Dublin, Ireland; Titanic Museum; Brú na Bóinne

 Before driving to Dublin we took an Uber to Titanic Belfast, a museum that stands right next to the dry dock where the Titanic was originally built.  The museum has no artifacts from the ocean liner but it is full of information about the building, staffing, and sinking of the Titanic.  The ship was heralded as the largest movable man-made object ever made.  Belfast, at the time, the largest ship-building city in the world, was justly proud of the Titanic and equally devastated when she sank on her maiden voyage.  The museum is a creative multimedia affair that keeps the observer interested in information being presented.  At times we feel like we are a part of the workforce building the ship.  Then you feel like you are taking a tour of the finished ocean liner.  And, finally you feel as if you are there when the ship slips out of site. 

What the 1st class cabins looked like

The Captain

On our drive to Dublin, and once inside Ireland (the Republic) we stopped at one of Ireland's most significant Neolithic sites, Brú na Bóinne.  Here there are several burial mounds of un- imaginable size with openings aligned to allow the most inner chambers to be lit up on significant days of the year.  In recent years arial photographs have shown that this area was once covered by dozens of these structures.  There is no way that we can know conclusively how the mounds were used, however, it is clear that they were a place to place the dead, and then to later interact with those remains.

The completion of our time in Northern Ireland is significant in that it completes one of the goals of this trip - to completely encircle the North Sea.  We are going to visit Ireland for a few weeks, but, by automobile, by ferry, by small airplane, by boat and by train we have circled the Sea.