2nd October, 2011 – Midday
Ahh, so it’s been a few days again since our last blog. Well atm we are sitting at London’s Luton airport with a few hours layover before we fly out to Paris!! But first things first, I think we left you at Galway. Galway was in my opinion a Irishy Irish town, complete with our first seedy Irish bar experience and a hot Irish stew with a pint of Guinness for me, YUM! There is not much to report about Galway as it was the surrounding southern area I was predominantly interested in.
We woke up and Amy ticked over to 28! Happy Birthday!! We shot off early and after heading South for no more than 30min the scenery changed drastically, massive barren limestone plateaus and mountains that look more like, for want of a better term, a moonscape... this area is called The Burren and it backs onto the impressive Cliffs of Moher. We toured around The Burren on back country roads and stumbled across a Tomb from 2000BC surrounded by all that cool limestoney stuff. Oh btw there are these rock fences EVERYWHERE here in Ireland, They’re really old and are still just used as normal fences today dividing up properties etc. Amy and I had in depth conversation about the rock walls, I won’t bother you with it too much but I will mention that it included bad Irish accents: “oh did ye hear teh O’Connell’s put timber fences oop, and here oi was tinkin’ tey were decent folk.”
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| YET ANOTHER CASTLE ON OUR WAY SOUTH OF GALWAY |
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| LIMESTONE MOUNTAINS |
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| SOME OLD BUILDINGY THING WE STUMBLED ACROSS IN THE BURREN |
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| FENCES! |
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| 2000BC TOMB |
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| THE LIMESTONE UP CLOSE |
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| MY RIGHTY IS DOWN A LIMESTONE HOLE |
We decided to head north again just to take the coast road down to the Cliffs of Moher and it was worth it. A tiny-arsed, rock-walled, winding road right beside the ocean with limestone mountains on the other, cool! This brought us to the Cliffs of Moher. Not much I can say about these that a photo won’t show you, but they are 200m high sheer cliffs with decent views!
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| SOUTH DOWN THE COAST |
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| THROUGH MORE OF THE BURREN |
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| MORE BURREN |
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| CASTLE ON THE CLIFFS OF MOHER |
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| CLIFFS OF MOHER |
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| CLIFFS OF MOHER |
We made our way further south again, crossing a big inlet on a ferry, and on down to an area called Killarney near the West coast and managed to score a kick-arse hotel room with a King bed and views of Killarney Lake for like 60Euro, win! Had a celebratory nice meal and few drinks in the restaurant for Amy’s bday.
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| BOARDING THE FERRY, KILLIMER TO TARBERT |
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| VIEW OF LAKE KILLARNEY FROM OUR ROOM, NOICE |
The famous Ring of Kerry drive kicks off right outside our hotel, heads West to the coast, south down the coast up into the Kerry mountains and then Eastwards again back toward Killarney. This drive was simply beautiful. ** Just want to interrupt to say that 2 solid coppers just walked past with full tactical gear with mp5 sub machine guns, COUNTER-TERRORISTS WIN! **.
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| RING OF KERRY |
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| RING OF KERRY |
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| RING OF KERRY |
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| RING OF KERRY |
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| RING OF KERRY |
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| RING OF KERRY |
Irish roads are insanely bad, man those crazy bastards just chuck up 100km/h road signs anywhere and everywhere. It’s like a rollercoaster and there are road works everywhere.. very narrow, and much to Amy’s chagrin, FUN TO DRIVE! On the mainish roads they got this absolutely stupid system where there is a wide lane and a narrow lane on the other side of a yellow dotted line which doubles as an emergency lane and a heavy vehicle lane, everyone is confused and doesn’t know whether they can use it or not, including me.. WHEN THEY COULD HAVE JUST PUT 2 NORMAL SIZED LANES IN, GRRR. The Irish jokes are starting to make a lot of sense.
Anyway, rant over. We realised how lucky we have been with the weather so far, fog up in the mountains etc as expected but otherwise great! It was now of course that it all went to crap, weather-wise. As soon as we started south again the dreary Irish weather set in… and it stayed in. Arrived in Cork that afternoon in the wet and left the next morning in the wet. Had a quick scoot around the streets and some dinner but that’s about it for Cork.
We left Cork early as we had to return the hire car in Dublin by 11am. Which wasn’t a problem as much to my surprise the Irish actually do have a well looked after road, probably thanks to all the Tolls, it’s the M8 motorway and stretches across most of the country from Cork to Dublin, 120km/hr all the way…. Woo! 250km in 2hrs!
Well we got there with a bit of time up our sleeves ;-), so we left our bags at our Dublin hotel, The Red Cow Moran Hotel.. yep cool name I know, and decided to offload all the crap we’ve been collecting via the Irish Postal Service…. WOW, these guys are just useless. They make Australia Post look like saints. The lady laughed at us when we asked if we could buy a box and tape to send our stuff back and then pointed us in the direction of the closest Tesco (dodgy UK version of woollies) for an old chocolate box or something, oh and they should sell tape as well. Anyway, an hour and 50euros later we returned the car and made our way into Dublin, or should I say to the Guinness Storehouse (brewery), via Dublin.
Kenny and Jess were cool enough to give us a couple of tickets to The Guinness Storehouse that they kindly forgot to use. The history and brewing process are interesting, eg Aurthur Guinness taking out a 9000yr lease on the premises, but to be honest the actual black liquidy goodness is where it’s at. If you think Guinness is good at home, IT IS, but it’s yummier here ;). After finishing both mine and Amy’s courtesy pint up in the gravity bar overlooking Dublin I convinced myself I hadn’t had enough, so we made our way down to the other bar where there was an Irish band playing and another 3 pints waiting for me!
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| JUST BELOW THE GRAVITY BAR |
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| MY FIRST PINT |
Stumble. Taxi. Belch. More pints. Stumble. Dinner. Stumble. Sleep. Dribble. Headache.
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| MY SOMETHINGTH PINT |
After a deep sleep in we realised we had a mountain of washing, so it was off to visit Mr Tubs, a laundry in Dublin! To be honest at this point we were both touristed out, kind of sick of just hitting the attractions and taking happy snaps so we apologise for the lack of Dublin pics, but we just needed a nice meander through the city shopping and doing not much, it was a great change!
This morning we had a 430am start from the hotel for our flight to London Luton. And here we are up to date, waiting for our flight to Paris, woop!
Matt
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