SATURDAY & SUNDAY & MONDAY – ITINERARY CHANGES

So, weather has intervened with our cruise schedule.  Saturday night as we were leaving Belfast, the Captain announced that bad weather was forecast for the Irish Sea and the English Channel for Monday and Tuesday, the days we were to dock in Holyhead (Wales) and anchor & tender at the Isle of Jersey (in the Med).  Holyhead is a notoriously difficult port in which to dock in rough seas and tendering is always difficult in bad weather.  So the decision was made to extend our stay in Dublin to two days in place of Holyhead and then to spend a day at sea rather than trying to anchor at Guernsey.

That’s all OK with us.  An extra day in Dublin is never a bad thing, and there is essentially nothing to see in the town of Holyhead.  It’s a great place for tours to nearby northern Wales, but we were there on our car trip last year and did not plan on anything beyond a trip to a pub.  We’ll miss Jersey, but we saw it’s sister island, Jersey, two years back, and it is very similar.  We will miss the chance to see Barb & Kris passing us on their cruise which is scheduled to go from Southampton to Guernsey on Tuesday night – literally it would have been two ships passing in the night.  Hope you make it into Guernsey, girls!

Sunday morning we arrived in Dublin on time at 8:00 AM.  It was mainly sunny skies with some clouds and a chance of showers.  We caught the shuttle bus from the dock to downtown and had a long walkabout.  We’ve seen much of Dublin, so we walked from the drop-off point at Trinity College through St Stephen’s Green to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  It’s Sunday for it was closed for services until 12:30, so we continued to the Christ Church Cathedral (Church of Ireland – Anglican).  Closed for services until 12:30.  Oh, well, the walk was nice.

We continued on along the River Liffey to O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main shopping thoroughfare and saw the newly installed spire.  (At least I thinks it’s new as I don’t remember seeing it before.  Further up O’Connell we visited the very interesting Dublin Writer’s Museum where we took the very informative recorded tour.  (OK, we all know about Brendan Behen and and James Joyce and Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw and, of course, Yeats.  Who out there knew Bram Stoker of Dracula fame was Irish?  I didn’t.)

We adjourned down the road to the Parnell Pub – lager for Elaine, Guinness for me.  Then we walked through Dublin’s pub and nightclub district, Temple Bar.  We were hungry and some what incongruously, we dropped in at McDonald’s for fries and a coke.  Then we were back at Christ Church Cathedral to check out the inside.  The catacombs were closed, but we walked around the cathedral proper.  Luckily we heard an organ and choir rehearsal that was nice.  We saw the tomb of Strongbow, the Anglo-Norman who led the capture of Dublin in 1170.  Unfortunately we could not see the mummified cat and rat (literally) that were trapped in an organ pipe in the 1860’s because they are located in the closed crypt.

Meanwhile St. Patrick’s had closed again for afternoon services, so once again we missed seeing the interior.  At that point we hopped a taxi back to the ship.  As luck would have it, it started to rain just as we got in the cab, so our timing was fortuitous.

It’s Monday now, the beginning of our second day in Dublin.  It’s a bank holiday here, so the streets will be teeming was tourists and locals again like yesterday.  It’s a bustling city.  My next posting won’t be until Wednesday night when we are ensconced in our hotel in London.  See you then!