Another morning’s travel brought us to the city of Galway in the northwest of Ireland (but not Northern Ireland). Galway was immediately appealing as we walked down to our hotel through the Saturday market, via pedestrianized streets filled with buskers. As a university town, Galway has a young population (and lots of pubs and music venues as you’d expect!).
We arrived early enough to see the small City Museum then catch an afternoon walking tour that quickly showed us all the highlights; Spanish Arch, medieval ruins and walls, and the original “Lynching” spot (where a lord and judge named Lynch hanged his own son from a window). After the walking tour, we had a short rest then chose one of the dozens of bars for a pub meal and a beer or two. The venue that we chose was called The King’s Head because the building was awarded to the English nobleman who purportedly was the “halberdier” who beheaded the unlucky Charles I back in the 1600’s. Good music and a fine selection of beers and ciders on tap.
At the close of the evening, having been bombarded with pictures from back home of the spectacular display of Aurora Borealis, we tried to spot them from our location. No such luck; either they weren’t there, or just too much light pollution.
The following morning, we took a bus tour into County Clare to visit Ireland’s second most popular tourist attraction, the Cliffs of Moher. (The #1 attraction in all of Ireland is apparently the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin.) Before we reached the cliffs we passed by a number of castles (with a stop at Dunguaire Castle) and through The Burren, an area crisscrossed by penny walls built during during the famine and home to the impressive Poulnabrone Dolmen neolithic portal tomb. The main event, a visit to the cliffs of Moher, was no less impressive. Great views of the Atlantic crashing in at the base of the cliffs rising 702 feet (over 200m) and running for 5 miles along the coast. We returned to Galway for another evening of pub grub and some Irish music.
Although we’d had a stretch of sunny days, the famously fickle Irish weather finally turned and our final day in Galway was windy, chilly and rainy so we took the morning off. By the afternoon, the rain was mostly over so we walked down to the Hall of the Red Earl the across the river to the Promenade. We took an interesting break from Irish cuisine and enjoyed Asian tapas washed down with Singha beer for our final night in Galway.
To channel Dennis Miller, “Now, we don’t want to get off on a rant here, but…” Galway was the place in Ireland where we reached our tolerance limit for the Irish preoccupation with 1) the notion that everything bad that happened in Ireland over the past 700 years is the fault of the English, and 2) that religious intolerance is a way of life and warfare is the solution. The breaking point came at Galway’s City Museum, where beside an exhibit glorifying IRA “heroes” of the civil war there was a section especially for kids titled “What Would You Go to War For?”. Ireland’s obsession with their troubled past doesn’t negate the enjoyment of a visit, but it certainly colours one’s view of the Irish nation (whether that’s one country or two). “…of course, that’s just our opinion. we could be wrong.”
Images of County Cork on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/100countries/albums/72177720317014696
