Wanderung 30

We had planned to spend our day exploring the small harbour town of Cobh, Ireland, which we had seen only briefly on a previous visit. We went on deck for our ship's arrival in Cobh and were rewarded by some nice views of the headlands guarding the harbor, complete with the remains of an old fort and a modern lighthouse.

The channel was surprisingly narrow, and the Caribbean Princess kind of zig-zagged into the bay between green and red channel markers, and then slid PAST the town of Cobh with its nice cruise ship terminal, complete with a fleet of tour busses waiting to take the cruise ship passengers on excursions. What?? But instead of docking there we continued upstream and crossed over to the other shore of the Lee River to what looked like an auxiliary port for ferry ships and small container ships. The ferry ship terminal had a nice gangway, but we eased sidewise in to the container ship dock and moored there.

The Royal Princess, which again was right behind us into the harbor, got the nice berth right in the middle of town. Nuts! In Porta Delgada we had the much better dockside, so I guess this turnabout was only fair play.

There was nothing to do around our commercial dock, but they offered free shuttle buses into Cork. Well we had seen Cork before with Lois, but it is a nice city and easy walkable. Since we would have had to swim across the river to get to the harbour town of Cobh, we quickly changed our plans for the day to walking around the city of Cork instead. We disembarked right after breakfast and hopped on the next shuttle bus.

Although Cork is only upstream about 18 kilometers from our dock, the drive was slow, taking us nearly half an hour. We were dropped off at the Cork City Hall in a pouring rain (Welcome to Ireland!) but this was Ireland: If you don't like the weather wait 15 minutes and it will change! Sure enough, not long afterwards the sun started to peek through. As soon as the rain let up, we started ambling up and down the old central section of Cork, which lies on a kind of peninsula between the North and South branches of the Lee River.

Princess had provided one of their notorious "Not To Scale" maps, but it had only the major streets and none of the smaller ones, which made it much less useful for walking! Our first goal, therefore, was the Tourist Information office, where we found a MUCH better map of the city center that included all the side streets.

Guided by our new map, we started down the main shopping street to the Post Office to mail some letters. We also kept a lookout for photography stores to find that dratted cable, but none had the right one! Crossing the peninsula, we kept going north to the northern branch of the Lee River.

Cork is where my great grandfather James Holmes married Sarah Holmes before they ultimately emigrated to Canada, and that church is on a hill just north of the downtown area and beyond the north branch of the river, so we could clearly see the steeple, which we had climbed on a previous visit. It was fun to think that some of the old buildings and stores might have been there when my two love-truck ancestors got married and shipped out to the Canada. Some of the buildings were clearly dated from the 19th Century and so possibly some were there back in the 1850s when all these momentous (to me, at least) events transpired. One result of that wedding is that although I am 1/2 Canadian, a large part of that 1/2 is Irish, possibly explaining the blarney in me!

Although we had no luck buying the camera charging cable we needed, Monika spotted a Lidl store and we went in to see if they had their normal Spring sale of bicycle/sports accessories. They did! In particular, they had wick-away polyester exercise shirts for both men and women, so I bought three: neon red, fluorescent yellow, and a boring royal blue. Monika bought two yellow and white exercise tops, and that helped augment our wardrobe for the planned bicycle tour. I started to complain about the 5 Euro price (about $6 at current exchange rates), when Monika pithily reminded me that back in the USA we paid at least twice as much for exactly the same kind of exercise tops!

We topped off our day in Cork with lunch in a nice Irish pub. We had Irish stew and drank Murphys Stout, which is available on draft only in Ireland, and had soda bread with that special Irish butter. So for a short time we were "More Irish than the Irish", as they say, but it truly brought back great memories of earlier visits to Ireland, where I feel completely calm, safe, secure, happy and relaxed. That "at home" feeling only occurs in three foreign countries so far: Ireland, Australia, and Germany.

We did a quick turn through the "English Market", a close relative of a Spanish Mercado, with stalls for fresh produce, meats, cheese, and so forth. We rambled a little more about the city hoping to find the elusive charging cable, but no luck, so we decided to pack it in and return back to the ship.

Getting tired, we shuttled back to our ship and retired to our balcony for the remainder of the afternoon. There we looked out across the river to Cobh, where we saw the Royal Princess docked at that nice terminal that our ship had so blithely sailed past! So seeing Cobh will have to wait for another day, methinks.