April Fool's Day- no joke

Tuesday- Dublin to Bonduran

On our way out of Dublin, our tour guide gave us a little lesson on how to change centigrade to Fahrenheit, how to change kilometers to miles and how to figure how many stone you might weigh. (FYI- I weighed 9 stone when I left home)

We learned about yellow plants growing wild in the countryside called gorse and broom plant

I’ve been seeing different prices for a liter of petrol—the one I noticed in Dublin was either really high, or I miss read it. Today we saw prices from 1.18-1.22 per liter again, realize that we are talking about Euros not dollars.

We learned that the Republic of Ireland has 26 counties, which hold 4.5 million people, and Northern Ireland has 6 counties and 1.5 million folks. And Ireland has about the same landmass as West Virginia.

We learned that Mel Gibson was named after St. Mel—His father is from the town of Longford, Ireland where there is a church of St. Mel.

I am pleased to tell those people who know that I’m not crazy about green that in Ireland –green is an unlucky color. If children wear it, the fairies are likely to steal them.

St. Patrick’s Day is an American invention—not even celebrated in Ireland until about 15-20 years ago.

We toured a Georgian house that has been lived in for the last 300 years up until 1997, when the last owner moved out. The house had walls about 18-20 inches thick and was COLD. The have a tiny bit of heat on, but we were all wearing our coats and weren’t comfortable. Interesting house tho [‘—supposedly haunted.



After the tour of the house we toured the Famine Museum, which depicted and explained what caused the Potato Famine of the 1840’s and the results were that the population of Ireland decreased by half. Many people died and others emigrated to Canada, U.S. Australia and New Zealand. I learned that the potatoes that were eaten by the poor people of Ireland were “complete” foods—supplying all the nutrition needed to keep a person healthy. They ate ONLY POTATOES AND BUTTERMILK. An adult worker usually ate 14lbs of potatoes a day. The potatoes got blight, people had nothing to eat, and they died or left.

After the museum tour we had lunch at the “tea room” connected to the museum. I decided that a baked potato would be appropriate. It tasted as if it had been cooked in 1845. It came with a salad that was okay. I don’t suppose it is appropriate to ENJOY eating at a famine museum.

We stopped at Boyle Abbey – a church built in 1161 and destroyed by Henry the 8th in his crusade against the Catholic Church.



We spent a part of this afternoon at the Belleek Pottery factory. We took a tour to see how it is made, finished, fired, painted, fired again, glazed, and fired yet again.

A piece of pottery takes from several weeks to months to produce. They wanted us to see how painstakingly handmade it is before we went to the store and saw the prices. They are one of the few places that is happy to take American money.

We drove for about 20 minutes to get to our hotel in Bonduran—The Great Northern Hotel. No internet in the rooms, so I’ll post this later. I’ll add another whole story about the hotel, the food, and Donegal Bay where you find the best surfing in Europe.