Given the hike yesterday, we decided to give ourselves a
break and sleep in, which is easy to do since the sun doesn’t really come up
until abut 8am. Damon and I “overslept”
until 8:30 – a luxury – and then we all grabbed breakfast. We are becoming used
to the traditional Irish breakfast which seems to waiver little in
variety: wet, runny scrambled eggs
(sometimes fried), “bacon” (ham), baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, black and
white pudding (involves blood, don’t ask), porridge (oatmeal) and a variety of
pastries. I’m trying to stick with the
oatmeal and fruit, but damn that ham is good.
We spent the morning exploring Galway – Tricia and Bobby did
their own thing while Damon and I toured the town. The downtown area is a really cute pedestrian
only shopping area with pubs and coffee shops occupying every other space and
random street performers playing music.
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| Galway |
We wandered up and down the narrow streets, popped out at a river that
had a historical Spanish arch that was on every tourist brochure. We were not impressed.
We wandered up the river, saw a few churches,
and eventually made it back to the hotel to meet up at noon.
Next stop… the well known Cliffs of Moher! The drive was about an hour and a half during
which time Bobby continued the quest (unsuccessfully) for the perfect sheep-wall picture.
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| Sheep and wall somewhere. Maybe. |
I had long since given up. The drive took us through some incredible
scenery.
Now we made it onto single-lane
roads with rolling green pastures on both sides. The stone walls were everywhere separating
property and animals. Luckily, the road
was near empty and but for the one tour bus that caused a group scream, and a
near miss with a truck carrying a 20’ tall load of hay that was listing
dangerously to the middle of the road causing Bobby to silently (in his words) “pucker”
as the hay truck flew past us. All in
all, a scenic drive and a beautiful sunny day.
On that note, we have been incredibly lucky with the weather. We’ve had no rain (knock on wood) and sun
almost every day. Today, barely a cloud
in the sky.
We arrived at the Cliffs, parked, and had our typical PB&J
lunch. We carry a bag of food consisting
of fruit, snacks and sandwich fixings that we eat out of the back of the car. We are very fancy. The visitor center at the Cliffs is actually
quite nice as it is built into the side of the hill, so it is not in any way ostentatious. There are a few shops also built into the
hill. None of us took pictures, so credit
to Google on this one.
One thing that must be addressed is the bathroom situation
in the visitor center. You walk in and
the bathroom sign points to a unisex bathroom.
One might assume that means that there are individual unisex bathrooms,
but no, it is literally a full bathroom that has stalls and everyone is
welcome. There is something a little
disconcerting, about going to the bathroom in a stall next to a male stranger. I’m not sure if the stalls all had doors or not,
but I did see one man standing and doing his thing with no door. Luckily, it was a largish room, so I could
grab a stall in a corner away from everyone else. Still, weird.
Of course, I later realized that if you went upstairs, there were gender
specific bathrooms. But then again, the
thought of walking up a flight of stairs would have been enough to keep me in
the creepy toilet.
Okay, so on to the hike.
We had the option of going in one of two directions – we opted for the
10k round trip rather than the 16k round trip, plus, we wanted the sun behind us
in our pictures. The first mile or so
was loaded with tourists – people stopped every 5’ to take selfies. We pushed past them all (after taking selfies
every 5’) and the crowd started to thin.
There is a placard at the start of the trail in remembrance of all who
have died on the cliffs. We googled and
learned that 66 people have died in the last 15 or so years and there are signs
everywhere communicating the danger of hiking on the cliffs.
As we continued the hike, the trail separated into three
distinct paths – sometimes coming together, but usually independent. The safe (sissy) path was the one far away
from the cliffs segregated by a waist high wall of rocks. You can still see everything, but there is zero
element of danger – this was built following too many deaths. The flipside is the path closest to the edge
(the idiot path). This is the one that
tempts people to peek over the edge, take selfies fake leaping, and the
romantic make-out pictures (yes, quite a few of these). Then
there is the middle path – still on the danger side of the wall, but with
enough room to make a leap to the sissy path should the bluff start to give
way. Obviously, we spent most of our
time on the middle path with me yelling at Damon at regular intervals when he
started edging toward the idiot path.
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| Middle Path and Idiot Path |
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| Me on Sissy Path, Damon taking pictures on idiot path |
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| Damon on idiot ledge with me screaming at him out of camera range |
We made it to the turnaround point at Hag’s Head where there
was a nice grassy bluff to sit and enjoy the view. Walking 6 miles is normally not a huge issue,
but given our exertion over the previous two days, the soreness was really
starting to kick in. We power walked
back, only stopping to take 700-800 more pictures. We were motivated by the setting sun as the
only thing worse than the idiot path is the idiot path in the dark.
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| Enjoying the View |
Our next overnight spot was going to be somewhere near
Shannon or Limerick. Having no real plan
was awesome – we just drove and searched for hotels until I found one that I
insisted on stopping at because the name was so awesome – the Bunratty Castle
Hotel in Bunratty, Ireland. Oh, people
tried to talk me out of it to stay at the Radison Blu, but I was
insistent. The deal was, if the Bunratty
was scary or weird, we would continue to the Rad Blue. The Bunratty was awesome. We skillfully negotiated another wonderful
rate that was somehow 24-Euro higher than the on-line rate. The clerk had me confused about the exchange
rate and I was doing it the wrong way, but it was still super cheap and nice accommodations,
so we stayed. Need to work on our
negotiation skilz for tomorrow.
When Triecia and I walked back to the car, we were super
excited that there were young people in the lobby since our other two prior
hotels seemed to lean toward the slightly older crowd. Bobby looked at us like we were crazy and
commented that when the two of us hobbled out of the lobby with our sore
muscles, we looked like senior citizens and the people in the lobby were
probably not thrilled to see us. Add to
that the fact that Damon and I are both currently wearing Invisaligns so we are
forever popping our “teeth” in and out like dentures, eliciting constant
ridicule.
The town of Bunratty is small and centered on the, you
guessed it, Bunratty Castle. We found a
pub for dinner called Durty Nelly’s, (also) claiming to be the oldest pub in
Ireland, built in the early 1600’s. When
one finds a 400-year old pub called Durty Nelly’s, one goes there.
The pub consisted of several small rooms with
a few tables in each room. One room was
the pub – drinks only, one room was the fancy room –nice menu, and one room was
the pub menu. We were all in a burger
type of mood, so we moved to the pub menu room.
There, we were offered a pamphlet that gave the history of Durty
Nelly. This is brilliant and must be
shared.
I’m paraphrasing based on a quick ready of a very long
explanation. In the early 1600’s, Nelly
somehow scored the right to charge tolls to cross a bridge. She accepted money, chickens, eggs and if a guy
was hot enough, she accepted “other” forms of payment, thereby earning her the moniker
“Durty Nelly”. One night, following a
durty encounter, she realized that her manfriend had stolen all of her gold. She determined that he must have needed it
for something important, so she forgave him.
That night, she had a strange premonition – a recipe for a secret potion. She
rubbed the secret potion on a sick dog and it healed. Then she tried it on a horse and it
healed. Then a barren woman came to her to
assist with getting pregnant. Her
husband tried the potion, they had a rockin’ night, followed by six kids. Nelly’s potion became world renowned and
people came from all over to get healed, among other things. The recipe was carried down and was
eventually banned due to its potency, although it is still secretly brewed in
the backwoods of Ireland. What we
determined is that Nelly basically invented Viagra and was able to keep her
fantastic little pub going for 400 years on the proceeds. Go Nelly.
Post dinner, we went back to the Bunratty and while everyone
else went to sleep, I spent the next two and half hours writing the blog 😊
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