A week in Ireland, Day 1

The first day, well the first day wasn't really the first day for those of us who were starting the trip from London. We had already caught the bus from London Victoria at some silly time in the morning on sunday and spent 12 hours travelling via road and sea to Dublin in order to begin our adventure.

So day 1, the journey from Dublin to Derry in the north. Once everyone who was staying at the paddywagon hostel overnight had been sorted into their separate tour buses we set off with a small drive around Dublin before leaving the city. We had a look at one of the worlds only completly square bridges where there was a camera continuously feeding images to a website so you could call someone overseas and they could actually watch you through a website while you spoke to them, too bad we didn't stop there though. The next stop was a national park which had a whole bunch of deer and a really big cross were the pope offered mass to over 1 and a half million people in 1979 so it was quite a big grassed area, would have been a sight to see.

Now moving out of the city we popped into an old style graveyard where there were some really old towers that monks used to live in and also doubled as a defensive position during war. Here's an example of some of the crosses that the monks used to worship around. On some of them you can see where the rock has been worn away as the monks walked around the cross reting their hands on the stone. Here you can see Eric our tour guide leaning on the cross, otherwise known as 'shrek'.

A church with a head was the next stop on the trip. An actual dude's head from a long time ago was sitting in a glass cabinet in a gold decorative thingo, well i'll just put a picture of it here for you. When you look closely you can see some hairs still attached to the head. There is a story behind this head of course and probably once a body under it but i forget it now, all i can remember is that the english killed this fella in London for something or other and someone smuggled the head back to Ireland and kept it hidden until it was safe to bring into the public.

nice set of teeth!!

Once we hit the city of Derry we found one of the local pubs, had some food took part in a piece of drinking and the group started to get to know each other in preparation for the week ahead.