been adopted as nexting boxes by crows and rooks.

We arrived in Dublin, where thankfully we will spend 3 nights, after 3 moves in 3 days.  Some of us realized that we might have a luggage problem because we were allowed 2 checked bags plus a carry-on and personal item on Iceland Air, but on Wow Air between Dublin and Reykjavik we can only have one checked bag and one carry-on (no personal item) and there are weight limits.  You can pay to have extra bags or to have more weight, paying less ahead of time online and more at the airport, but it turns out that we can't do it individually, only through the tour company that booked the tickets, and they have stopped responding to e-mails.  So we are making plans to weigh bags, wear multiple layers of clothing, leave things behind, stuff out jacket pockets, etc, to get around this.

This morning we had a bus tour of Dublin, rearranging our schedule to not get caught in the lines due to cruise ships docking and taking their passengers on bus tours.  We roamed St. Patrick's cathedral, Phoenix Park, and Trinity College/Book of Kells exhibit.  Now, anybody can take pictures of stained glass and marble sculptures of old white men, but my interests are a little more eclectic, to wit:

The floor tiles.

Medieval wall, door with modern security pushbuttons.

Handmade needlepoint cushions hanging from the back of every chair, and piled up in randome places along the walls.

Flags so old and rotted they are held together with netting (hard to see).

Long-haired ladies.

After the tour we went out to the middle of nowhere to a pub called the Merry Plowboy and had a good lunch, then were dropped off in town or back at the hotel.  I stayed in town and hunted down a yarn store called This is Knit, where I paid more than I intended for some locally made yarn and picked up some double-pointed needles to finish a hat.

Left: Irish.  Right: Scottish.

Yesterday I finished another project I started on the way from Scotland to Ireland:

A cowl in some Noro.  This is fancy-looking somewhat expensive yarn (which I got on sale), and everybody thinks it's so cool, but I had to keep stopping to untwist it, which doesn't normally happen, and I think of it as garbage yarn because it looks like somebody had a big bowl of scraps and just twisted them together to see what happened.  Feh.  Not using this again.

Now resting my weary feet after walking back to the hotel before hopping on the bus for dinner.  I think I need to skip dessert.