Sunday March 17—Saint Patrick’s Day
I awoke fairly early, I really don’t know why, I guess I was just excited to get on with our trip. Jeff and Nicola had gone out after we went to bed last night, and bought pizza for their dinner( they seem to eat fairly late) so we had leftover pizza for breakfast. Yummy.
It was sunny and cold as off we went into town for the Saint Patrick’s day parade. I drove my rental in to The University of Ulster where Nicola works and made use of her parking pass. We were just around the corner from the Cathedral Church of Saint Ann, a truly beautiful building, of which the UK and Ireland have many.
After a short walk we arrived in front of Belfast's City Hall where the parade was to start. I knew we were at the right place when I spotted Saint Patrick himself leading the parade. That's him with the beard.
The parade was very energetic but short. Very colourful too. I was told it gets better every year. They could learn a thing from the St. Patty's day parades (plural) in New Orleans. Sorry , I digress.
Belfast city proper has a population of only 281000 while with the area around, it’s over 600,000, and it’s still hard to find a place to park. Luckily the downtown area is fairly easy to walk as we did several times. One of the places we enjoyed was Saint George’s Market. It’s sort of an indoor farmers market, something like the Saint Lawrence Market in Toronto, but probably 4 times older and as you can see by the photo below it’s fairly big. Today, a number of events were taking place, including some young ladies doing Irish dancing.
We had lunch from one of the many venders and purchased some hummus and some excellent sun dried tomatoes.
The day was capped off with drinks in (what else) a local pub. We both had Irish Coffee and it’s not a bad way to get your caffeine.
It rained on the way home, then the sun came out. Still colder than I liked.
Monday March 18
Today the rest of the story began. After breakfast we packed our hired car and headed off to Galway. The GPS (sat nav in the UK and probably Europe) said take the third exit from the upcoming roundabout.
Roundabouts are quite another thing about driving in the land of our forefathers. Here in the UK, Ireland and other so called civilized places, they don’t control a place where 2 or more roads come together with traffic lights, they have roundabouts. It’s a simple idea really, that works well when traffic is light. A car in the roundabout has the right of way. Normal 2 lane roads come together and carry on without much fuss. When multilane roads come together at rush hour it’s a whole different thing. Strangely enough, many of the more complex roundabouts are now controlled with traffic lights. Sort of defeats the purpose. Some roundabouts have several exits. That’s what I was talking about in the last paragraph.
The GPS said to take the 3rd exit. Only problem was there was no roundabout. It had been converted to an intersection so what I really had to do was make a right turn. Of course I was in the wrong lane by the time we figured that out. Straight through then a U turn to get back to the intersection then a left turn and we were on our way, till next time. One nice thing about modern GPS’s, they never criticise your driving skills, they just recalculate and give you updated instructions to get you on your way. I know because we caused our GPS to recalculate quite a few times.
The GPS had calculated about a 5 hour drive to the B&B I had booked in Galway, it took closer to 8 hours. On the plus side ,we did see a lot of Irish countryside. We arrived at the B&B about 5 PM and after parking in a very tight space we settled in.
Tuesday March 19- Thursday March 21 (first day of spring???)
The B&B was an easy walk to the center of Galway, so the car didn’t move while we were there. One of the things I was interested in seeing was the Spanish Arch and Parade. My grandmother, Delia Goulding , was born in Galway and since she was 8 when she left, the only thing she remembered was the Spanish Arch. It was part of the wall built in 1584, that once surrounded Galway and was used for access to the docks when it was told to me Spanish ships unloaded their cargo (mostly wine).
This bird stood outside a restaurant door begging to be fed. It was there every day we passed.
Two bus trips (pick up at our door), the first to the Cliffs of Moher (where part of the Princess Bride movie was filmed) and The Burren (a somewhat desolate but beautiful National Park) adjoin each other.
Carolyn at O’Brien’s Tower.
The cliffs cover more than 8 km of coast and over 200 metres (700 ft.) in height at the tallest point. The pic below is a panorama from Wikipedia taken from the O’Brien tower. O’Brien tower in case your interested was built by Cornelius O’Brien in 1835 a local landlord. One version of the story says he built the tower to impress a lady.
The picture below is from Wikipedia.
The view is spectacular on a clear day. We will have to take their word for it as we just got a good view of approaching rain showers.
Rain heading our way.
Lucky for us though this was O’Brien week. Seems the local tourist people are celebrating the Gathering in Ireland by marking each week this year with a different original Clan from County Clare and this week was O’Brien. We received a certificate and a goodie bag.
Some parts of the cliffs are naked and unprotected. We didn’t walk out there.
The second bus trip was to another National Park called The Connemara. (You may have heard of Connemara marble). We also visited Kylemore Abby, originally a castle like home on a 15000 acre estate, built in 1850 by Mitchell Henry. The estate was very self contained with fruits and veggies all year long from the gardens and greenhouses.
It was a rainy day but also incredibly windy. One of the staff told me he could not remember a worse day in the 20 years he had worked there. We had trouble walking upright.
Mitchell Henry built a beautiful small cathedral like Gothic church in memory of his wife Margaret, then at some point he ran out of money and a group of nuns from France bought the place and turned it into an Abby and school. The school recently closed due to poor enrolment.
Friday March 22
The trip back to Belfast was a little smoother and faster. We took the highway towards Dublin ducking off a couple of times to avoid the tolls. On one of the side trips we stopped in a town (didn’t write it down so can’t say where) for lunch at a pub (where else?) The soup du jour, served with bread, was very good. When we mentioned to the waiter where we were going, he said he wouldn't go to Belfast today. Seem they had a bad snowfall and many roads were impassable.
This is what we found when we arrived back at Jeff’s house (our rental is the white one on the right). Not really a lot of snow by
Canadian standards but the city has almost no equipment to handle a snowfall. It was worse in the nearby countryside. Nicola’s parents were snowed in and lost power for two days. The farmers were out rescuing sheep and their lambs by digging them out with shovels. The evening we arrived back in Belfast we went to dinner with Nicola’s parents at the Dirty Duck (a favourite of Jeff and Nicola) then went to a play put on by the company that Jeff has performed with. The play took place in a pub(!!!) and dealt with a young mans return to his home town from America.
