Travels With Jim and Rita
Discussing the challenges, rewards, and drawbacks of living overseas. Follow our decision to sell our home and live abroad until the housing market adjusts. Information for the would-be expat, digital nomad, roving retiree, or just plain traveler. Host Jim Santos is a published travel writer with over 200 articles and seven books (jimsantos.net). He and his wife Rita lived in Ecuador for 6 years, and are currently test-driving the roving retirement lifestyle. Jim is also the host of the popular "International Living Podcast".
Travels With Jim and Rita
Episode 55 - From Belfast to Roscommon: Castles, Coastlines, and Cultural Discoveries
When our flight touched down in Dublin, we had no idea our carefully planned 29-day Irish adventure would begin with financial shock. Our supposedly bargain $18-per-day rental car suddenly required mandatory insurance at €58 daily plus a €31 fee for crossing to Northern Ireland—ballooning our anticipated $522 cost to nearly $2,500. Welcome to Ireland, indeed!
Belfast greeted us with beautiful architecture at City Hall and Queen's University, but also with sobering reminders of The Troubles at every turn. The hop-on-hop-off tour highlighted bombing sites and memorials rather than typical tourist attractions, creating a somewhat melancholy atmosphere despite interesting spots like the Titanic Museum built near the shipyards where the ill-fated vessel was constructed.
As we ventured along the coast, we discovered that sometimes the most famous attractions aren't the most rewarding. The Giant's Causeway, though geologically fascinating, was overwhelmed with tourists even in early May and bitterly cold with whipping winds. Meanwhile, lesser-known Dunluce Castle offered dramatic clifftop ruins, Game of Thrones connections, and the luxury of space to explore without crowds.
Our counterclockwise journey around the island revealed Ireland's constantly shifting landscapes—from dramatic coastlines to rolling countryside, often changing every few miles. The Wild Atlantic Way provided breathtaking scenery, while small towns offered unexpected treasures. In Donegal, a beautifully preserved 15th-century castle gave us a genuine glimpse into medieval life with its thick stone walls and vaulted wooden ceilings.
Roscommon became our favorite Irish destination, with its fourteen-acre Loughnaneane Park featuring walking trails, wooden sculptures of Gaelic heroes, and castle ruins we could explore freely without entrance fees or formal oversight. Local pubs provided authentic connections with colorful characters, including a bartender who insisted the proper local pronunciation of "Mur-RAY" was actually "Murry," and claimed the other version was "posh."
The most profound aspect of our journey was encountering Ireland's painful history at every turn—castle fortifications built out of necessity, famine memorials in town squares, and exhibits describing the "coffin ships" that transported desperate emigrants to America. At Strokestown's Famine Museum, seeing my family name among those who fled or were forced onto ships hit home in ways I hadn't anticipated.
Despite these echoes of historical trauma, we were consistently moved by the warmth and resilience of the Irish people, their genuine hospitality, and their ability to acknowledge a painful past while embracing visitors with open arms. Our Irish adventure reminded us that travel isn't just about seeing beautiful places—it's about understanding the complex human stories that shape them.
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Welcome to Travels with Jim and Rita. I'm your host, jim Santos, along with my wife, rita. And welcome to the second season of our podcast. In the first season, we set in motion our crazy plan to outfox the real estate market in the US and actually increase our retirement nest egg by selling our home and car and spending the next three years or so living abroad and exploring the world. While we did manage to increase our net worth while we traveled, a bout of pancreatitis in Latvia caused us to return to the States for surgery and recovery and to rethink our plans in light of our ages and other factors. Enter Plan B. We now have a home base set up in eastern Tennessee and are ready to hit the road once again. Our plans are now to spend anywhere from six to nine months a year abroad, returning to the US to visit friends, family and to recharge. Join us now as the adventure continues.
Speaker 1:On Travels with Jim and Rita. Hello everybody and welcome back to our podcast, travels with Jim and Rita. Today, rita and I will be picking up where we left off, talking about our recent 10-week overseas trip. Now, you may recall, we had just completed our stay in Great Britain and were ready to take the short flight from Edinburgh to Dublin. Now, as I recall, we had some time to kill at the airport and thought we'd use our priority pass card to get a free meal in one of the lounges. Unfortunately, several hundred other travelers had the same idea, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it seems like all the European lounges are always super full.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just really busy. You have to leave your name and then they'll maybe call you if it comes up. But we still found a seat at a restaurant and I did manage to finally sample a Scottish whiskey just in time, just before we left.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because you didn't have to be driving.
Speaker 1:Right Now. The flight was no real problem, but I think we spent almost as much time waiting in a stairwell to board the plane as we did in the air.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know that was a strange boarding situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially since it's one of those. You just walk out and get on the plane.
Speaker 1:Right no seats called nothing, yeah, so I'm not sure why there was such a big deal about waiting for it. Nevertheless, we still made it to the Dublin airport. Our plan was to pick up our rental car from Avis, drive into Northern Ireland first. Our plan was to pick up our rental car from Avis, drive into Northern Ireland first, and then work our way over the next 29 days, kind of counterclockwise, around the island. Now we had reservations for a couple of nights in a Belfast hotel to start things off. We'd booked the car with Avis months earlier and I found I got a discount through our American Express card and only had to pay an unbelievable $18 a day.
Speaker 2:However.
Speaker 1:Which turned out to be a pretty comfortable VW Golf, actually Turned out also to be actually unbelievable. But that was one of the two nasty shocks we got in Ireland. At the Avis counter, the clerk asked me if I needed insurance. Now I told him no, because we have insurance through our MX card. If we use it to book, we have coverage for a flat rate of $25 for up to 42 consecutive days. So it's a pretty good deal.
Speaker 2:And we just used that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we just used that in Oxford and that was no problem, Right. In fact, when we rented that car in England, I didn't tell him this, but we actually filed a successful claim because I clipped that wing window wing mirror.
Speaker 1:So anyway, we knew we had the insurance, we knew it worked. But he insisted that in Ireland I had to have a written letter of insurance or else buy it from them at the low low price of 58 euros per day. Also, if you're crossing into Northern Ireland there's a one-time fee of 31 euros. So in other words, he was telling me our 29-day rental cost was going to jump from $522 to about $2,500.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally unexpected.
Speaker 1:Yeah, welcome to Ireland. I got my phone out and I went to the Amex site. I found the description of the insurance. I even showed him where they had just billed me $25 for the insurance, but he said that wasn't good enough. So after a lot of back and forth, he finally agreed that he would reduce the overall cost to about $1,800, still three times what we'd been quoted when I booked the car and told me that if I got a letter from Amex I could file for reimbursement when we returned the vehicle or at any Amex office or Avis office. Rather, and the worst part for me anyway, is that once we got to our hotel and I went to the Amex site to get the number to call about the insurance letter, I saw the details of our policy. Our insurance coverage is good anywhere in the world except for Australia, new Zealand, italy and Ireland.
Speaker 1:You guessed it Ireland. So I admit that was partly on me which stung a bit, but I did get the $25 insurance charge rebated at least.
Speaker 2:And it was a nicer car than we had in England. Yeah, the car was very comfortable, very nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you know, there it was again on the wrong side of a car driving. It was much nicer than one in Oxford, seemed easier to drive and fortunately the airport is outside of Dublin and it was pretty clearly marked how you could get out of there. It was fairly late at night too, so there wasn't a lot of traffic, so we were almost immediately on major roads and heading to Belfast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it didn't take an hour and a half maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it wasn't too bad. So we got to the hotel without incident and before we could get in the car again, I also found that the dash display, this time, was compatible with our iPhone via Bluetooth, so I was able to have maps and directions displayed for the rest of the trip, without trying to balance the phone on the steering column or have Rita hold it while I drove.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was kind of awkward when we were driving around in England.
Speaker 1:So that helped a lot. We were only in Belfast for three nights, but I have to say really that was plenty, don't you think?
Speaker 2:For us. Yeah, yeah, that was more than enough. I think we saw the gist of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we did a circuit on a hop-on, hop-off bus to get a pretty good overview, but frankly, I thought Belfast was actually a little depressing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I did. I thought the Belfast City Hall complex was beautiful and I thought the Queens University. Even though we didn't go into either complex. They were very, very ornate, very pretty. The rest of it just a.
Speaker 1:Well, it's just, you're taking this bus tour and instead of pointing out you know as they're pointing out these points of interest it was over. Here was the bomb that killed the seven martyrs.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, there's that.
Speaker 1:And this is where the freedom fighters were beaten to death by police. Yeah, yeah. And this is where the freedom fighters were beaten to death by police.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and this is where we locked people in at night at 830.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there were murals everywhere commemorating the dead, and you know, it was just a little depressing.
Speaker 2:It was.
Speaker 1:They had the beautiful Titanic Museum, since the Titanic was built in the Belfast shipyards.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:You could take Game of Thrones tours. We also stopped at the St George's Market. Always love to find the little markets and mercados, but this one really was not that special.
Speaker 2:Well, it's really tough to go from Lisbon's market down by the water, which is just super fabulous to go to. This was a mediocre market, but this was the capital.
Speaker 1:Area of Panama City is a San Dery market.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, yes yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there was some produce, some food, some seafood.
Speaker 2:No restaurants really. Yeah, not really restaurants, unless you stood up, just walk-up stuff, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a lot of kind of almost like flea market-like stuff.
Speaker 2:That's the way it was, yeah.
Speaker 1:Probably, overall, the nicest part of Belfast was a cute little Mexican restaurant. Oh yeah, that was sweet.
Speaker 2:It made you think you were in Panama or Ecuador or Buenos. Aires. It was nice.
Speaker 1:So probably by Sunday or Saturday morning rather, we were ready to move on. Our ultimate goal for the day was an Airbnb in a small village called Greysteel. It's about a half hour east of Derry, but first we're going to hit the biggest drawl in Northern Ireland, the Giant's Causeway. Now we had plenty of time, though, to get there, so on the way we stopped at a village called Antrim Just kind of picked it randomly because it was by a lake, lough Neagh, I think it was called. This is one of those one-plan stops. That is the best part of roaming, right.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. You never know what you're going to find.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we saw a sign that said Antrim House and Gardens so we pulled into that and there was a long drive through a wooded area. We had to pause at an intersection because they're having some kind of 4K run or something and people were just staggering by.
Speaker 2:It was a beautiful city park. I mean for the size of the town, it was magnificent really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there was no charge to park, no charge to enter the grounds.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:If we wanted to take a tour of I think it's called the Clotsworthy House.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:There would have been a tour for that. But of course we were just stopping to stretch our legs and see a little bit.
Speaker 2:We walked some trails and you could actually go across the highway into the main new center, new city center.
Speaker 1:There was a walking trail that took you into town and down by the lake and everything.
Speaker 2:It was very pretty.
Speaker 1:And it's mostly locals walking around there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there were no tourists, no, tourists.
Speaker 1:There were people who come there to jog or Everybody knew each other, I think Ladies with their babies pushing around on strollers, that kind of thing. So it was very pleasant. So after a nice walk around there, we saw the statues of the Queen and Prince Philip and her little corgis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that made my day since we had a corgi Commemorating a visit that the Queen had been there.
Speaker 1:So it was time to get back in the car and head back out to the causeway and I have to say by this time I was feeling much more comfortable with the car and the driving situation in general. It was starting to feel a little more natural.
Speaker 2:We made it to the causeway, and I don't know about you, rita, but all in all I thought the Giant's Causeway was one of those you know we ticked off that box moments, I think for us, if we would have hit there maybe the first thing in the morning or it was so crowded, so crowded and incredibly windy and cold. It was 40 degrees, but the wind chill was probably in the 20s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this was early May and it was still just crawling with tourists.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. Yes, buses everywhere.
Speaker 1:So you couldn't really get a good picture of the causeway Without ants crawling, people crawling all over it.
Speaker 2:Well worth it though.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I have to say we've hiked into a crater lake, we've hiked to the Inca Trail, we've seen stuff around the Appalachian Trail and around the Smokies and this was just basically a geological formation.
Speaker 2:That's what it was.
Speaker 1:It wasn't really.
Speaker 2:But it was something you've never seen before. Yeah, it was definitely unusual.
Speaker 1:But just saying I wouldn't make a trip to Ireland just to see the Giant's Causeway. No.
Speaker 2:No, and if I did, you might as well go in the dead of winter, because it's going to be colder than unbelievably cold, no matter when you go, and windy. We had on winter coats and layers underneath and wool hat and gloves. It was cold.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I have to say it also costs 15 pounds each.
Speaker 2:Right to freeze cold? Yeah, and I have to say it also costs 15 pounds each.
Speaker 1:Right To freeze yourself. Yeah, just to go down there and should warn you if you have any mobility issues. It's quite a long walk. It is Down there and it's steep, and it's fairly steep, yeah, and they do have little shuttle buses that take you back and forth yeah.
Speaker 1:You could do that to walk a fair amount there anyway. So we finished up. We're in the parking lot, asked the GPS for the closest lunch spot and it directed us to a place called the Bushmills Inn. I was just starting to drive like a local, I had no qualms about crossing the lane of oncoming traffic. To park front bumper to front bumper with another car, with two wheels up on the sidewalk.
Speaker 2:That kind of scared me to death, honestly. That's the way everybody parks.
Speaker 1:That's the way everybody parks, that's the way everybody does it, so why not? So I look like a local right, but it was a really nice lunch and the building was one of those. At one time a big manor house or something had been renovated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a hotel now and a wonderful restaurant. It was nice.
Speaker 1:And they are the makers of Bushmills whiskey. But unfortunately, as I was driving, could not sample any of their wares there. But it was a very pleasant little interlude there and it wasted enough time so that we could get to Greysteel to check into our first Airbnb in the daylight.
Speaker 1:This is our first one in Ireland. Very nice house actually. We had the entire house two bathrooms, two living rooms, full kitchen. We were surrounded by cows. We saw rabbits and foxes Just out in the countryside and up on a hill you could look out and see the bay in the distance. Sheep, sheep. Yeah, the only real issue and this came up often on our trip was the heating system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they time their heating systems so it's on a timer. You can't control it. It comes on and off at their whim and we realized we could override it. But you had to be up every hour to push it, to push the button to override it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the direction told us where there was an override button to give a 10-minute boost.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But I think you could only use it about once every hour. Yeah, that's the way it was, and I'm a night owl, so I was the booster. And again, this was early May, so it was getting into the forties. Yeah, overnight it was cold, but other than that it was very pleasant. It was beautiful surroundings.
Speaker 2:Lovely house yeah.
Speaker 1:It was one of these situations again, though, where we were about a mile and a half up a road that had two-way traffic and was barely wide enough for one car Right. But I think there was only one time we had to back into a driveway to let somebody go past.
Speaker 2:The milk truck. Yeah, let somebody go by.
Speaker 1:Of course, a big farm dog came out barking at us and chased us out.
Speaker 2:Biting our wheels, yeah.
Speaker 1:But anyway, we were in, we did a little shopping at a local store and had our stuff for breakfast, and during the course of our stay there we'd bring home some things to make our dinners also. So it was very pleasant.
Speaker 2:It was.
Speaker 1:The next day we took a day trip into Derry or Londonderry, if you want to get beaten up when we were lucky enough to hit a jazz festival.
Speaker 2:Well, that was interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Derry is a fairly interesting little town. There we managed to take a tour of the Guild Hall. Kind of reminded me of the House of the Blackheads.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was quite beautiful In Riga.
Speaker 1:So it was a beautiful building, an old building and they had displays that you could walk through, and this is where I really first started learning about the plantation system.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And basically why the Irish are not particularly fond of the English or the Scottish. Yeah, Basically, the English sent English and Scottish settlers over to just take over their land.
Speaker 2:And make them pay rent and make them pay rent for the benefit of farming their own land.
Speaker 1:So it was really pretty interesting and, again, minorly depressing, right? It's also the only city in Europe that has a continuous wall.
Speaker 2:That was amazing Around the city.
Speaker 1:The entire city is still walled, but when you took that little tour, you found out why it was walled.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:People don't build that for fun.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:But the town itself inside the wall is very walkable. Really enjoyed poking around there. We had a great lunch at a local pub with the ever-present football or rugby game going on in the background and even ran into a couple playing a fife and fiddle outside the Richmond Center.
Speaker 2:That was interesting and the travel visitor center was amazing, showed films.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, we saw some little dairy girl cut out.
Speaker 2:Right, we did. Of course we had to take a picture like tourists.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were leaning hard into the dairy girls. They had tours and cutouts and some murals around town for that.
Speaker 2:We loved that.
Speaker 1:So way home we stopped at Tesco again where every little helps and picked up some stuff for our dinner at home. Yeah, now we had no real plans for the next day, but we had seen two things on a map that I thought might be worth checking out. One was a small seaside town called Port Stewart and the other was a site called Dunluce Castle, and really that's all we knew about them was what it looked like on the map. Port Stewart was really a neat little town, beautiful, beautiful coastline, even had a couple of beaches. But unfortunately we couldn't hang around long because this sleepy little town was about to host a huge motorcycle race, monaco style, through the streets.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they were setting up stands along the streets. There were ESPN signs and banners, rvs and motorcycles pouring into town, so we decided we'd better leave.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really it was a sleepy little town If that wasn't going on. It's someplace that you would really like to go and just relax and enjoy the water.
Speaker 1:It's right on the water and yeah, we loved it Reminded me of Watkins Glen in New York, Upper State.
Speaker 2:New.
Speaker 1:York. It's a quiet little town, except when they had the Watkins Glen race.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Now. Dunluce Castle, on the other hand, was really a wonderful find Only seven euros each to get in and hardly any tourists. That was wonderful, I guess they were all either at the causeway or the motorcycle race.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So incredible scenery and fantastic ruins, and because there was hardly anybody there, you could get great pictures.
Speaker 2:Right Of things and just really enjoy it. I mean, they had pictograms of what the castle looked like and they had been restoring it. It was a great find.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's really easy to have like a self-tour of it to walk around, and the castle is built on two cliffs and the two sections are connected by a bridge.
Speaker 2:That was cool.
Speaker 1:It's amazing how much of it was still there. The coastline was just really was really beautiful, in fact. It was still there. The coastline was just really beautiful. In fact, it was used in the Game of Thrones as the background for the Iron Islands. Really enjoyed that more than the causeway, to tell the truth.
Speaker 2:I did too, because you didn't feel like you were being pushed or you had to hurry to take a nice shot. You could take your time and enjoy the whole landscape shot.
Speaker 1:You could take your time and enjoy the whole landscape, but soon though it was time to say goodbye to the cows and we left Greysteel, and indeed left Northern Ireland and the UK, heading back into Ireland. I'd like to mention that for all our time in the UK I guess around a month we never had to convert any cash to pounds.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:No, we managed to pay for everything with our phones, and I don't recall even taking out a credit card.
Speaker 2:No, we just did the click-click.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, we were on our way to an overnight at a hotel in Sligo, and of course we were planning a few stops along the way. But I remember thinking it odd that there was no sign at the border crossing when we went into Ireland.
Speaker 1:The only change was that suddenly all the highway signs were in English and Gaelic Right Now. We drove through a little town called Letterkenny. Really don't remember anything that we saw that made us want to stop, but we did have a great time stopping in Donegal, where we first picked up the Wild Atlantic Way. Donegal is not only a nice little town, but we were able to visit the Church of Ireland, and right across the street from that was the Donegal Castle, which was built in the late 15th century. Like most of the castles in Ireland, it had its share of fires, destruction and rebuilding over the centuries. In fact, the story is that the original owner, a guy named Red Hugh O'Donnell, burned the castle to the ground to prevent it from falling into British hands after the flight of the earls during the plantation of Ulster, something we read about in Derry, actually.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:It's one of those places that looked more of what you think when someone says castle.
Speaker 2:Exactly. The bottom floor was all rock and stone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean some of the castles we saw were just like well, like in Antrim, there was just one tower.
Speaker 2:Yeah, was all that was left, or?
Speaker 1:something, but this really looked like an actual castle. It was really pretty interesting. It had been restored for a while. It had wooden floors above the ground floor yeah, a lot of it was still intact. You had the really thick castle walls. You could see where the windows were cut out and even a few just really beautifully furnished rooms with vaulted wooden ceilings. It was really pretty impressive.
Speaker 2:It was.
Speaker 1:So after an enjoyable time in that castle, we had a nice little lunch downtown at a place called the Blueberry Tea Room and Restaurant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was sweet.
Speaker 1:Yep and walked down to the riverfront area and looked around a little bit there before getting back in the car and heading back to the Wild Atlantic Way. We also drove through Ballyshannon, one of the many bally's on our trip.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And then made another of those unplanned stops in a little town we later found out was named Bundoran. It's the last town in County Donegal before you cross into County Leitrim. All we saw when we entered town were some really charming-looking multicolored homes on one side and the sea on the other, and suddenly there was this convenient free parking lot on our right. So we thought what the heck? We pulled over there and and got out. We must spend an hour hour and a half yeah doing our beach, just walking up and down the coast there, listening to the waves crashing on the rocks and then the little uh crackling sound as they went back out to sea and pulled the rocks with them. It was really pleasant.
Speaker 2:They even had clean bathrooms yeah, public, they were public bathrooms, which were great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, apparently Charlie Chaplin used to visit that town, so there were a couple little murals and a little sign marking. You know, charlie Chaplin slept here. Now I think it was this area too. Rita thinks it was later on or on a different turn, but whatever, this kind of thing cropped up from time to time. There was some sort of ruined or historic landmark that was just off the main road. So we thought, well, we'll go see that. But we turned into it and it was one of those one-lane roads. This one was really one lane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like a cow path.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it was two-way traffic because we could see cars coming down the mountain towards us. And there's really no place to turn off or move or anything. We in fact tried to turn around in a gravel driveway because there was a car behind me, but I couldn't get up the gravel. The car kept slipping on the gravel and actually turned out that was the house the car was trying to turn into.
Speaker 2:Right, also a big truck yeah.
Speaker 1:But we did manage to, you know, get away from that, let the guy get into his driveway, and then I made like a six or seven point turn and finally got us turned around and then back out to the main road and we swore not to try that again.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:On this trip and really through all of Ireland and England, the landscape seems to change almost constantly. Every couple of miles it just looks completely different. And on the way to Sligo, the rest of the way we were basically curving around this large plateau that was over on our left and then the Atlantic over on our right.
Speaker 2:It was like a monolith with a plateau top. Yeah, it was really pretty dramatic, it was.
Speaker 1:I should mention that there are pictures of everything that we're talking about, too, on our website. If you go to jimsantosbookscom and look at travel photos, you'll find some of the island pictures there. Now we did make it to Sligo. It wasn't really a destination for us, something that we wanted to go to. It was just a convenient stopping point on our way to Roscommon.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So we didn't have to make one big drive in one day. But it was a nice little seaside town, had a protected harbor and a little river out to the sea.
Speaker 2:Right the address. The hotel had some weirdness to it hotel had some weirdness to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the parking, for instance, was a little odd. There wasn't any parking at the hotel per se, it was kind of around the corner, down the block and in an underground parking.
Speaker 2:Under another hotel. Yeah, another hotel. It's like okay.
Speaker 1:So we parked the car and came out and weren't really sure which direction our hotel was now, but we made it. It was a nice little place to walk around. We found a little pub, harganon Brothers. I had lamb stew, we had some kind of salad and a jar of stuff to spread on bread that we still haven't identified.
Speaker 2:That was cheese. I think it was some type of spreadable cheese.
Speaker 1:Sometimes a cheese-like thing, probably sheep-related.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that pub was very unusual. It had tiny rooms that were just like one table. We were in a bigger room.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's definitely a very old place.
Speaker 2:It was an old place, yeah, a lot of very strange wooden kind of hand-hewn furniture. Right yeah, what was the oldest pub in that region?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and of course they had Guinness, yeah, and I did get to sample some of their local whiskeys there, since the car was safely parked.
Speaker 2:Right right.
Speaker 1:So the next day we continued on toward Roscommon. We made a cool little detour that took advantage of having our own transportation. We were cruising down a pretty major highway and saw a sign that said something about a lake overlook. But we were a little too late to take the turn off. But just a kilometer or so down the road there was another sign for the lake itself, the Loft Key. So we decided to take that went down. This road Kind of reminded me of some places in West Virginia.
Speaker 2:Really it was very narrow. Yeah, like in Deliverance Right right, the vegetation was in, like you're driving through a tunnel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this road don't go to Atrie.
Speaker 2:No, down there.
Speaker 1:But we did make it down to the lake. There was a little parking lot down there and a boat ramp and a little small dock like a little kayak dock and everything. It was actually a very beautiful place.
Speaker 2:It was great for a fisherman.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we decided after we'd looked around a bit, we might as well drive back, since it was only a kilometer or so, and take a look at that overlook, and I'm really glad we did that. It wasn't only a terrific view of the countryside on one side and lake on the other, but there was this metal sculpture on the hilltop called the Gaelic Chieftain.
Speaker 2:It was incredibly well done, very beautiful.
Speaker 1:It was kind of a life-size, or slightly larger than life-size impressionist rendering of a chieftain on his horse looking out over the valley. Signs said it was inspired by the Battle of Curlew's fault in 1599. It was a really stunning piece of work and, again, if you check out the website, we've got several pictures of that. This is just really beautiful and we would have been completely unaware of that if we had been on a bus or something or heading toward Roscommon by any public transportation. So we did make one more stop, this time in Strokestown, so you could hopefully do a little family research. So tell us about that a bit, why you wanted to go to Ireland in the first place.
Speaker 2:Oh, my mother's side of the family. They were Marais and they originated around Stokestown and all the records I had been told were there in a national archive. I had been told were there in a national archive, but it's so regulated by the national church that that's how you have to get your information and of course, while we were there, even two days there, there was nobody in the church. So but I do have the contact to get that information and I'll do that someday.
Speaker 1:There was a little library there that you thought might have some information.
Speaker 2:Of course it was closed or didn't open until noon, or something like that.
Speaker 1:So while we were there, the parking lot we were in was right next to a big park area where the Famine Museum is. So we walked down there and looked around a little bit. We didn't really go into the museum, promised we'd go back and look at it some other time. But we came back and the library was open and we went in and just this sweetest little old lady- oh my gosh, she probably weighed 80 pounds.
Speaker 2:She was tiny.
Speaker 1:Yeah, real prototypical Irish accent too.
Speaker 2:Right, very friendly and gave us a lowdown on how you get your genealogy information, which was wonderful. She had some ideas. She knew that where it was housed would be expensive You'd have to pay them by the hour to look at what you wanted, etc. But she was a wealth of information.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a little one-room library.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Maybe 10 by 12 or something very small. And a family was waiting also for it to open came in with their little girl who was returning some books and picking up some more, and I think she liked that. We told her to go ahead and talk to the little girl.
Speaker 2:to help her out, check her books in and out.
Speaker 1:She checked her books and she talked to her about every book, about you know. Oh, this is a lovely book. I like this wee story.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We heard a lot of wees.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was really something I wished we'd have taken a film of, because she was magnificent with that little girl.
Speaker 1:So we promised ourselves we'd return sometime to see the museum, but drove on to Roscommon so we could check into the Abbey Hotel, which turned out to be a pretty cool place.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I loved it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it actually looks like a castle from the front. It has a spa attached, a little band area. There was some sort of concert going on that night that we were there, and it's named for the ruins of an old abbey that sits behind the hotel. It's a really very pleasant place. Good breakfast, but again a little cool in the room.
Speaker 2:Right yeah.
Speaker 1:And we did ask for help with the heating and the guy who brought us a wee heater was like the stereotypical drunk Irishman.
Speaker 2:I think that was an act though.
Speaker 1:If it was, it was a very good one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think he was trying not to bring us the heater and he did admit that the heating systems are on timers.
Speaker 1:If it was an act, he was the Irish Foster Brooks.
Speaker 2:Oh, he was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, but he brought us the wee heater and we were warm in our room. We were comfortable, it Definitely. But he brought us the wee heater and we were warm in our room Right, it was comfortable Right. It was a nice place. They had a nice breakfast, so we really enjoyed our time there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And in general just really liked Roscommon itself.
Speaker 2:Oh, I loved it and I loved the food at the Abbey. Even our dinners were excellent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the food at the Abbey was great. We did go to the Roscom and another fruitless search of their computer system.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:You didn't find any references.
Speaker 2:No, no, no she. And they said too that you had to get it from the genealogy service.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they sent us to another, to a clerk's office.
Speaker 2:They did.
Speaker 1:Which also was no help at all.
Speaker 2:No, they tried to send us to the exact location that I had for them of where my family lived. There was somebody there who was 90 years old, that I was supposed to talk to.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah, there was some guy that we could talk to. Oh, just stop by, he won't mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm like no, I don't think so. I don't think that would be the right thing to do.
Speaker 1:But it was on the way to a big park and a church there by the curate's house, which we actually got inside there. This time there weren't any funerals going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We were able to take a look at that, but what was really unexpected was this park and I know I'm pronouncing this wrong, but it's something like Loftananiyane Park. It was beautiful Loftananiyane Park, something like that it's a 14-acre park, walking trails, they have a dog park area. There's a lake like a wildlife area, some cool wooden sculptures around various Gaelic heroes, including Queen Maeve, who we'd find out about a little bit later. And, best of all, at one end of the park was the ruins of the Roscommon Castle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was nice.
Speaker 1:You know there's no fee for this park.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:No fee for the ruins, nobody even to ask about. No I mean it was just the castle ruins sitting there but there were guys doing some restoration. They're doing some restoration work, but no, no, like you know nobody in a park uniform or anything. So we're just free to walk around, explore this, the insides of the castle, and there's a pretty large area too it was, it was nice some shetland ponies outside that was.
Speaker 1:That was really an enjoyable morning. I really liked that. But as we walked through town then on our way back looking for a lunch spot, it was a little early. It was only about 11.30. And people eat a little bit later in most of Europe really.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 1:But Rita spotted a familiar name there.
Speaker 2:Oh yes, Thomas A Murray.
Speaker 1:Yep, stouts and Ales.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Found a bar there, Thought well, it's early, but maybe we can get lunch, or maybe we can have a drink a while and then get lunch as soon as they're ready to serve. But when we went in and asked the bartender do you serve food?
Speaker 2:He goes. Thank Jesus, no.
Speaker 1:We knew right away we were going to love this guy. Yeah, it was just him and a local sitting at the bar having a beer. What the heck we didn't want to be rude. We, what the heck? We didn't want to be rude. We sat down and had beers also.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he did tell me that my family name was not Murray. In his area it was Murray.
Speaker 1:That.
Speaker 2:Murray was posh, right? Everyone else says Murray. Murray was posh, yeah.
Speaker 1:But we had a good conversation with him, showed us pictures of his peat farm.
Speaker 2:Right, it was a great pub.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we really enjoyed it there, but afterwards we found some a nice lunch. There's some painted alleyways, pedestrian areas. We explored the abbey back behind of our hotel and actually cock-blocked a teen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was back there. He did Poor. Thing.
Speaker 1:But really just enjoyed Roscommon. It was a really beautiful place.
Speaker 2:You know one thing that I have to say. I noticed between Northern Ireland and Ireland the pubs. In Northern Ireland you had waiters that came to you. In Ireland you went to the bartender or the whoever and put in your order and paid for your meal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was kind of a mix.
Speaker 2:It was kind of a mix. I kind of like the Irish way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So our last full day in Roscommon we went out into the countryside around an area called Tullsk, which is known to have several ancient mounds and ring forts. Now, the first one we stopped at didn't really look like more than a little bumpy hill.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And you couldn't really walk on it or anything. It was a field with some cows in it and a little robot lawnmower.
Speaker 2:That was kind of cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but we did go through. The Heritage Center had some great displays, gave some history of the areas, a couple of videos, and that's where we got the story of Queen Maeve in more detail. Apparently somebody stole some cows from her and she read a bloody little war with hundreds of people to recover the cows. Apparently it was a big deal at the time.
Speaker 2:Must not make the lady mad.
Speaker 1:As we were leaving, the ticket seller told us that just up the road, a couple of kilometers, there was a place where we could park and walk up to one of the mounds and from there we'd be able to spot several more from that vantage point. So we did indeed find a little parking lot right where he said he would, and there's a sign welcoming us to Rathcroan burial place of the kings of Conalt, and it covers 518 hectares, which Alexa tells me is 1,280 acres, and has more than 20 ring forts, burial mounds and megalithic tombs, which sounds great, but all I saw was a field with a big hill on it and a whole bunch of sheep.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you had to make your way through the sheep to the top of the hill.
Speaker 1:Yep, we weren't sure we were really supposed to go in there, but there was an obvious little entrance gate that you could get through and the sheep couldn't, and we could see a sign or two going up the hill. So you know, we went ahead and joined the sheep. They kept an eye on us but they were pretty calm about it.
Speaker 2:They were pleasant.
Speaker 1:It really was a spectacular view up on top of that hill, but I didn't spot a single ring ford or megalithic to do, but we don't know what we're looking for. Yeah, but still it was great fun. We did see another person braving the sheep on our way down the hill.
Speaker 2:We didn't want to tell him that he couldn't see anything once he got up there.
Speaker 1:So we did decide to head back to Strokes Town, and this time we did take the time to tour the Famine Museum. They had grounds and gardens there that were really very lovely, and the museum certainly had a lot of information. But over and all again it was a pretty depressing visit, don't?
Speaker 2:you think it was, especially when I saw my family name in several areas talking about how they managed to leave or were put on ships.
Speaker 1:Yeah, basically that area was the start of a march from there to Dublin. A hundred miles, a hundred miles from there to Dublin to get on the boats, picturesquely called coffin ships.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:To take most of them, the ones that survived to the New World. Now the owner of that manor there started paying to ship people off to America because it was cheaper than trying to support them. And of course many died on those coffin ships. And, you know, some said he was trying to do his best for everyone but he was eventually killed by an assassin.
Speaker 2:Right, and actually I had read which I didn't know, that one of the Marais actually had tenant farmers of his own and he wasn't starving to death, but his tenant farmers were.
Speaker 1:Yeah there was a lot of resentment. There were some displays about that that the owners were living nicely and eating and everybody else was starving. So they all left together on that ship. When you visit Ireland, you really get to look at how much strife, invasions and disasters have really affected the people there, and the fact that they're so friendly with us was just a really stark contrast to things like famine, memorials and statues in just about every town. You know you don't build those castles for the fun, they're for protection.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:In fact, on our flight back to the US on Aer Lingus later I was watching some episodes of Dairy Girls and we'd seen it before, but it hits you differently after you've actually been there.
Speaker 2:Right, it does.
Speaker 1:There was one scene where they were all studying for a history test and their cousin from London was complaining about how complicated their history was, and one of the girls said well, if you lot weren't invading us every six fucking seconds, it'd be a lot simpler.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what do you think about all these reminders of their past?
Speaker 2:I thought it was incredibly sad, but every area has a history, but it was the fact that they never got a moment's hardly breath to take without being invading.
Speaker 1:And it's such a beautiful country too.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:That it's really heartbreaking to think about the population there. One of the stats in the museum said that in 1918, I think it was the Irish population in New York was greater than the population of Ireland.
Speaker 2:Well, there was supposedly 6 million immigrants that left. Yeah, and there's only 6 million people there now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it dropped to like 2 million, I think at one point I mean it's just, yeah, it's just, it was genocide, that's all it was. But all in all, Roscommon still was one of our favorite places.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I loved it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we had to bid a fond farewell and it was time to head back toward the coast and to County Galway, but that's going to have to wait for another episode. That's all for now. Thanks for listening, and remember that photos and videos of some of our travels can be found on our Instagram and YouTube sites, and more photos and blogs are on the website at jimsantosbookscom. You can also find all my books and audiobooks on Amazon at jimsantosnet, and all those links are, of course, in the show notes. Rita and I will also be in Portland, oregon, from August 29th to September 1st at the International Living Ultimate Go Overseas Boot Camp. We'll have a table in the exhibition hall to talk to attendees and I'll be giving three talks as part of the program. For more information or to sign up, go to internationallivingcom slash events or use the link in the show notes. Until next time, remember that we travel not to escape life, but so that life does not escape us.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
