Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Arrived in Limerick at 11:10, and checked into the George’s Boutique Hotel.
The weather is fine, but Limerick is not a pretty city. Although they have a couple of rivers and some old buildings, they don’t make the best of them.
We headed down to the Shannon River and walked up to the Tourist Center. They suggested the castle and a couple museums.
We got ice cream and walked up to St. Mary’s Cathedral (built in the 12th century). It has the largest solid limestone altar in the British Isles. We noticed some features we hadn’t seen before. They had ornately carved stalls with hidden benches for the priests to rest on while they were supposedly standing, There was also leper slot. (Lepers couldn’t go in the church, but they could peak inside the slot and receive Communion through the slot.)
Then, we decided that we had just been through a castle the previous day so we would go to the Georgian House instead to view their 16 decorated rooms. It is on the opposite side of town from St. Mary’s, but no rain so the walk was nice.
However, the Georgian House is no longer open! They still display their pamphlets at the tourist office and train station???
By this time, it was too late to go back to the castle. We walked around a park for a while, then down to the docks. They weren’t loading anything on the ships so we just went back to the hotel.
What a waste of a day… We could have taken a later train from Dublin, but thought there’d be things to do in a city with a name such as Limerick.
We were having a beer in the hotel bar, when a man came up to us, having heard our American accents. He’d lived in NYC for a few years in the mid 80’s and wondered if we found the Irish difficult to understand. We told him we hadn’t had any problem at all understanding folks. He made reference to the Irish dropping the “h” from the “th” so that they say “nort”, instead of “‘north” and “sout”‘ instead of “south”, but we’ve become so accustomed to it that it’s starting to sound normal!
We’ll be back in the USA tomorrow, so this is “pinchontheroad” signing off from the British Isles. It was a great trip, and great fun to update this travel blog with our adventures!
pinchontheroad 