Parents Visit Ireland

My first final in John Milton was approaching and I had some work to do in preparation for it. I spent the next four days in Dublin reading the second half of Paradise Lost, which is now my favorite piece of literature. It is very long and very hard to get through, but Milton’s imagination, coupled with the fact that he wrote it in unfaltering iambic pentameter when he was blind is unbelievable. I took the test on May 4^th and described the experience at the beginning of my third Greece road trip post.

Two days later my mom and dad came to Ireland to visit for a week. We had a great time. We rented a car and Dad adjusted to driving on the left side of the road. We wasted no time and drove up to Belfast and stayed for two nights. It is a very interesting city, and Mom and Dad were particularly intrigued because they remember hearing about Belfast on the news every week only a few decades before. While up north we explored the city, visited the Bushmills distillery, the Giant’s Causeway, and explored. It was raining for most of Belfast, which only really affected the visit to the Giant’s Causeway.

After Belfast we drove westward through Sligo county and ended in Connemara. We stayed there for two nights as well, saw the Cliffs of Moher, walked around Galway, and explored Connemara. In Connemara we went to Kylemore Abbey and then the more impressive Ashford Castle, built 800 years ago and still functioning, now as a five star hotel. That night we drove into Galway and walked around. I brought my parents to my favorite pub there, Crane's, which they loved, and then we went back to the hotel where I finished writing my thesis proposal for next year.

The next day we headed back to Dublin, stopped in the middle of the country to get haircuts (Dad and I have a running list of all the interesting places we get haircuts, which includes: an island in Seattle and the Arab Quarter in the old city, among others). We got back to Dublin and I settled back in my apartment while my parents checked into the Schoolhouse Hotel down the street. That night we went to a restaurant called Eden, which was fantastic, and at the end of dinner the Dublin Film Group (that’s not what they’re called) put on The Wizard of Oz on an outdoor screen right outside the restaurant. We ended up staying and watching the whole movie, which undoubtedly will never get old, even 100 years from now.

The next day I slept in while my parents went to the Guinness factory. I met them at the front gate of Trinity and we had lunch at Murdock’s, a fish and chips place in the Temple Bar area. After that we went to the Jameson distillery, and then back to Trinity to see the Book of Kells and the Long Library. Later that day I took them to my favorite alcohol store, where I bought my Dad’s birthday present in February, a bottle of whiskey called Clontarf that he thoroughly enjoyed. He bought another bottle of Clontarf and a second bottle of whiskey from the same distillery.

That night we took Brad out to dinner in a part of Dublin I had never been in before. It was only five minutes from my apartment, and I was shocked that I hadn’t seen it before, and wondered where else in Dublin I hadn’t been, thinking that I should have explored more since I only had a week left. Yet at the same time you can never fully explore any city, and I know for a fact that I am infinitely more knowledgeable about the layout of Dublin over the layout of Chicago. 

My parents left the next day, and took the majority of my luggage with them. We had a great time together exploring the country, and had many great conversations on the road. That was the longest time we ever consistently spent together in my whole life, and it was wonderful.