food and some other stuff: Ireland, Day Six: The Burren to Galway

After the Cliffs of Moher day, I had essentially no plans for the rest of the trip. We had booked the places to sleep, but that's pretty much it. In Scotland I remember figuring it out as we went along, through talking to people and some weird kind of osmosis, and this turned out to be the case in Ireland as well. B&B owners are full of information and like to tell you about things to see, too.

Ben had disobeyed my instructions and taken a wrong turn trying to find the B&B the previous night, and we ended up catching a glimpse of The Burren, a weird landscape of flat limestone that goes on for miles and miles. It had been my vague plan to go see this anyway, but after that Ben was really fired up about checking it out, so that's what we set out to do. Like everywhere we went in Ireland, there are a lot of very old things in this area. And also cows.

The first place we stopped was a stone age ring fort, from which you could start to see the limestone.

This was a pretty atmospheric place, and there was also a man there demonstrating sheep-herding with his dogs.

Then we drove onto see the Poulnabrone Dolmen, a 5000 year old passage tomb. The weather was quite bad while we were here, with tiny pellets of sideways rain.

It was also extremely eerie. We walked around for a while.

And then we got in the car to drive a few miles toward a trailhead to go for a walk. We had to take one of the yellow roads, but fortunately someone happened to be right in front of us, which is the ideal scenario. The lead car is the one who takes it for the team when someone is coming from the opposite direction. I think we only had to pass someone once, though.

The directions said to park right across the street from this pub, which turned out to be very convenient when we were done with the hike.

It was an easy walk for the most part. We saw only a few other people.

We ran across the ruins of various things several times. I never really got used to how casual they are in Ireland about leaving what America would consider priceless archaeological treasures out in an unmarked field, completely unsupervised.

This standing stone was near the church but there was no information about it.

No information about this, either.

Here you see Benjamin "pulling a Ben," which means running up a hill and disappearing over the horizon to leave me standing around waiting for him to come back.

But it wasn't raining and there were no cliffs to potentially fall off, so I didn't mind.

We were walking along the road back toward town, nearly at the end of the walk, when the path arrows pointed to The Bog Road. There was a sign that said "The Bog Road floods in rain." I mean, we should have known better. We had plenty of information to let us know this wasn't a good idea. We went anyway, though, and ended up getting completely soaked and muddy halfway to our knees. It was gross! Squelchy!

When we got back to the car, there was another older American couple also getting into their car and we all complained about how ridiculous that Bog Road was and how dumb we were for not continuing to walk straight down the road toward town. Oh well! I changed in the car into sweatpants and new shoes and socks and was a new woman.

We went into the pub. I can't remember what this sandwich was called but it's something like the Hungry Herder and it was ENORMOUS. Ben's hand for scale.

After lunch we had another bit of driving through The Burren. I'd never seen anything like this place before.

Our goal was Galway. It seemed like an easy drive, but traffic getting into town was terrible, stop and go for the last half hour. Then we had a bit of a time trying to find the proper parking lot. But it all worked out and we managed to not kill each other.

In Galway we were staying two nights, and I'd reserved a whole apartment so we would have room to relax. It was great! Above a pub, but not facing the street so it wasn't too loud.