a few pictures, two rather heartbreaking

Today we crossed the Irish Sea, from Dublin to Wales (we had to get up at 5:15 to make sure we got to the ferry on time). We saw a rather intact castle at Conwy. Their city wall is still there too. Also had our first taste of true British weather today--quite rainy and cool. We arrived at Chester, England, without incident, excluding the arch that the bus BARELY fit through. Which we had to go through twice. We went to the Chester Cathedral here today after lunch. It was lovely, but unfortunately most of my pictures didn't turn out because it was rather dark, with a lot of wood, and I didn't want to be disruptive by using flash a lot. But here are some other pictures:

This first picture is a close up of one of the famine memorial statues in Dublin. Ireland had a Great Famine from 1945-1948 because of a potato blight and various government failures. Literally over half the country starved to death, died of disease caused by malnutrition, or immigrated to escape the Famine.


















This is the Yeats statue in Sligo. Very cool. The words on it are bits of his poems.



















This is the cross at the site where several leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed. The executions ended after one particularly brutal execution where the victim was so sick he could not even sit up in a chair--they had to tie him to the chair to be able to shoot him. Public disgust was so great that they ended the executions and made the rest of them life sentences.