September 23, 2013: Kylemore Castle and Gardens, Ireland
	September 21, 2013: Traveling from Liverpool, England to Dublin, Ireland
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Today, we are going to pick up another van at the Dublin airport and then drive ourselves across the country to Galway. Once there, we'll check into the Nile Lodge B&B and, we hope, have some time to explore Galway on foot.

Dublin's Dylan Hotel

We were at the Dylan Hotel only one night; as hotels go, it was way, way upscale- easily the most expensive place we stayed during the trip, and one of the most expensive that I can recall. But for that you got a boutique hotel, tastefully-appointed, with large rooms and ample public spaces, in a great in-town location.

Aerial View of the Dylan Hotel and Neighborhood

The Dylan Hotel originated in an older building, then expanded into a newer one next door:

Some of the pictures we took here at the Dylan were on the day we arrived; for example, we had the desk clerk take a picture of the seven of us in the hotel lobby. In front of the hotel was a broad patio or porch, furnished with lots of low outdoor furniture. Just before we left for our evening walk on the day we arrived, Fred got a picture of Guy, Prudence and Ron relaxing. And at one point, Ron asked Fred to hold his cigar for a minute, and with Fred's Irish cap and orange shirt, Prudence thought it to be a picture worth taking.

While we were outside the Dylan on the day of our arrival, and also the next morning, Nancy was at work with her camera, taking pictures of the hotel and some of the public areas that neither Fred nor I got to. You can use the clickable thumbnails below to have a look at some of her pictures:

The rest of the pictures we took here at the Dylan we took the next morning, when the light was a lot better, and you'll be able to see most of those in the next section.

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible) Our Room at the Dylan Hotel

As I said, we had a really nice room at the Dylan Hotel, and in the morning I made a movie of it. You can watch that movie with the player at right. And you can use the clickable thumbnails below to see some still shots Fred took in our room:

Fred, with his eye for decorative elements, found the Dylan to be full of them. It seemed as if all the chairs, for example, were fanciful, such as the one in the elevator lobby on our floor and a really weird one in the lobby; you can see that last one in a picture Prudence took here.

Below are clickable thumbnails for some other pictures Fred took of the decorative elements here in the Dylan Hotel:

In the next section, we'll see some additional pictures we took outside the Dylan on the morning of our departure.

Driving to Galway

Today, we'll head to the airport to pick up our van and then drive over to Galway. We spent a bit of time this morning wandering around the hotel and the nearby neighborhood taking pictures. The weather was nice, and of course there was more light this morning. Prudence and Nancy went through the gate into the little park across the street and then down the walk to St. Mary's Church. I don't believe they went in, since I didn't get any interior pictures from them, but Nancy did get a nice view of the bell tower before they returned through the little park and past the statue of St. Mary.

The rest of the pictures we took on the patio out front of the Dylan, or from across the street. For example, Fred saw the same calico cat that we saw yesterday sleeping on a nearby bench and, a bit later on, sitting on the sidewalk.

Below are a collection of clickable thumbnails for more of the pictures that we took while waiting for our taxi to the airport:

Outside the Dylan Hotel, Dublin

Presently, the taxi that Ron had called arrived, we loaded up and were off to the airport.

The rental car place was just off the airport in a support area, and it took a while for us to get the kind of van we needed, learn about its operation (I would not only be Ron's navigator but his substitute when necessary), get directions and head off for Galway.

The trip to Galway, took over three hours, not counting our pit stop in Enfield; the distance was somewhat over 150 miles. (A country that you can drive coast to coast in three hours!) We (Fred and I) took a few odd pictures on the way; the countryside looked like anyplace in the southeast US, I thought. There are clickable thumbnails below for some of these pictures.

Scenes from the Drive from Dublin to Galway

When we got to Galway, it seemed that my directions didn't quite match the road numbers, but we were fooled temporarily in that when an expressway turns into just a divided highway it changes its number. It's no problem when it goes from M6 to N6, but in Galway we lost N6 altogether and so went a mile or so out of our way.

Part of the problem was that the Nile Lodge was on Lower Salthill Road, but Prudence's iPad and my own directions were sending us to the small town of Salthill just down the coast from Galway. When we got there, and the road deadended into the ocean road, we followed our noses and headed back northeast, and finally the road turned into Lower Salthill Road. Then we just followed street numbers until we got to where the Nile Lodge was supposed to be.

The problem then was that the building where the Nile Lodge was supposed to be seemed to be a doctor's clinic. We had to stop and ask someone where the Nile Lodge was, and all they could do was point us to that clinic building.

So we drove back down the street and in the wider of two driveway gates onto the property and got out to see if we were in the right place.

Galway's Nile Lodge B&B (and clinic)

Well, I guess Prudence might have worked out what was going on, with the B&B in San Antonio called Dr. Yrizarry's; it is run by a dentist who has offices on the property. The Nile Lodge was run by a doctor who had an outpatient clinic on the basement level of the large house on a few acres of land.

Originally, when we knocked on the door, no one answered, but it turned out that Maire MacDermott, the doctor and hostess of the B&B had been downstairs in her office. (The whole clinic thing seemed a bit distant, as we never saw any other cars in the parking circle out front, nor did we ever see someone come up to the house and go down to the clinic entrance on the lower level. All that we ever got from Maire was that she did indeed see patients, but apparently not many of them.) We did chat with Maire a number of times during our stay about her family history and the history of the house.

William Hutchinson entered the Royal Navy in 1790 as a seaman on board HMS Nassau. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming a full Lieutenant in 1805. In 1809 he commanded a ship in Admiral Nelson's fleet and by 1820 had command of a 70-foot gunship and 50 men. (He was reprimanded at one point for waking the townspeople of Galway by firing off cannon in Galway Bay to celebrate the birth of his friends son). He was appointed to The Victory (the ship on which Nelson so famously died) while it was acting as a guard ship in Portsmouth, England. In 1851 he was made Captain.

In 1798 Admiral Nelson defeated Napoleon's fleet at the Battle of the Nile, and the HMS Nassau took part in that event. Returning from the war, Hutchinson built Nile Lodge in Galway, completing it in 1805 and naming it, of course, for that battle. When the house was built, it was pretty close to being oceanfront, but when Grattan Road, which now runs along Galway Bay, was built in 1860, the bay was a half mile away, and the new land reclaimed was quickly built up. The house is one of the most famous in the city and actually gave its name to the crossroads nearby.

The house passed to his son, Captain William Hutchinson Jr., in 1855, and remained in that family past the turn of the century. In the 1900s, it changed hands a few times, eventually being bought by the MacDermotts. Now owned by Maire MacDermott, it has become one of Galway's nicest and most lauded guest houses.

In addition to the really nice picture Fred took of the Nile Lodge from Lower Salthill Road, between us we took a number of other outside the front of the lodge. There are clickable thumbnails below for a selection of these:

Outside the Nile Lodge B&B, Galway

We spent a bit of time outside talking with Maire and learning a bit about the neighborhood we were in.

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible)

While everyone was chatting, I took the opportunity to make a movie of the Nile Lodge and while it might not add much to the still pictures, you can watch it with the player at left.

The pictures in this section were actually taken on three different days, but are all here under this one heading. On our departure, on Prudence's request, I got a nice picture of Nancy and Maire. There are also a few other pictures Fred got out front of the B&B that I want to include here; there are clickable thumbnails for them below:

Before we head inside to get our rooms (and look at some of the pictures of the inside of Nile Lodge), I might mention that at the back of the house, the dining room and family room led out to a very nice sun room, and outside of that there was an open garden area. At one side there was a picnic area, and on the opposite side a pleasant outdoor seating area. I used the panoramic ability of my new little camera to take the picture below of this patio area:

The Patio and Picnic Area Behind Nile Lodge, Galway

Let's take a tour of the inside of the Nile Lodge; we'll go room by room, beginning on the first floor.

Formal Living Room at the Nile Lodge

To take a tour, it is useful to orient all the rooms to each other. The house is, essentially, a square, and the square is bisected, front to back, by a long hall; the hall begins literally at the front door and continues two-thirds of the way through the house. It ends in the breakfast room/family room, but you can continue through that room to the sun room and out to the garden. On the left side of the hall are, sequentially front to back, the formal living room, the guest room that Nancy and Karl occupied and the guest room that Fred and I had. On the right of the hall as you go to the back of the house were the formal dining room, Prudence and Ron's guest room, a service hallway and the kitchen.

We might begin with the formal living room; Guy took the best picture of it and that picture is at left.

The living room was very tastefully decorated, although I don't imagine that with the comfortable guest rooms and the nice family room at the back of the house, that it gets much use.

It has a fireplace (note the china chihuahua next to it) and striped wallpaper. You can use the clickable thumbnails at left to see a couple of Fred's pictures of it. On the day we left, I got a nice picture of Maire and Guy in the living room.

Windows in the living room look out onto the front of the house and to the lawn on the west side.

With his eye for detail, Fred took a number of pictures of the items in the living room, and you can use the clickable thumbnails below to have a look at some of them:

Opposite the living room on the right side of the house is the formal dining room. Maire did not use it for anything while we were here, probably because there is no good way to get from it to the kitchen quickly. One would have to go out in the hall, walk to either the back of the family room or down the service hallway to get to the kitchen. This makes me think that either the dining room was not always where it is, or the kitchen wasn't or there wasn't a guest room between the two. Maire just used it for her checking in and checking out procedures. The dining room has a nice fireplace; the fireplace in the dining room and the one in Prudence's guest room share the same chimney.

Since we've mentioned the guest room Prudence and Ron had, let's go out in the hall and continue towards the back of the house; the next door on our right was for their room. In the two pictures below, remember that their fireplace backs up to the one in the formal dining room:

On the opposite side of the hall from Ron and Prudence was the guest room Karl and Nancy had. Again, in their pictures below, the fireplace in their room is on the same wall as the fireplace in the formal living room:

Let's continue down the hall towards the breakfast/family room. Just before the hall ends in that room, there is another, smaller hallway off to the left; this hall makes a dogleg and takes you to our room. (Before we head there, we can turn and look down the main hall towards the front of the house.) We had the smallest of the guest rooms; the bath, particularly, was very compact. We had a queen bed and a little dressing table/desk, a fireplace at the foot of the bed and a small, L-shaped bathroom. Have a look at our room with the pictures below:

Just opposite the entry to the hall leading to our room, on the other side of the central hall, is a dogleg hallway quite similar to the one that leads to our room. In place of our room, after the turn in this hallway, is the kitchen, and it is just about the same size as our room and bath combined. At the turn in this hallway, unlike on our side of the house, there is a stairway leading down to a floor below which, on this side of the house, has windows that look out- due to the grade in the property. Downstairs, there was an entry to Dr. MacDermott's office and also Guy's guest suite.

The room at the end of the central hallway, between that hallway and the sun room, is the room that served as a living room for guests and the breakfast room. One side of the room has a seating group around a fireplace; the other had the dining table that could accommodate eight guests. The four pictures below will show you the view from this room down the hall to the front of the house (first row), the two sides of this room (second row) and the sun room (third row):

There were a few additional pictures taken by the five of us with cameras in and around the Nile Lodge that I want to include here.

At left are clickable thumbnails for some of Fred's photographs- two photos of display ceramics and one artistic shot of the sign we had totally missed the first day when we were looking for the Lodge. Additionally, there were two good pictures on the morning that we left to go back to Dublin. One was Guy's photo of Ron and Prudence at the front door of the Nile Lodge. The other shows Maire, myself and Prudence in the front hall of Nile Lodge.

Well, that was our abode in Galway; now for the things we saw and did while we were here.

An Afternoon Walk in Galway

After we'd gotten settled in at the Nile Lodge, we decided that with the short time remaining in the afternoon, and because we'd been sitting in a car for three hours, that we'd just head out for a walk to see what we could see.

Following Maire's directions (and our own previous drive to get to the Nile Lodge), we turned left out of the driveway and walked southwest down Lower Salthill Road towards Galway Bay. At the shore, we walked along the bayfront for a while, and stopped in at a local pub for a drink and a snack. Then we returned to the Nile Lodge via a different route, walking along the new shore created when the new bay road was built in the late 1800s.

We did not go downtown until dinner, but I wanted to use the larger aerial view than necessary to show you where we were in relation to the center of Galway; Nile Lodge is very convenient if you want to walk everywhere rather than drive.

On our walk down the street, there was not a great deal to see until we got to the bayfront. However, there were a couple of interesting things. One was the English Bulldog that came to the gate of a house along the street as we passed by. Prudence has gotten to like dogs as much as cats, and she wanted to stop and interact with it. In the picture Fred took of her encounter, the dog has a skeptical expression that made the picture worthwhile. Nancy found an interesting thatched roof house that seemed to be losing its thatch. And for you neatness freaks (or professional electricians), you'll probably blanch at Fred's picture of a typical utility pole. This was certainly not the most complicated wiring we saw in England, but I would hate to have to trace the source of someone's electric or phone problem!

We had a pleasant walk down the road; there was lots to look at though, in truth, not a whole lot worth photographing. Lower Salthill Road seemed to be a typical in-city Galway street, although with a "vacation" flair, being near the water. I did pass a church that reminded me of Santorini, and also a colorful local watering hole. Eventually, we came to the bayside roundabout we'd come through earlier, and here we stopped to do some walking around and picture-taking.

I've gotten an aerial view of the roundabout and the area around it where we spent the afternoon. I've marked the route from the Nile Lodge, the little pub and restaurant where we stopped for a snack, the roundabout where we took pictures and I constructed a 360° panorama view, the stretch along the bayshore where we took quite a few pictures, the area where we stopped to watch a chess game in progress and our route back to the Nile Lodge.

I hope that you find comparing the pictures we took to this aerial view interesting; I always do.

When we arrived at the roundabout, the first thing we did was to walk over to the little park along the bayshore to take some pictures.

Walking along the bayshore in the cool (but not cold) sunshine was very, very pleasant. Living here in Galway must be pretty nice, except for the fact that most weather would come in from the ocean, and with a bad storm, the wind surges might be a problem.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

Between Guy, Fred and I, we took oodles of pictures along the bayshore. Quite a few of them were duplicates, and some of them didn't turn out so well, so after weeding through them I had a bout a dozen left. That's enough for me to create a slideshow to let you see them easily and quickly.

To view the slideshow, just click on the image at right and I will open the slideshow in a new window. In the slideshow, you can use the little arrows in the lower corners of each image to move from one to the next, and the index numbers in the upper left of each image will tell you where you are in the series. When you are finished looking at the pictures, just close the popup window.

Fred and I returned to the restaurant where everyone else was having a snack, and I went out to the roundabout to see if I could put together an entire 360° view of the area. I took ten pictures and ran them through my software, but found that one of them didn't have quite enough overlap to be automatically merged, so I had to do it manually and then clean up the image overlap manually, but I think it turned out pretty good. You can use the scrollable window below to see this panorama.

Then, of course, it occurred to me that my new camera would take panoramic views, although I think there is a limit to the field of view that you can have. Just for comparison, I moved to a different spot and put together an in-camera panorama with a field of view from the restaurant on the left around to the traffic circle on the right. This is what it looked like:

I came back to join everyone at the restaurant. After Guy had finished his bread pudding and Ron had smoked his cigar, we got ready to leave the restaurant/pub and head back along the bayshore to the Nile Lodge. As we were leaving, I noticed a guy sitting with his back to us outside where we were. It wasn't the guy that was interesting, but rather the dog that was with him.

Leaving the restaurant, we crossed over to the other side of the bayside road and walked eastward, enjoying the afternoon sunshine and the sea views.

Along Galway Bay

The bay road leads around across the new land that resulted in the 1880s when a new road was built. Ahead of us we could see the newer houses and buildings built on the new land that juts out into Galway Bay. As we walked along, we stopped occasionally to get group shots or pictures of the bay. You can use the clickable thumbnails below to see a few of these pictures:

A ways down the street, we came to an area where a couple of guys were playing chess on a huge chessboard with 2-foot-high plastic pieces, and we stopped to watch. Below are clickable thumbnails for a series of pictures we took of them; they are in time sequence so you can gauge who is winning (undoubtedly White who queened a pawn in the last picture:

We watched the players for fifteen minutes or so, and although I didn't think that Ron and Karl played, but they certainly seemed engrossed.

I also happened to notice that we were right across from the Irish National Aquarium. It made me wonder whether the Chinese restaurant has to go very far to get their fish. Below are clickable thumbnails for the final pictures we took along our afternoon walk by Galway Bay:

We completed our afternoon walk along the bay and then headed a few blocks inland to get back to the Nile House to relax and decide on dinner plans.

Dinner in Galway

We decided on a restaurant called Nimmo's, which was down near the Spanish Arch near the center of Galway.

From the Nile Lodge, we crossed Lower Salthill Road to Griffin Road on the other side of the street, We followed this road around until it crossed a bridge over the canal that runs by downtown Galway. Along the way, we took a number of interesting pictures, and you can use the clickable thumbnails below to have a look at them:

After we crossed the bridge over the River Corrib to central Galway, we heeded the multi‑function signpost and turned right to walk along the canal to the restaurant. Right at the corner was a sculpture called "In Praise of Cormorants." This sculpture by John Coll is one of the more famous pieces of street art in Galway. Anyone who has spent time in the city will appreciate the iconographic status of the resident cormorants drying their wings in the Atlantic breezes.

To get to the restaurant, we had to go through The Spanish Arch. The arch was originally an extension of the city wall built to protect the city's quays, which were located in the area once known as the Fish Market (now Spanish Parade). The wall extension was constructed during the mayoralty of Wylliam Martin in 1584. In the 18th century, an extension of the quays called The Long Walk was built, and the arches were created to allow access from the town to the new quays. The Spanish Arch is located on the banks of the River Corrib directly across from The Claddagh. In 1755, the arches were partially destroyed by the tsunami generated by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Until 2006, part of the Arch housed the Galway City Museum, but it is now in a dedicated building located just behind the Arch.

Just through the Arch we found Ard Bia at Nimmo's- the restaurant we'd chosen for dinner. The building actually houses two separate restaurants, owned and run by the same people. We were eating at Ard Bia, locally famous for healthy Mediterranean-inspired dishes. Nimmo's, the other restaurant, serves more typical Irish fare. We had a really good meal, and the group was particularly fond of the wine that was suggested. After the meal, just before we walked back to the Nile Lodge, I got a picture of Guy, Prudence and Fred at Ard Bia/Nimmo's.

We walked back to the Nile House at a leisurely pace, talking about what we might do tomorrow. We settled on a drive in the countryside northwest of Galway, which Maire said was particularly scenic, and our goal would be Kylemore Castle and Gardens.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	September 23, 2013: Kylemore Castle and Gardens, Ireland
	September 21, 2013: Traveling from Liverpool, England to Dublin, Ireland
	Return to the Index for Our British Isles Trip