April 13, 2005 - Shannon and Bunratty Castle and Folk Park

Shannon airport turned out to be a fairly small airport located a bit to the west of Limerick. There is a town of Shannon, but I don't suppose 99.9% of the folks passing through the airport even know it is there. We, on the other hand, had to get there to pick up some money at the post office, so we were obliged to figure out just where the town was and, once we had picked up our car, how to drive there. For those of you who are now deathly curious as to how to get to Shannon from Shannon airport, the directions given to me (by someone who was obviously puzzled why we would even want to go to Shannon) were "Go straight through 3 roundabouts and turn right at the 4th and then follow the signs to the city center."

As usual such directions were not quite as simple as they seemed, and in this case things were complicated by the immediately apparent fact that I was driving on the "wrong" side of the road. That is, in Ireland all traffic travels on the left side of the road whilst in the U.S., Canada, and continental Europe I was used to driving on the right side of the road. I drove on the left once before in 1973 in England, but there were several key differences that made it a lot easier that time than in 2005. First, I hadn't been driving that long and had less strong habits for driving on the right side. Second, I was driving a motorcycle, which meant that I had the same driving position and controls no matter if I was driving on the left or right side of the road. Third, the risk assessment center in the prefrontal cortex of my brain had not fully matured, which is a very scientific way of saying I was young and foolish.

Driving on the left hand side was still exciting in 2005, unfortunately, even just getting the rental car out of the parking lot. But at my current stage of life, the word "exciting" in connection with driving implies a Bad Thing. As it turned out, on this narrow, 2-lane access road to the "car park" there were no lane markings of any kind and all of a sudden a shuttle bus loomed up in front of me. Thirty years of driving habits took over and I instinctively swerved to pass the bus on the right side, which must have given him a bit of a shock. Possibly he was used to Americans driving unpredictably away from the airport, but in any event he just stopped dead and let me careen around him on the right (wrong!) side.

To make our final right hand turn at the 4th roundabout, for example, I had to wait for a gap, accelerate like mad into the LEFT lane of the roundabout, go whirling around it for ¾ of a revolution, and then squirt out on the road leading to Shannon. That road debouched onto a 2-lane side street that led past what looked like a small strip mall and then into a residential area. We kept driving and searching, not realizing that we had already passed through downtown Shannon, which as it turned out was the strip mall. After hitting some dead ends and turning around, we finally drove back to the mall to ask directions and found out that the post office we were seeking was down one arm of the mall. The mall itself had a huge interior formed from a set of interconnected halls that was much larger on the inside than it looked to be from without.

Retrieving our money without any incident, we carefully drove back to the airport to pick up Lois, who arrived on a later flight from Chicago. While waiting I used the wireless connection capability of Baby to use the free Internet service in the airport lobby. We sent the kids emails that we had arrived, sent Heinke an email that the money had arrived, and in general took care of things. After picking up Lois we drove over to our bed and breakfast to sign in and then spend the afternoon at Bunratty Castle and Folk Park.

Visiting a castle and folk park would be, we thought, very interesting in its own right and it had the added advantage of keeping us active for the afternoon, which kept us from getting near any beds, which kept us from falling asleep! We first had lunch at Durty Nelly's pub across the street from Bunratty Castle, and that was our introduction to "pub fare", which during our visit we found was typically cheap, nourishing, and anything but low fat.

After lunch we wandered into the Folk Park and headed for the castle. It turned out to be a quite impressive restored 15th century castle complete with a moat, dungeon, turrets, and maze of rooms to explore.

The largest room was, of course, the Great Hall, and it was magnificent. The vaulted ceiling was far, far above a set of stained glass windows behind a raised dais. The dais had what looked like the main table in the old days, when the other dining tables would have been spread across the beautiful wood parquet floor. The hall was decorated with age-darkened carvings and faded tapestries. When new, however, I expect those tapestries would have been filled with vibrant, vivid color, almost like a color photograph.

The other castle rooms included guardrooms, bedrooms, "solars" (sitting rooms?), and a couple of chapels. The bedrooms were actually rather dim and plain although some of the wooden bedsteads were beautifully carved. In contrast, the chapels were brilliantly lit from stained glass windows and had a full set of religious accoutrements. The solar rooms were fitted out as sitting rooms or day rooms, and one in particular had a very intricately carved and extravagantly painted ceiling.

After finishing our tour of the castle, we returned to the Folk Park area that displayed an additional 25 or so authentic rural Irish buildings. Each building had been relocated or rebuilt in the folk park, and the path through them was designed to preserve something of the natural setting and appearance of each one. The buildings ranged from a very basic one-room cottage to a manor house.

The interior furnishings of each house were supposed to reflect the type of possessions that would be found there, but we had some doubts about that. The possessions of the small farmer, for example, looked considerably fancier and more expensive than we would have expected. Certainly the furnishings and dishes were more lavish than we later saw at Muckross Traditional Farms. In any case, the houses and businesses were fun to look at and pleasantly warmed by smoky peat fires, a definite plus on a cold, wet day.

Jet lag was catching up to me as we drove home, and it didn't help that we couldn't find the correct entrance to the motorway and had to drive many kilometers out of our way on really narrow twisting roads. At one point I was squeezed by construction, four bicyclists in my lane, and a dump truck coming against me, and that was downright nerve wracking. Still, we arrived back at our B&B without incident. I persevered in writing in the journal a bit before just simply crashing around 7 p.m.