August's Bingo

For allbingo

beer	cab	bread	s'mores	chilled
lavender	catching up	crazy	thunder	tan
bubbles	hike/hiking	FREE SPACE	carefree	over-crowded
fried food	cosmos	trail mix	sharpness	packing
typhoon	late night(s)	vacation hair	cold is coming	sea

Ireland Day Two

Apparently Mom saved up all of the two weeks of grocery shopping for me as I was out all day doing that. And I chickened out of looking at my work email for one more day.

I do have a little good news. Modified and Sacred did fairly well in sales, generating over 100$, not bad for a novella.

So on to the more interesting stuff, my trip.

Ireland Day 2

Both ELD and I popped awake at 3 AM…and couldn’t get back to sleep. We stayed up a couple hours before trying to get an hour nap before we had to get up. We had a proper fry up for breakfast, the full Irish with fried eggs, fried potatoes and tomatoes, bacon (which I hated, more like boiled Canadian bacon), sausage (pass) white and black pudding and beans. Yep I DID eat the blood pudding and I liked it. I didn’t like the white one (just fat and oatmeal).

We took a double decker into Dublin. To be honest I’m NOT a city person but we weren’t really on a city tour. We walked to Trinity college where the Book of Kells was. The original plan was to see the book and I was excited to do it. But it was now 20 euros to do so in HUGE groups and no pictures allowed. It didn’t seem worth it to us. I’ve always loved the book but neither me nor ELD are particularly religious, so it wasn’t worth queueing up and paying that much.

Trinity college was lovely though and from there we meandered to the Dublin post office where the citizen rebellion took place. So, a site of great tragedy that left a lot of people dead. It is still a post office today. We walked past parliament and to our actual destination, the history museum. It was fantastic. There were nearly a half dozen bog bodies and I learned things I didn’t know like one must have been a visiting prince/scholar because the hair style and hair ointments were from the middle east. They think some of these bog bodies were kings (maybe failed ones, which gives me ideas for certain rulers) sacrificed to appease angry gods. One had his nipples cut off because the Irish pagan kings had a thing where submissive people (i.e. ones they conquered and perhaps lower ranking nobles who wanted to kiss butt) had to suck the king’s nipples to prove they were subservient. (yeah that needs to be in a story).

I knew the Celts had gold. I didn’t know how MUCH gold they had. It was stunning. Lots of gold jewelry, lots of amber jewelry and from there we went up to the Vikings in Ireland display, took a picture of a huge Viking skeleton. This transitioned into the ecclesiastic life and middle ages, lots of bejeweled reliquaries and croziers. There was one creepy Jesus with his hands bound with rope sitting on a skull called Jesus of sorrows. There was also a pagan Sheela-na-gig showing us her vulva. By the end we were on museum overload. We ate lunch there (carrot soup and a weird piece of bread because the rest of the meals were huge and I wasn’t up to it).

We headed on to our next destination the Monastic City of St. Kevin at Glendalough. We’re staying at the Glendalough hotel which was very lovely. Had a fantastic dinner here, three courses, fried brie with mango chutney, braised lamb shank with red wine au just and chocolate orange cheese cake. From there we went into the monastic city having it nearly to ourselves. I loved it. It was the site of Saint Kevin and there was the original church for the 600s (hated ELD but liked me), a bigger church ruins and a high round tower which was for the bells and for protection when Vikings come a knocking. Graves everywhere from the middle ages to now. I could have spent all night there. The gateway to it was the only monastic gateway left in Ireland. St. Kevin was a hermit, living in a nearby cave who eventually had a following giving rise to this monastic city.

( A bog body so if you're squeamish... )

( the rest of pics this way )