Our First Trip to Italy

Here are some pictures from our first trip to Italy. I say, "our first trip," because we are certainly going back. Karen and I both want to see Rome and Florence, etc.

Karen and I took a week long trip to Northern Italy. We stayed in Riva, a costal town on the northern shore of Lake Garda. We went with an Irish tour group called The Travel Department.

We were the only Americans on our trip; the group was all Irish otherwise. What a wonderful people. It's hard to accurately describe what is so nice about them, they're just a genuine people.

Here's the view from our hotel room. It was so nice to wake up with these mountains all around us. The views were gorgeous!

You can click here for a movie we took of our room in Riva. We stayed in the Grand Liberty Hotel which had a spa, pool, sauna, steam room, etc. It had a real old world charm to it.

First day in Italy we hiked up to a Basilica of Santa Barbara. This is a view of Riva from the mountain. After we had some food at a regional alpine mountaineering club the clouds started to roll in. The views were really cool.

We went for a tour around the lake and stopped at a nice marina town for some espresso and fresh pastries. The mountains around the northern part of the lake are just so beautiful.

On the North East shore of the lake, the mountains come almost straight out of the water. In a lot of places they had to dig out tunnels through the rock because there was not enough land on which to build a road. They were really neat to drive through and beautiful to look back on.

We also took a day trip to Venice. It was really cool to see all the canals and architecture. Venice is a pretty expensive city though. Our tour guide arranged for a few discount things for us. It was great to have her looking out for us in financially like that.

I'm really glad to have seen Venice, but I don't know if I needed to spend a whole lot more than a day there. I can't imagine seeing it in the height of the summer. Probably better with a fraction of the tourists.

Check out the pigeons in the middle of St Marc's Square below. They sell bags of bird food you can feed the birds... actually you just let 'em see the food and they maul you. We watched it happen to a few people and vowed NEVER to feed the pigeons again.

Trim Castle in County Meath, Ireland

This is the castle where Braveheart was filmed. The movie was set in Scotland, but the Trim Castle scenes were actually filmed in Trim, Ireland in County Meath. They must have done a lot of work to get everything together for the movie. There is a photo album there with a lot of pictures showing the behind the scenes production of it’s filming.

Here’s a picture of Trim in relation to Dublin. The drive is 39 miles and takes a little over an hour. There’s another castle or at least a few ruins visible from the N3 to the North of the road. It’s a really nice drive up into County Meath.

Trim Castle is a keep style castle that was designed to be easily defended by 7 or 8 well trained men if need be. Everything was constructed with incredible insight into highly efficient methods of defense. The stairways, gates, windows and all points of access were built giving amazing advantage to the defending knights.

Trim is the largest Norman castle in Ireland and was built by Hugh de Lacy and his son Walter beginning in the late 1100s. It was built by England serve as a visible sign that the English ruled Ireland.

Inside the curtain wall lived trades people who had to pay taxes to live inside that protected area. The taxes to live inside were high, but the protection was unquestionable. Lived outside you were subject to the whims of nearby tribes who would come through periodically and attack, taking whatever they could ravage from anyone outside the castle.

That didn’t breed much local patriotism for the English. When the castle was under attack, the folks living outside would cheer for damage the castle would sustain (no matter how little it actually sustained).

There was some pretty advanced engineering inside the castle. They vented a duct in the stone walls from the septic collection area up through where the clothes were hung using the ammonia to kill lice or fleas in the clothes. I don’t know how they dealt with the stench, but there were no bugs!

The person in charge of the septic area would regularly stir the excrement and even collect bowl to leave on the outside of the door for examination. In that day, they would be proud of darker excrement because it was evidence of a rich castle diet. They would use that to advertise the culinary luxury of the kitchen. Little different than today, huh; now we just have to look into Zagat’s!

We left Trim and headed back for Dinner at O’Shea’s and Guinness at The Brazen Head. Brazen Head is the oldest pub in Ireland. It was established in 1198 and still pours a great Guinness… they’ve been doing it long enough!!!

Al and Kathy Visit!

This weekend we had two friends from NYC come and visit. Al and Kathy flew in on Thursday morning and stayed through the weekend. I think it was only 2 or 3 hours before we were sampling Ireland's infamous Guinness.

Getting off the plane after a red-eye flight to Ireland usually takes a shower and a cup of coffee to recover from. Al and Kathy were lucky to have slept well on the plane, so they just needed the shower each before hitting the pubs!

We walked through St. Stephens Green and fed the ducks on our way up to Grafton Street. It's fun to walk around through all the people and neat shops up there in spite of the heavy tourist feel. I'm glad we stopped to feed the ducks. It's something I really like.

We made our way up to Temple Bar area and stopped in for another couple pints in the famed Temple Bar itself. It’s one of the most well known pubs in Dublin… they even named an area of Dublin after it!

Pubs sure are friendly in Ireland. Neil, our bartender, taught us how to balance a pint on it's edge using a match stick. He even offered us some snuff we later found out he picked up from a couple other patrons 20 minutes earlier. Funny place I guess!

After Temple Bar, we walked up to the River Liffey and took some pictures before making our way home.

Karen met us after she got out of work and we headed down to the Canal for dinner. We had reservations on the only river boat restaurant in Dublin, La Peniche. Our house is right on the Grand Canal and the river boat docks about 150m east of our back gate.

They sail every Thursday night and try to go 2 locks east or west. The food was GREAT and it was really cool going through the locks. Not cheap, but worth the expense.

Our cruise was actually boarded at the Leeson Street lock by an inebriated local on his way to a party someplace further up in City West. He was walking with another buddy with a case of Portuguese beer (?) and jumped on board for a minute. They wouldn’t serve him a drink on board though, so he promptly jump off.

It’s so nice to show our new home and city to good friends!