So apparently this is a bona fide heatwave for Ireland – 3+ days
getting up to 20-ish degrees. Many, many people have said they haven’t seen a
spell of weather this good literally for years. (I don’t know how Ireland is so
green, since it never seems to rain… hehehe. The only time I’ve used wipers in
the car was on intermittent for a short period on Sunday – well, ahem, that is apart
from the occasional lapse when I meant to turn the blinkers on.)
This morning we drove straight across Dublin, rather than
taking the ring road, as it was our only chance to see a bit of the city as we
left it. (Besides which, arriving into Dublin and on to the ring road last
night I was reminded of Auckland, hitting real traffic for the first time over
here, so decided it was best avoided.) Overriding impression driving through
was of the large number of buses on the roads. Other than that Dublin looks
like a nice city, and I’d like to come back and spend a bit of time here. I had
planned to swing by a couple of churches that the Bald family attended – a Catholic
church where some of the children were baptised in the 1830s, and a Church of
Ireland where William and 3rd wife Margaret McGreevy got married. (Yes,
the same Margaret McGreevy who was also married to William by the parish priest
in Islandeady (of the silent d), a couple of days later. It seems William was somewhat
adaptable in his choice of religious belief.) However we ran out of time to do
that, so settled for driving along Aungier St in central Dublin where
g-g-grandfather Charles (William’s eldest son) and his wife Harriet lived for a
time.
We detoured off the main highway for breakfast in Drogheda
(said “Dro-he-da”), where William
Bald worked on some harbour improvements. Unfortunately this was another town
where the layout and the parking defeated me, so we drove round in circles for
a bit (this will be a recurring theme, you’ll find) and ended up going through
the Maccas drivethrough (happily, this is not a recurring theme). We didn’t go
right into the centre of Drogheda, but from across the river (along a stretch
of road which we traversed no less than 4 times) it appears to be a very old
and attractive town which would be worthy of more exploration.
Once again from Dublin to Belfast the highway was fairly
featureless most of the way - apart from the odd amusing placename...e.g. in photo 3 above. The highlight of today’s road trip… I saw a
badger! Unfortunately it was dead on the roadside :’-( The second most exciting bit was crossing
back into Northern Ireland – got tricked by the change in speed measurements, drove
for a few minutes at 60 km/h (thinking gee, this is slow for a good road like
this) before I realised the units had changed to miles per hour, duh.
Finally when we got to about 80km from Belfast, hooray, some
landscape features! It sounds sort of inane to say it now, but the change was
really quite noticeable, to the extent that at the time I commented out loud
(to myself of course; Levi was buried in a book as usual).
We dropped the tractor car off at the airport, taxied
into the city and checked back in at the Premier Inn, then went and had a late
lunch with Chris and Gavin. They’ve been looking at the film, checking whether
there’s anything else they want from us before we leave the country, but they
said they’re happy with what they’ve got. Apparently all up they’ve got around
25 hours of footage that has to be edited down to 90 minutes (3x half hour
episodes), which they’re aiming to deliver to the BBC ready for broadcast by
the end of the northern summer. It sounds like that might be a bit optimistic though
– Gavin said he thinks they’d be doing pretty well to get it completed by
September. It’s highly unlikely to get broadcast in NZ, but they’ve promised
DVDs :-)
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