Easter in Ireland

 Confession: After listening to several talks in General Conference just the weekend before about the importance of keeping Easter Christ-centered..... well, we almost completely ignored all of that and absolutely did not keep the Sabbath day holy. Yes, I feel bad about it. We couldn't really brainstorm a way to to see everything we wanted to see and keep to our schedule without blowing off Sunday... Yes, total rationalization going on over here.  

Moving on.

We drove down to Limerick to attend Sacrament meeting.  Our choice was between going a half hour south, or 1.5 hours north to Galway for 10 am church. We opted to go south even though we wanted to see Galway later in the day. We'd been sight-seeing so fervently that we were wearing out. Besides, Limerick has a real church building, and Galway rents a space in a mini mall, next door to a gym. 

The branch was friendly. They didn't have an Easter program like I was expecting. It was a simple testimony meeting with singing the two usual Easter hymns. It is times like that when I miss our ward at home. We do sing with gusto and volume, and that can be lacking in small branches. There was a gentleman who was curious about our family history (I guess only people with roots in Ireland generally visit??) and after sacrament meeting took us back to the family history room. It appears to be combined with the young women room with two computers set up for Family Search. Ryan couldn't get logged in to his church account, so I logged into mine to get into Family Search. I have enough of Ryan's genealogy attached to me that I could find the one ancestor everyone is stuck on, a Mr. Matthew Kannely that arrived in California just prior to the gold rush. The census says he was both born in Ireland and illiterate. (Not a great starting point to find ancestors prior to him.) After getting us all excited to maybe have our big break-- as our friendly Family History consultant saw the estimated date of birth, he looked at us and said, "Nope, there's nothing we can do." Record keeping was pretty spotty around 1830 and before. Boo. 

I wanted to poke fun of our footwear, but in all seriousness these were not the only casual shoes in the building. Probably a quarter of the congregation was in the same shoe situation. I had insisted on bringing a second pair of shoes in case our regular ones got too wet in the Irish spring time weather. Then who wants to lug around a third pair when you are only bringing carry-on bags? I could have saved my worry because the weather was more than decent and we never soaked our shoes. The only day it poured rain was the day we were leaving Dublin to come home. We totally could have brough church shoes. Oh well.

Aren't we classy?

We were all feeling worn out by this point. But we only had another 24 hours in Ireland and wanted to make the most of them!

After church, we made the drive to Galway. We listened to the Follow Him podcast on the way. That was our last effort towards religiosity until the evening.

We parked our car in a parking garage, changed our clothes in the car, and started wandering. We were hungry and found a pub for lunch. It looked tiny, but just kept going. We walked past the bar part (which looks really cool) and over to the restaurant area.

This staircase was just behind us, where there was more seating upstairs. I'll say this for our food service experience in Ireland: they hustle! We always got our food fast, and we watched servers jog, if not run, up and down these stairs.

And we are back to wandering the streets.

We wandered around for an hour or more. About the time we were ready to head back to the car, we found a street performer. I wish I had written this guy's name down somewhere. He had a great voice, even if he wore crocs with his suit.

Funny story: In between songs, he was working the crowd and asked what to me sounded like if they "loved their local Pope?" I thought that was an interesting question especially when he started in on a song about drinking at the bar. I started thinking back on his question and realized he had asked if they had a favorite, local PUB that they liked. There were a few instances where I incorrectly interpreted accents, but this one was my favorite. I wasn't alone though, because Ryan asked me at the end of the song what that had to do with a Pope? I was able help by then.

Our last Airbnb was about an hour west of Dublin, so it was back in the car for another drive. This host was super sweet and had a whole Easter centerpiece on our table, knowing that we were traveling with our kids. The girls gratefully scarfed down the chocolate in honor of the special day.