Wet and Wild

It’s been a very busy week touring the west coast of Ireland. We’ve seen cities, towns, and little villages that aren’t much more than a crossroad. We’ve walked mountains, cliffs, and fields full of sheep. We’ve even seen the sun occasionally!

Cliffs, Mountains, and Other Rocky Things

The stunning scenery of Ireland is a big draw for tourism, and it certainly was for us. We have seen some pretty amazing landscapes this week! We climbed Slaibh Liag, some of Ireland’s highest cliffs. We also got to see the Cliffs of Moher from a boat, which was super cool. We saw the Fairy Bridges, where the waves crash through various rock formations. We climbed to the top of Croagh Patrick, the holiest mountain in Ireland. It’s a pilgrimage route with lots of stone steps and a rocky trail that some people do in bare feet! We were lucky enough to get to the top before the clouds and rain moved in. We weren’t as lucky while we were driving the Ring of Kerry, though. We had lots of rain and crazy wind that day, so we couldn’t see the Kerry Cliffs or the monastic island of Skellig Michael (as featured in Star Wars movies). We drove the Slea Head route on the Dingle Peninsula and walked out to Dunmore Head (also seen in Star Wars). We actually drove that way twice in one day because the weather cleared up in the evening, so we did it again and we got to see Skelling Michael in the distance that time. Views here very much depend on the weather. The stony landscape of The Burren was so different and so cool.

Cities & Towns

We went to Donegal, Sligo, Galway, Doolin, Westport, Limerick, Killarney, Kenmare, and Dingle. All of them were good, but the towns we think are worth a return visit are Dingle, Kenmare, Dingle, and maybe Westport. We have enjoyed the excellent food, the super nice people, and the fun music. Places here are generally clean (they have a “tidy town” competition every year) and decked out in flowers.

Old stuff

There are ruins and archeological sites everywhere here. We visited the ring fort Dún Aonghasa, which is hanging over a cliff on the island of Inishmore. We saw the amazing Gallarus Oratory, which is a stone structure build 1200 years ago that is not only still standing today, but still water-tight. We walked around the grounds of the manor house of Muckross in the Killarney National Park and dropped by the Kylemore Abbey. We also saw Poulnabrone Dolmen, the remains of a portal tomb in the Burren. So many cool things!

Experiences

Our climb up Croagh Patrick was cool. It was a difficult climb for me, as I’m still nursing my lame foot. It was also very exposed and I worked really hard, with lots of help from Nathan, to calm my racing mind and continue up the very steep slope. Thank goodness for hundreds of years of people building a good trail with rock steps!

We took the ferry to the biggest of the Aran Islands, Inishmore. Our visit on the island was quite nice, but what made that day the most memorable was the boat trip over. If you haven’t caught it by now, I will mention that we have not had great weather this week. Our day to visit the island was wet and windy, so the ferry trip from Galway was, let’s say, eventful. People were queasy and throwing up like crazy. You could see them walking through the aisles of seats toward the open deck with wide, haunted eyes. The crew of the ship were kept busy handing out seasickness bags and checking on their patients like dutiful nurses. People were laid out across several seats or curled up, just trying to keep it together. It was sad to see and hear.

We went to a very fun show in Galway called “Trad on the Prom”. It’s been going for more than twenty years and is produced by a musician couple who have toured the world with Riverdance and other productions. The show featured traditional and modern Irish music, singing, and dancing. It was definitely made with tourists in mind, but it was high quality and a great show!

We had a bit of a scare halfway through the week when Nathan discovered on Wednesday that we had made an error in the booking of our accommodations. We were double booked for Friday and had nothing booked for Thursday. To add to the excitement, the place we were staying on Wednesday had no WiFi. We contacted one of our hosts to see if we could move our booking to Thursday night, but we didn’t know if our request was accepted until Thursday morning. Exciting! The request was accepted and it all worked out pretty well.

We stopped at a cute chocolate factory and had a tasting the morning that we were driving the Ring of Kerry. It was really rainy and windy and there wasn’t much scenery to enjoy, so that was a fun and cozy place to be. We also went to the Skelling Experience Visitor Center. It would have been super cool to take a boat way out to the Skellig Islands and climb the many stone stairs to see the beehive huts and remains of the monastery there. But the weather was too bad and boats weren’t running, so we enjoyed the little museum instead.

Another museum that was a really great stop was The Blasket Centre. People lived on the Great Blasket Island until 1953. They preserved a traditional was of life and the Irish language there for over 100 years. They would row their lightweight boats across to the mainland to trade for supplies and sell their sheep. They relied on fishing and farming for survival, and many of them wrote about their experiences and stories. The center was so informative and very well done.

Our last experience to share was a little adventure we took yesterday. We were visiting a cool old Norman church when we spotted a sign outlining a path that went from the coast all the way to Mount Brandon on the Dingle peninsula. We saw that there was this ancient rock with a carved spiral on it and I wanted to see it. If you’ve done some walking in the UK and Ireland, you know that the paths are just wherever they need to be—across pastures or through towns—and arrangements are made to make the path possible. Well this one was through the sheep pastures, so we were climbing the stiles over the rock walls and steering round the sheep,and their *ahem* droppings. Did I mention that it has been raining a lot? Although it wasn’t raining at the time (much), the grass was very wet and the shoes that we thought were waterproof were no match for Ireland. So we were squishing around in our wet shoes and ,field after field, we were following this route. We finally had to give up, because we had dinner reservations. So, we didn’t get to see the old rock art and we had soggy feet, but it was a fun adventure.

We have a few more days here in Ireland and then it’s off to something new!