Ireland Travel Skills Part 1

So good morning, everyone. Welcome, welcome, welcome to all of you here in person this morning. I appreciate you coming on a beautiful, sunny, and very rare sunny Seattle day. For those of you watching us streaming on Facebook right now, hello to you as well. Just wanted to mention first my name is Pat O'Connor and I co-write the Rick Steves Ireland travel guidebook. I'm actually flying over there tomorrow for two months.

So this is our guidebook here. I'll be over there leading a couple of tours and then doing the guidebook research for next year's 2013 edition. Just very quickly I wanted to mention that we have a great sale going today for 20% off on all of our merchandise and guidebooks. That's right around the corner down here at our Travel Center. For those of you in person and for those of you watching us streaming on Facebook that same sale is available to you as well at ricksteves.com.

And you just need to use a festival code--or code I should say, that is "festival" -- our promotional code, just the word "festival." So thanks very much. Rick and I sort of have a playful little debate about Ireland.

He always calls Ireland the "rainy Italy," and I can kind of see his point, you know. It's a place full of history, full of people who are in love with life and wear their emotions on their sleeves, and a beautiful place, but I prefer to think of Italy as a "dried-up Ireland," okay? Okay, we'll just kind of get our Irish pride going here at least for the next hour and a half or so. How many of you have Irish heritage?

Wow, most of you. How many of you have been to Ireland? Great, quite a few.

How many of you are planning a trip to Ireland? Yeah? Good, good.

How many of you wear green on st. Patrick's Day? Cool, okay, good, good. So we're all part of the same clan on St. Patrick's Day anyway. By the way, "clan" is an Irish word. We have lots of words in English that we've adopted from the Irish language. "Clan" is short for" Clannad" which means family, and so that terminology was transported across to the States, particularly into the Appalachians.

We refer to those clan feuds and so on. A lot of Irish and Scotch-Irish people settled in the Appalachians. So let's start our travels around Ireland here. When we're looking at the map of Ireland, it's about 300 miles north to south, maybe 150 miles east to west. What this means is that you're never more than 75 miles from the ocean.

And what that means is that you've got a very mild climate, right? It's rare to get a lot of snow in Ireland, even though when you're in Dublin you're as far north as Edmonton, Canada, and when you're up here on the northern coast, Donegal, you're as far north as Ketchikan, Alaska, on the panhandle up there. So it is pretty far north. Longest days of the year in late June, of course you'll have really long days there. We're looking at a map though that shows the four different provinces of Ireland -- the ancient provinces.

We've got Leinster, Munster, Connacht, and Ulster. Now, Ulster makes up nine counties and only six of those counties are part of Northern Ireland. We sometimes hear Northern Ireland called Ulster, and that's true, Northern Ireland is a subsection within Ulster, but Northern Ireland is also part of a different country -- the United Kingdom versus the Republic of Ireland there in the south. So let's start moving around here. I like to fly nonstop to Europe when I can, or at least I don't want to be stuck in between, if you catch my drift here.

Flying from here to Amsterdam non-stop, from here to London non-stop, from here to Paris non-stop, from here to Frankfurt non-stop, and then make a short connection. My thinking is, you know, I'd much rather be stuck either here at home if the flight is canceled or something, or stuck in Europe, but not stuck in Dallas or Chicago or Minneapolis or somewhere right along the way. So if you can book far enough in advance, you should be able to get some nonstop flights across over to Europe and then make a short hop over to Ireland. There are no non-stops from here in Seattle that go straight to Ireland. Now, if you are combining your travels with United Kingdom or Britain you can connect over to Ireland using the ferry system.

There are three different ferry ports that go across -- two from Wales and one from Scotland. It's about a three-hour crossing in between. But if all I was doing was tying London together with Ireland, I would fly it. You know, don't spend a whole day of your valuable time surface-travel getting it all the way across to the Welsh coast and then taking a three-hour boat ride from there across to Dublin. Just fly it unless you want to do some sightseeing in the rest of Britain.

Now the thing about Ireland is that it is the youngest per capita population in the EU, so about 40% of the population are under the age of 25. It's a very youthful population and a very vibrant population. Kind of a baby boom going on there right now. When we talk about traveling around Ireland, I'll kind of go through some of the nuts and bolts of traveling here first before we start looking at destinations in particular. When you're traveling around Ireland the trains are fine where they exist but the problem is that they don't serve the country as well as some of the other European countries. Basically a third of the people live in Dublin so all trains lead to Dublin and that means that if you're on the west coast you might not have the train service that you need in Ireland.

So as an example, if you're here in Tralee and you want to go to Galway, you've gotta ricochet across the country by train. So when you can't get there by train, you can augment that by bus instead, going across Ireland by bus. Now having said all of that, my favorite mode of transportation in Ireland is by car, and we'll be talking about that for sure. Here's a bus -- a few years ago I took a bus ride from Kenmare in County Kerry to Dingle in County Kerry. Took me four hours and I had to take two transfers.

I can drive that same thing in two hours. So if you're debating whether or not to go by car by train, just understand, you know, buses and trains are fine but they'll put you in slow motion compared to a car, and a car will get you to all the little nooks and crannies that you want to go to. This is actually myself back in 1981 on my very first trip to Europe and I am, believe it or not, reading Rick's very first edition of "Europe Through the Back Door." On a train, you know, you can sit there, you can read a book, write a postcard, take a nap, and you meet a lot of great locals, but again, the car gives you total freedom.

Now, at that same time in the summer of '81 that I was doing this, there was this long-haired hippy freak named Rick Steves out in the bogs, and he was out there writing his second edition of the book and I had no idea that years later the two of us would be able to team up on our Ireland book that I do every year now since 2002. Now in Ireland they use the euro. The euro at the moment is worth about $1.30 -- that's in Ireland, the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland they use the British Pound, which at the moment is worth about $1.60. So the Euro is almost ten years old now. It's not a big adjustment, it's pretty straight-forward.

These are the countries that use the euro. Actually, we need to update this because now Slovenia and Slovakia also use the euro. So you can pull money out of a ATM machine in Helsinki and spend it in Athens or Lisbon or Dublin.

But now look at the island of Ireland here and look at this little chunk up here -- that's Northern Ireland, and of course as I just mentioned they use the British Pound. ATM machines are the way to go for cash. The traveler's checks are really dying out, kind of a dinosaur, and slowly dying out. ATM machines are open 24 hours a day and you get a good bank exchange rate. The thing about an ATM machine, though, is that you'll get dinged with a fee every time you use it, so rather than use it every day and pull out a little bit of money, you know, maybe go twice a week and pull out a big chunk of money instead.

And do keep it safely tucked away in your money belt because, unfortunately, there are pickpockets even in mist-kissed Ireland. So yeah, wear a money belt, you'll be fine. Also, call your credit card company before you go, to make sure that they know where you're going, so that they don't freeze your card, thinking that a thief has taken it to Belfast or something.

Just a good idea to do that as well. There are some great little city buses that will drive around on tours, little tours around to the 15 or 20 main interesting spots in town. In the bigger towns -- this happens to be Galway -- right in front of the tourist information office. The tourist information office is a good resource for you guys for maps and for finding out about festivals, and if you ever really get in a pinch and you don't have a room, they can book your room as well, based on their database of approved lodging that meets certain standards. So, just know that that's kind of a fallback. In our guidebooks we have our very best options, but you always have the tourist information office as a fallback.

Now, for sightseeing, there's a fantastic card here called the Heritage Card. And this will get you into the 20, or, pardon me, the 80 or so most important castles and monuments and parks, and it will, you know, you just buy it once and you're good to go for all these government-owned castles and parks and gardens and mansions and so on. About 20 to 22 euros, as I recall, for one person, so if you're going to see half a dozen sights, this will pay for itself.

Plus, it'll save you from waiting in line. So you just buy it at any tourist information office, like the one we just saw in the previous picture. Or there's a second guide that can be useful, as well. There is no overlap on this pass, I should say (not guide).

This is the Heritage Island pamphlet -- similar-sounding. But this pamphlet covers privately-owned establishments like crystal factories or brewery tours or those types of things. This is best for couples because primarily what you're getting is "buy one, the other one goes in free." So if you're traveling alone it doesn't quite pay off as much.

If you're traveling alone, you'll get about a 10 or 20% discount instead, so it doesn't quite pay off when you're traveling alone unless you're doing a lot of sightseeing. But between the two-- the publicly-owned or I should say, the governmentally-owned sites here on this card and the privately-owned here -- this one cost about 7 euros. So for about 27, 28 euros, which is under $40, you've got all your sightseeing covered.

You buy both of these at the tourist information office in the first town you come to, and then you're good to go. Sometimes I just buy them right at Dublin Airport, right when I land, and just get it out of the way, and then I'm footloose and fancy-free. Now, for lodging, we try to find, every year, locally-owned, friendly, clean, good-value places to sleep in. And this happens to be one of my favorites in a little town called Trim.

This place has a story, because it is a former Victorian maternity hospital, of all things, and a really cozy little place. You know, we do list a few chain hotels but we're primarily not looking for those unless there's really not any options. We like to put you in touch with with the small merchants and the locals who are, you know, more representative of the culture that you've gone so far to see. So you can get a great room like this in a B&B for about 80 euros, roughly. 80 euros is maybe $110 -- that's two people in a room, so you're spending $55-60 per person, in the countryside, for a room like this -- en suite, with a bathroom.

If you're in Dublin, it'll cost you about a third more. Dublin's still a very expensive city. And you get to meet these wonderful people like Chrissie and Tom here in Kinsale -- couple of my favorite, favorite Irish people. They'll sit you down at their breakfast table in their kitchen, and they'll make you, you know, breakfast, and they chat with you and jokes and just, you know, good fellowship. I really love meeting people like this and I really advocate trying to stay locally as much as you can. Now, a breakfast in Ireland is something that's really hearty.

In some places in Europe you'll just get a roll and some yogurt and maybe a piece of fruit and some juice, coffee. In Ireland, you get a cooked breakfast, so you start with fruit and toast and juice, coffee, eggs, here we go, tomatoes, sausage, then this mysterious-looking object right here -- that is black pudding and black pudding is sausage made from pig's blood. So be aware of anything on your plate that looks like a hockey puck. It's an acquired taste.

Also, just to mention briefly, if you're traveling on a super-tight budget, there are hostels, we used to call them youth hostels, but really people of any age can stay in a hostel -- except in Bavaria, one state in Germany -- everywhere else you can be any age and stay in a hostel. And we list the best ones in our guidebooks in any town that we feel is is worthy of it. Now, driving, yes, they don't drive on the "wrong" side of the road, you guys, they drive on the "other" side of the road, okay? And, you know, an Irish road, it's really not my side of the road or your side of the road, it's just kind of a shared cooperative adventure. But you do get used to it, you do get used to driving on the other side of the road. But you can't be in a hurry, so that means you have to get an early start.

You have to have a good map. It helps to have a patient navigator next to you. I pull over frequently to let any faster local person scoot on by me. And it's, you know, you do get used to it. It is the best way to get around.

Now, keep in mind, first of all, that you can save about 30% by getting a stick-shift over an automatic. But you're sitting on the other side of the car with the stick- shift in your left hand, driving on the other side of the road. So, you know, at least the brake and gas and and clutch are all in the same place that you're used to. That's something to be thankful for. And the stick-shift, you know, the H pattern of a stick-shift, you know, first, second, and so on, that's the same, as well. So some things are the same but, you know, you do get used to it.

So, I just had to kind of give it to you straight there. Now, this is fun for me. I love driving down a little, tiny Irish lane. There are little pullouts here -- if another car came the other direction, whichever one of us came to this little pullout first would pull into the pullout and blink our lights and let the other guy go by. The Irish are generally courteous drivers -- it's we tourists who are fouling things up over there. Now, Irish roads are beautiful out in the countryside but you have to be a cautious driver because you never know what's going to be around the corner.

You got to be a careful driver because around the corner could be a tractor or a couple of pedestrians or maybe some of these guys, or a few of those guys, and even sometimes one of these guys. So you just really have to be a careful driver and take your time as you're getting around there. I figure I can average about one kilometer a minute in Ireland.

Here in the States, I figure I can average a mile an hour, right, or probably a mile a minute, not an hour, a mile a minute, you know, if I'm driving from here to Portland, what is it, 200 miles, you know, might take me, you know -- two and a half hours or something. In Ireland it's going to take you lots longer because the roads are narrower, they're building new roads, they're building some highways, but it's a slow process. So when you're looking at a map and you see a distance in kilometers about a kilometer per minute, which is about 40 miles an hour, on average in Ireland.

Now you do need a good map because when you're looking at a street sign like this in Ireland, you gotta have some patience. They are converting from miles to kilometers right now. So on this street sign, you'll see to Ballinadee, it's seven kilometers, but to Kinsale it's seven miles.

If you see "km," that's kilometers, if you see nothing, it's miles. So it's 39 kilometers to Cork but it's five kilometers to Kilbrittain, so, or five miles, rather, to Kilbrittain. So just kind of roll with it, you know.

You're over there experiencing another culture and, again, you'll get used to it. This is my brother Tim, and I took him to Ireland in 1995, and we rented a car, and we were in Dingle, and the brakes started to squeak, so we went into O'Connor Motor Company here, we're proud members of the O'Connor clan, and we said we'll get our brakes fixed here, and we slept great that night because we knew that if those brakes failed the next day, our kin would still get our business here. Keep it in the family no matter what, right? Okay, let's start traveling around the country. Dublin -- biggest city in Ireland, really the most important or the most visited site in Dublin has to be Trinity College because it has a wonderful illuminated manuscript called the Book of Kells.

Now, the lines in to see this can be quite long so you want to make sure that you find out the opening hours and either go early in the day or late in the day because midday, you could be standing outside for 45 minutes or something, waiting to get in. But this is one of the illuminated manuscripts of the Book of Kells -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- the scriptures copied down on calfskin vellum way back 1,200 years ago in a little island that's now part of Scotland, called Iona. And it was raided by the Vikings and they started massacring the monks and the monks fled with their precious manuscripts.

The Vikings, by the way, were raiding not because they were anti-Christian, but more that they were raiding for the plunder of the jeweled book covers, the golden chalices, the silver candle holders. And the monks just were massacred in between. So anyway, they moved to the center of Ireland -- these particular monks from Iona -- they went to Kells, and that's why we call it The Book of Kells.

And the library at Trinity Colleges is gorgeous. I believe one scene of one of the Harry Potter movies was filmed in this. It's just a lovely, lovely old structure. The Guinness brewery is a holy pilgrimage for some people.

When you walk into the lobby of the Guinness brewery, you're walking over this glass plate here, plexiglass, I should say. The original lease that Arthur Guinness signed is right here and you can see the terms -- it says this is the original 9,000-year lease signed by Arthur Guinness in 1759. 9,000 years at forty pounds a year -- a pretty good deal.

At the time he didn't know, you know, there were many breweries in town, he might have gone out of business. It was a risk for him, but he certainly made a success of it. And Guinness has this wonderful advertising campaign you've probably seen a lot of, they're sort of colorful cartoonish-looking ads all over the place, on the sides of pubs and so on.

To save some money, get a carvery lunch in a pub. Pub grub, comfort food -- not gourmet but filling and economical. In Dublin, the city is cut in half by the Liffey River -- the north side and the south side, we're standing on the south side here at the Halfpenny pedestrian bridge. And I was there on St. Patrick's Day in 2006 and it was just a zoo, it was lots and lots of fun. In the Temple Bar area of Dublin -- kind of the party zone -- lots and lots of fun, big crowds, lots of great people-watching.

The Dutch soccer team was in town and they were playing the Irish. This guy's about six-foot-eight, so nobody's going to argue with him but, his friend's looking at him, going "what were you thinking of?" Okay, now we're outside of Dublin, and if you're looking for a less expensive Dublin sleeping option, there's a couple of great ones that are only about 20 minutes out of town on the light rail Dart system. This is Dún Laoghaire, which is also the ferry port -- one of the three that goes over to Wales. Very quiet, nice little town made famous by James Joyce in the novel "Ulysses" -- starts in this round tower right here.

And then the other town on the north side is Howth, which is a fishing village. Again, quiet -- the rooms are about a third less in these two little suburbs than what you'll pay in Dublin. The trade-off is that you need to take a 20-minute light-rail ride, no connections, just straight in and out, real easy, and we write those up in the guidebook. Now, this is Dublin in the center of town on O'Connell Street Bridge.

And I'm going to show you this same view about, what, 96 years ago. What the heck's going on? Well, that would have been 1916 -- Easter Monday of 1916. Rebels in Ireland rose because they knew the British were tied up with World War I and distracted. And the rebels rose, tried to get a national revolution going while the British's backs were turned because Ireland was part of the United Kingdom at that time.

And the British came in with gunboats and troops and within a week they put down this rebellion -- the Easter uprising. But the rebel leaders were taken here to Kilmainham Gaol. If they'd just thrown them in in the clinker and thrown away the key, Irish history would have been completely different because these rebels were not, all of them were not well-thought of by Irish people whose town had been destroyed because of their uprising.

But when the 16 major leaders were executed, suddenly they were martyrs, and public opinion reversed about 180 degrees. And within half a dozen years, Ireland was on the road with limited autonomy from Britain, and by 1947 was a republic completely separate from Britain -- other than the six counties of the north, which chose to remain with the United Kingdom and we'll talk about them later. This is the the stone breakers yard where those rebel leaders were shot, so this is sacred ground to the Irish. And the closest thing I can think of in our own history would be to go to the Arizona Memorial or something like that in Honolulu.

The Irish feel super-strongly about this particular place because it's the birth of their modern Republic, after being under the thumb of the British for 750 years. These are the Irish leaders' names and you'll see it's written in Irish, the language of Irish first, and then in English second. The general post office is where the rebel leaders held out, kind of like an Alamo, for that week. And here's a statue of James Joyce looking across there, the famous novelist, looking up at the Irish flag, which is a tricolor of green, white and orange. Green representing the nationalist Catholic perspective, orange representing the unionist Protestant perspective, and white representing the hope for peace between them.

This was a gift from France to Irish rebels back in the 1840s and when Ireland finally got its independence they adopted it as their national flag. Trinity College, pardon me, Dublin Castle here is where the British turned over control of the country to the Irish in a ceremony right here in this courtyard. And the sad thing is that within a few months or less than a year, the Irish were at each other's throats over the terms of the treaty, and that's a very involved thing that I don't have time to get into now, but the first shots of the Irish Civil War were fired here at the Four Courts, which is their Supreme Court building. If you're trying to track your genealogy and having trouble tracking your genealogy in Ireland, part of the reason is because the public records office in this building went up in flames, and there were records and went way back to the 1200s -- precious documents that went up in flames during the Irish Civil War.

Irish sports are fantastic. This is Irish football, not soccer. You kick it past the goalie, you get three points; you kick it over the top, you get one point; and this guy can pick it up and run for three steps and then he can pass it to his buddies.

So it's not soccer. A little bit different. Each county has their own colors. The gentleman here in red is from County Cork -- that's Cork in the Irish language, his wife is from County Kerry -- that's Kerry in Irish. So this is a mixed marriage.

This is like a Husky marrying a Cougar or a Duck marrying a Beaver. Yeah, they have a truce on weekends, whenever their teams are playing each other. The kids from Kilkenny and their colors here. And this is my favorite game -- this is hurling. This is a 2,000-year-old game that the Celts used to play.

Very fast- moving game, very rough-and-tumble game. This guy here has just hit the ball, you can see it going out there, this guy's just trying to block it with it with his mallet there. Think about standing in front of, I don't know, Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds with a bat and trying to block their home run?

It can be pretty, pretty...a pretty rough game. Very exciting game, though. Oh, and horse racing and steeplechase are huge in Ireland. Steeplechase was actually invented in Ireland where there was a race between two steeples across a horizon down in County Cork. So let's start moving around the island. This is right out of our guidebook.

Each one of these little circles are towns where we list lodging, so we feel it's worthwhile to spend the night, if you have the time. And here we go. So Powerscourt Gardens are in County Wicklow -- just an easy hour's drive south of Dublin. Beautiful Renaissance, Italian Renaissance gardens here at Powerscourt. Glendalough is the, what am I trying to say, the monastery of Saint Kevin founded way back in the mid-500s. Also in County Wicklow, they call it the Garden County of Ireland.

You'll see these round towers in these monastic settlements, very historic monastic settlements, all across the country. There's between 80 and 90 of them in varying states of repair across the countryside. But you can figure that most of these towers are in the neighborhood of 1,000 years old. Kilkenny is our favorite interior town in Ireland. This is Kilkenny Castle, which is more of a palace now.

It's worth a visit if you are cutting through the interior. Cashel, though, is my favorite stop in the middle of Ireland. It's in County Tipperary.

St. Patrick himself visited here and last year the Queen of England visited here. This is the first time since the Republic was founded in 1922 that the Queen set foot in the Republic of Ireland. So it was a huge watershed moment.

And actually she was better received than anybody really would have expected. It was a real cathartic moment in Irish history, modern Irish history. If you're going to the Rock of Cashel, the crowds, again, are big in the middle of the day, so try and do it early in the morning or late in the afternoon to minimize the crowds. And you gotta bring extra film, memory for your camera. My tour members are always asking me halfway through the tour, you know, "where can I buy another memory chip?

I didn't bring enough memory," you know. Just do yourself a favor: think of how much film--it's not film any more--memory you want for your camera and now double it, because you're just going to be taking tons and tons of photos and you don't want to spend a bunch of your time trying to find a camera shop as you're traveling around. Waterford is actually an older town than Dublin. Dublin, Waterford, Limerick were all founded by the Vikings. The very first towns in Ireland were Viking settlements.

We know Waterford, though, for Waterford Crystal, which went out of business in 2008, and then it was bought up by American investors who've reopened a new Waterford Crystal that's even more accessible and more interesting to tour than the old one. So if you're into crystal, now you can walk down the assembly line and actually pick up the thing and talk to the guy and really get a feel for their craftsmanship. It's a smaller-scale thing because most of their production is done by cheaper labor across the world, but the really most important and most intricate creations that they do are still done here in Waterford. Now I love finding out about different characters in Irish history. This is my favorite character in Irish history -- just indulge me here for a minute or so -- this gentleman is named Thomas Francis Maher.

He was born in Waterford in the 1830s. He became an Irish rebel in the 1840s. As a young man -- he's the guy who went to France and brought back that first Irish flag, the tricolor, as a rebel. He survived the famine, he was in an uprising, he was caught, he was sentenced to death, but Queen Victoria commuted his sentence and banished him to Van Diemen's land, which is Tasmania today, off the coast of Australia. He was there for three years, he got in a rowboat and escaped, got out in the shipping lanes, and an American whaling ship picked him up, got him to the state of New York, in New York he started a newspaper, he became wealthy, he went down to Central America and started jaguar-hunting and looking at the possibility of maybe creating what later became the Panama Canal, then he heard the Civil War might start, so he ran back up to New York, he became a general and founded the fighting 69th Union regiment that fought on the bloodiest day of the Civil War, which was Antietam. In September of 1862, had his horse shot out from underneath him, survives the war, after the war he becomes the first territorial governor of Montana, ten years before Little Bighorn, and now he's about my age.

I'm out of breath just talking about him. What happens to him? Well, he's on a riverboat in the Missouri River, falls overboard and drowns.

And his body was never found. So somebody's got to make a movie about this guy, he was everywhere. And if you've ever been to the state capitol in Montana, I always forget, Missoula or Helena? Helena, thank you.

There's a statue of Thomas Francis Maher right there in front of the capitol building. But nobody knows where his body went. So Irish history starts with these stone circles, just the same vintage as Stonehenge, but much more accessible, and much more intimate. You can't walk up and touch Stonehenge very easily, but you can these stone circles in Ireland. There's over 200 of them spread across Ireland.

And then from people-early man went from Stone Age, Stone Age tools to the Bronze Age, where they began smelting tin and copper to make bronze. And they were able to create axe heads, and then they figured out how to make iron, and you know, the ages progressed technologically. So about, oh, a thousand years before Christ, this would this would have been the way Irish people were living. Now, about the time of Christ, in the Iron Age, if you were a wealthy Irish chieftain, you would build a fort out in a swamp like this, and your wealth was measured by how many cattle you had, how much land you had, and also how many slaves you had, because this is a slave trading economy.

And St. Patrick himself was a kidnapped slave, kidnapped from the coast of Britain -- they think, maybe Scotland, they're not 100% sure -- and brought to Ireland for six years where he kind of found God and eventually escaped again, and then had another vision that he should become a member of the clergy and come back and convert the Irish. He was not the first Christian missionary to Ireland but he was the most successful and of course the most famous. So when Christianity came to Ireland, it wasn't really at the point of a sword, it was through the persuasive powers of people like St. Patrick.

Ireland is unique, perhaps, in Western European history in many ways, for being converted to Christianity not with a crusade and not with the Inquisition or anything like that, but rather with the persuasive powers of the early missionaries who would take nature and help to explain to the pagans, for example, the Trinity: three and one, right? The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost -- three and one. They take a shamrock -- three petals on one stem -- and they would explain the Trinity to the pagans, you know, people that way, and make it more palatable to them.

Anyway, that's why the shamrock is one of the national, one of the symbols, I should say, most associated with Ireland. Now in the 800s, here came the Vikings. We already talked a little bit about them raiding, and after a few years, instead of just raiding, they set up camps so they could trade with the Irish, and you know, rob them on a more regular basis.

And those Vikings became the Normans within a couple hundred years, the Normans, the men of the north, the Norseman, who had settled on the coast of France and Normandy and came across at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, took over Britain, and about a hundred years later in 1169, came over at the invitation of a couple of Irish chieftains as sort of a military muscle in the 1160s, and stayed, and became eventually what evolved into the British aristocracy, or the English aristocracy in Ireland. When they landed on this beach, the Normans -- this beach is called Baginbun -- and there's an old Irish saying that goes "on the beach at Baginbun, Ireland was lost and won." Lost to the Irish and won to the English- by the English for the next 700 years.

Now, there's a little lighthouse, actually a big lighthouse, that was built by the Normans and it still stands. It's a modern lighthouse today with a modern light on the top. But when Oliver Cromwell came through with his British troops in a "scorched earth" policy to take over Ireland in the 1640s, he looked at Waterford, a very strategic town, and he said, he looked at the map and he said "I can either go through Hook Head by that lighthouse, or I can go through the little town of Crook on the other side of the bay.

I'm going to take Waterford by Hook or by Crook." That's where we get that. Oliver Cromwell -- kind of the boogeyman of Irish history. And then there was the 1798 uprising with the pikemen who tried to rise up against the Redcoats, but the Redcoats had already lost the 13 colonies and were battle-hardened and were not going to give up Ireland. Ireland to the British was like Cuba to us in the 1960s.

If you were trying to get at the British, let's say you were a French or Spanish monarch who shared their Catholic faith with the Irish, they said "well, we'll get at the British the back way through Ireland." So the British were not going to let that happen, they weren't going to let Ireland fall, and they put down this rebellion in 1798. 30,000 people died in six weeks in this rebellion. The bloodiest Irish rebellion. In the 1840s, 1830s, the Irish were looked at in a very sort of bigoted way, as subhuman in many ways -- this is a cartoon out of an English newspaper of the time -- and when they came across to the states, they were portrayed very ape-like as well; very, you know, uncomplimentary ways. They were given the most basic labor jobs: washerwomen or ditch-diggers and so on.

But eventually the Irish, the first mass migration of a European country, there are many other proud nationalities that came soon after: Italians and Germans and Poles and so on, but the Irish for the first major influx of immigration into the States. They made their names by helping to build the Transcontinental railway, they helped to build the Erie Canal, they helped to build some of the first skyscrapers in Chicago, they fought bravely on both sides of the Civil War, and eventually we had our first Irish Catholic president. He was not our first Irish president -- there were about eleven other Irish presidents before him -- but they were Scotch Irish from up in Ulster, or at least their heritage was from up north, and JFK was the first Irish Catholic president. So if your heritage is Irish, chances are good that your people got on a boat in this town. It's called Cobh, C-O-B-H. And that was a main port of emigration, it was also the last stop of the Titanic.

In those days, the town was called Queenstown. It was renamed Cobh after the Irish got their independence. By the way, you guys, at 7:45 tonight, if you start feeling a little chilly, 7:45 tonight will be the 100th anniversary of the striking of that iceberg.

The ship sank on April 15th of 1912. And then three years later the Lusitania sinks right off the coast of County Cork, torpedoed by a World War I German U-boat. So lots of interesting maritime history here on the coast of County Cork. Our favorite town is Kinsale in that region. Beautiful little town, wonderfully painted. They have a contest called the Tidy Town contest and Kinsale has won that more than once.

Has a wonderful star-shaped fort that the British built to try and protect this strategic harbor from invasion by either the Spanish or the French. Great walking tour guides like this gentleman named Don Herlihy who will tell you all about the local history. And again, we write this up in our guidebook. Blarney Castle is nearby.

Blarney Castle, if you want to kiss the Blarney Stone up near the city of Cork, you've got to climb up into the tower here, and right up here on this parapet, eight floors up, you got to lean over backwards and these bars will keep you from falling through, but you gotta kiss the stone which supposedly will give you the gift of gab, or the cold of the people who've kissed it before you. You got to have a good back to do that. The Ring of Kerry is beautiful, but we like Kenmare much more than Killarney for a town to launch from. Here's the town of Kenmare. It's located right here on the Ring of Kerry, about a 130-mile loop.

Killarney is over here. So we come from Kinsale way over here. We come through Muckross and visit the mansion there, go over Moll's Gap, and we get that part of the Ring of Kerry done on our entry day, spend the night here, get up early, and we drive this way around the Ring of Kerry.

The convoy of buses we'll be going this way around the Ring of Kerry, so we don't want to be going this way because then your lasting memory of the entire trip will be the license-plate number of the giant bus blocking your view. So we prefer to go the other way around, which is the way the locals do. Now, eventually that convoy is going to meet you, but what you do is you go out on this little Skellig Ring road, which is too narrow for the buses. The buses go this way, you have lunch and enjoy the views, and then you continue on like that. So that's the way we like to do it.

Here's Staigue Ringfort, which is one of the Iron Age ringforts you can visit out on the Ring of Kerry. Here's passing one of the coaches. Now, they widen the road every single year. I've been back to this same exact spot and this- they've dynamited out, the rock on the right, and it's a wider road now. So the horror stories that you heard from relatives trying to drive this 30 or 40 years ago is outdated. It's really become much easier to drive.

And now here's the Skellig Ring Road. Now, a coach could never drive this. But you can in your car, to get away from the crowds. Looking off the Skellig, or the coast here, you're looking out at the two Skellig rocks. The most magical thing I've ever done in Ireland is to take a boat trip out there. I've been out there a couple of times.

45-minute boat ride out there, the boats will not go if the seas are rough, and they'll know right from shore whether or not to go or not, so you don't go halfway out and then turn around and come back. So let's go out there for a few minutes. Taking a boat right out to Skellig Michael, named after the Archangel Michael.

The monks built these little beehive huts right up here on the summit and they lived out there from the mid-500s until the early 1100s, living off nothing but birds' eggs and rainwater and fish. A dark, damp, devoted, you know, life, trying to get away from all the temptations of the big cities, you know. Or at least, any city or any town. So they lived out here on these rocks, and they built these stairs -- 600 vertical feet of stairs, no escalator, no railings, no coffee shop, no bathrooms, no nothing out there except for fantastic atmosphere and beautiful scenery.

So you start climbing up these stairs that the monks built, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and you've got puffins all around you. If you're there from mid-April until about the first couple weeks of August, you'll see puffins. And I didn't use a zoom lens on this. This is about, this puffin was maybe 10 or 15 feet away from me. So you're climbing up the stairs and you're puffin', too. They're puffin, everybody's puffin out here.

A little more puffin', and eventually you get to the top and there is a ranger up there who spends the summer, and will explain these amazing stories of the monks who lived up in this area way off on what was then the edge of the known world. They didn't know about the North and South America -- this was the edge of the world as far away from civilization as they could get. There are the graves of the monks right here and a 600-foot drop right over the edge, right there. Here's the trail. You know, you just got to have good footwear, keep your eyes open, you know. The Irish don't, you know, usually build railings, they take us all to be adults and be, you know, able to sort of watch out for ourselves and just walk carefully.

So now we're back on the mainland and Killarney National Park is a beautiful national park along the way. Heading north, here's Muckross House on the way as well. A nice mansion to visit in the Killarney National Park area.

There's a full park here with thatched houses and so on. Definitely worth visiting. And the reconstruction of the original houses here, you learn that in the old days, people were taxed by how big their windows were, because glass was a luxury.

So in order to avoid taxes, you'd build a tiny little window. And the Irish called that daylight robbery. So that's a another thing that we get from the Irish. Dingle is our favorite town on the west coast, a beautiful little fishing village.

And you can visit Fungie the dolphin, who has adopted this bay in Dingle harbor. You can take boat cruises out there to visit him. They're nuts about Fungie in Dingle. This is the loop that we like. This is the Slea Head loop around the tip of the Dingle Peninsula. And you get great, great, great scenery like this out on the tip of the Slea Head Peninsula.

Again, you can only do this by car. Rugged, rugged scenery out there. And this is the westernmost point in Europe, Slea Head itself. Now I took this picture in early August with one of my tour groups and I came back to the same viewpoint two weeks later in mid-August. You can't out-guess Irish weather, you just can't. It could be like this, or it could be like this -- you never know.

This is both August, alright. Oscar Wilde, the famous author, said "there's no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing." Okay, so if you're a sun worshipper, you know, Ireland's a gamble. Gallarus Oratory, an early Christian oratory, almost 1,100 years old, beautifully constructed with no mortar, those stones are just stacked on top of themselves.

I love Irish pubs, they're the public living room of the people. Sometimes they're, you know, little communal houses like this out in the countryside. Sometimes they're romantic little places like this one in Kinsale, the Spaniard Pub in Kinsale. Sometimes they're very quiet and introspective, and sometimes they're kind of steamy and conversational and kind of loud and boisterous, but the thing I love most about Irish pubs, beyond the beer, is the music -- wonderful Irish traditional music in these pubs. The musicians show up just for the love of the music, they're not getting big money for being here, they just know that on Thursday night O'Flaherty's is the right place to play with their friends. And they also do church concerts in Dingle, so you can hear the same musicians in the pubs who you will hear later in the pubs, you can hear earlier in the church in a more sort of serene setting.

The Uilleann pipes are an Irish bagpipe. It has double the number of, has two octaves instead of one, unlike the Scottish bagpipe, and it's a very complicated thing to play. He has fingering here that's like a flute, but he's also hitting with his heel these different drones on this here, he's got one bag under one arm to keep the air going, and another bag on the other side like a bellows to pull it in, he's got five or six things he's doing with two arms, and in order to keep this thing in his lap, he's like wrestling with an octopus, he's got this thing in his lap, he's got a seat belt or a little belt to kind of hook it on to, and he's got two bags on either side. These guys joke that it's the safest instrument in the world to play because you got a seat belt and two air bags. Blasket Island, the great Blasket Island is off the tip of the Dingle Peninsula.

A wonderful hiking area if you've got the time, and nice weather. You'll see these round circles in different parts of the Irish countryside. These are old raths or ringforts that were built, again, roughly the time of Christ, in most cases for the Iron Age, to keep their cattle safe from other clan rustlers who would want to steal their cattle during times of war. You can walk around on the edges of these ringforts. And there was an Irish folklorist who said, you know, these were built by the little people, the fairies, the little people, and it was bad luck to pull any stones away from the ringforts. They say the Kennedy family has had such a tragic, you know, series of generations because someone on their County Wexford farm must have taken a stone from the ringfort.

Bad luck, right? Superstition. Well, anyway, they asked this woman "do you believe in fairies" and she thought for a second and she said "no, but they're there anyway." Irish logic. Cliffs of Moher, 700-foot tall cliffs right on the coast of County Clare. Look at these people walking right up at the edge, I can barely even watch.

They don't build fences, the Irish just believe in natural selection. There's a wonderful little holy well nearby, Bridget, St. Bridget's Well. You can walk right in there and see all these wonderful artifacts that were left behind by people who are making offerings to the Virgin Mary. The Burren is a national park in Ireland, there in County Clare.

"Rocky, stony place" -- that's what the word "burren" means in Irish. Here's an ancient dolmen burial mound structure, the mound around it has been weathered away but the interior superstructure of it still remains. The cremated remains of the royalty would have been put inside this way back, 3-, 4-, 3,500 to 4,000 years ago. Great castles all across Ireland. One of my favorites is here, it's Dungaire Castle, where you can do a castle banquet, the waiters and waitresses sing songs and tell jokes, and then, you know, serve your meals in between each song or each course. But really it's the people that you meet in Ireland.

I was talking to this guy, he was out in the Burren, he was leaning against a stone wall. I know this sounds like a cliché, but I looked out there at that rocky ground, and I wondered what it'd be like to live here, and I said to him "have you lived here all your life?" and he looked me right in the eye and he said "not yet." Okay, so we've come around the southern part here, we're in Galway now, and we're going to go across the north, but let's spend a few minutes in Galway and the Aran Islands in Connemara on our way north.

Galway is a college town, a university town, a youthful, vibrant town, so it's a good base for the west. Now, to get out to the Aran Islands, you can fly out, I've done that many times. But normally, flying in, you get some great views of the three Aran Islands, coming in.

I like Inishmore, the largest of the three, most. But if you go in by boat, which is fine -- it's about a 45-minute boat ride versus a 10-minute flight -- the boats are subject to tide, so once you dock at 10:00 in the morning, you're there until 5 or 6, 4 or 5, actually, in the evening, before the tide comes back in. This is where the Irish language is spoken most prevalently, out on the Aran Islands. They'll speak English to you and me but they speak Irish to each other.

This is where you find the thatched hut culture that we see so much in the postcards, and that's unfortunately dying away, but you can still find it out here. This is where the Aran sweater comes from. Just remember to get your VAT tax form if you're buying crystal or sweaters or something expensive like that, so that you can get a refund on the 20% tax that you'll be paying. A European is stuck with that, they can't do anything about it, but you guys can, you know, get a refund of about 20%, that VAT tax, by following the instructions we have in our guidebook and so on for getting that refund. Really slow out on the Aran Islands, really relaxing. You'll make friends beside the road like this guy.

You can compare dental work if you want. But the way you get around on the island is by minivan. If it's raining, I get in a minivan. These guys are waiting right on the dock, you know, they're hawking their wares, so to speak, and they'll drive you around the island for five or six hours for about 10 euros. You get eight or ten people in there and it's a good deal. You can also get a little pony cart, a driver to drive around on the island if the weather is good.

It's slower and it's twice as expensive, but it's very romantic and relaxing. Or you can rent a bike and get around this way if you want. They're relatively flat and easy to get around. You got to worry about bandits along the road, though. These guys will charge you a toll, trying to get through past their corner here.

The main site, though, is Dun Aengus, this Iron-Age ringfort, right on a cliff, up there on Inishmore, 2,000 year-old ringfort, with these concentric ring walls, and then you look out here and you see these, like, tanks' teeth sticking out. These are man-made defensive structures, rocks that they carried with a ton of labor, like this. So if you're charging that fort, you gotta tiptoe through these things, and by the time you get close to the walls, they'll have picked you off. So it was a lot of labor, but it certainly made them very well-fortified 2,000 years ago with the weaponry that was available at that time. You have wonderful little currach boats, very maneuverable little boats that the Irish would fish from.

Very light and easy to carry but also very fragile. If they took a goat ashore or a sheep, they would have to lay the sheep or the goat on his back and tie all of its legs together so that it wouldn't kick a hole through the canvas and sink the boat. The rough-and-tumble, hardy people of the Aran Islands, you can just read it on their faces, the no-nonsense, tough, and, you know, life that they lead out there. They literally, in the old days, had to manufacture dirt, because it was only rock.

So they had to get sand and seaweed and animal dung and just start scraping it together to have a little plot of land to grow some vegetables in, and to have a more varied diet. So a really hardscrabble life the people have lived out there. This little young lady, I met her in 1981 on my first trip, and I was just a kid with a bicycle, right out of college. She was so cute, I stopped and I said "can I take your picture?" She said "ok," I snapped this picture and I pedaled away. And whenever I'd show my pictures to my friends or relatives, they would see this picture and they just thought she was really cute.

So when I went back over there with my brother Tim in 1995, he said -- great suggestion, Tim -- he said "bring along a little photograph of her, see if you can find her." So I did. And Tim and I are having our lunch in this little cafe before we start bicycling around, and I walk up to the cash register at this cafe, the only crossroads in town, the only cafe, practically, on the island, paid the bill, and then I pull out this picture and I say "you know, I was here 14 years ago, you have any idea who this little girl is?" and they look at the picture and they said "sure, that's Suzy Gill," and I went "oh cool, can you tell me where she is? I'd love to just show her the picture," and they said "yeah sure, she's in the back cooking, we'll bring her out."

True story, true story. So she didn't remember me from Adam, but when she looked at the picture, she remembered her red galoshes, her little kitten, and she recognized her brother there in the back. So my whole point is, just reach out to the Irish. You just never know what sort of magical, you know, magical interactions you'll have. Last time I talked to Susie, she sent me a postcard from Australia, she was headed for Boston.

I know that sounds like another cliche for the Irish, but she's out there, and the Irish diaspora, you know, moving around. Suzie Gill. Okay, we're back on the mainland moving north up through Connemara, beautiful countryside in Connemara, moving north up the west coast, some of the greenest "40 shades of green," you've probably heard that cliche about Ireland, really is true out here in Connemara. This was the cover shot on our guidebook here a few years ago, one of my favorite little areas of Ireland, Connemara. Beautiful lush vegetation out here -- this is in May, when the rhododendrons are blossoming, the fuchsia start coming out in June, you get the Irish Rose coming out roughly midsummer or a little bit earlier, you get heather, you know, all the way through the summer, the foxglove is growing, as well, in mid and late summer, and my favorite, you can't quite see it here, but this is orange flower here is called montbretia, and that grows lushly in August. So some great wonderful flowers out there across the Irish countryside, but you'll also see signs like this.

There are many famine graveyards all across Ireland. Just a quick little history thing here -- in 1800, there were four million Irish in Ireland. In 1900, there were roughly four million Irish, but in the middle of that century, in 1845, there were eight million Irish.

There was a huge population boom because of the potato, you could live off potatoes and buttermilk, you had enough vitamin C and vitamin A to survive, so peasants would grow potatoes in this rocky wet ground and, you know, survive off that. But when a fungus started to kill the potatoes for four years in a row in the late 1840s, a million people died, and another million and a half emigrated, and after that time, only the male, one eldest male got the land and any other male had no choice other than to join the clergy or to emigrate. So with just one male staying home, the population started to go down again. So I think Ireland is unique in history as well as being the only nation to double its population and cut it in half in a hundred-year span and it wasn't by warfare, it was by dependence on the potato.

So here's a healthy potato field, and here is a ghostly remnant of an old potato field from the famine. They call these "lazy beds." And I'm out here in the middle of nowhere, and I'm realizing that in the old days, Ireland was much more densely populated and people were living way up these slopes, and you can still see where they were living from the scars of the lazy beds from 150 years ago.

And of course they commemorate that with a variety of memorials across the country. Okay, let's get off that heavy subject. A friend of mine calls a pint of Guinness the "tall blonde in the black dress." There is a subculture in Ireland called "travelers." We used to call them "tinkers" but that's derogatory now, politically incorrect.

You call them "travelers." 30,000 of them living nomadically across Ireland. Sometimes they're called gypsies but they're not ethnically gypsies at all -- they're as Irish as Irish can be. They were displaced during the famine and displaced during the Cromwellian wars and just adopted a nomadic lifestyle, and they live in these little trailers that they move around every so often from halting sight to halting site.

Travelers. And then out in the West and in the center of Ireland you have these bogs where they literally cut peat or turf out of the bogs, they let it dry, and then they burn it like Presto Logs in their fireplace, which would have been all you would've needed to grow your potatoes as a peasant -- go to the bog, cut some turf, let it dry, and then you can boil the water to boil your potatoes. The Irish, by the way, the Irish peasants would have one long thumbnail and that was to peel the potato, because they were too poor for silverware -- dirt-poor, literally. Out in the bogs you can still see these plants called sundew, they're carnivorous plants like a Venus flytrap, because the bogs don't have enough nutrients in the soil, so the plants have to get their nutrients from other places. Here's one of my tour groups -- we're out in front of Kylemore Abbey.

Our tour groups are usually roughly 25 people in a group. This is our whole tour itinerary, all across Western Europe. Here's Ireland up here. Our Ireland tour spends a couple nights in Dublin, two in Kinsale, three in Dingle, two in Galway, with a trip out to the Aran Islands, one in Westport, two up in Portrush, and one back in Dublin. So that's our best two-week itinerary. By the way, if you don't want to take one of our tours, we have a consulting service as well, which you can do in person or by phone, and we can help you plan an independent trip if you prefer not to do a tour.