Travel-log Part 5: The Wild Atlantic Way
Today will be my last post about Ireland, as I recount our final adventures.
We said a fond farewell to Killarney and headed out to the Wild Atlantic Way where we caught a ferry from Doolin Pier for a tour of the Cliffs of Moher… you might recognize them from movies like The Princess Bride or Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince!
Our plan had been to go up to the top of the Cliffs of Moher and walk along them for a bit and then head down to the ferry at Doolin Pier where we had tickets to go out in the ocean to see the cliffs from the water.
However, the parking at the Cliffs was a nightmare, and we were a little pressed for time, so we decided to skip the hiking bit for now and head straight down to the pier, where we had about an hour to kill… so we clambered around on a truly alien landscape of a beach for a bit while we waited for our ship.
I’ve been on boats a lot, kind of grew up around them, but I’ve never been out on the ocean in one, so it was very exciting for me.
We were against the wind and the waves all the way out, the water was quite rough, which I found to be quite thrilling.
Once we got to the start of the tour, I went up top and got some great shots of the cliffs and enjoyed the tour guide pointing out various important land marks.
After we returned to shore, Derek and I continued on our day-trip along the Wild Atlantic Way into the Burrens.
We got a teensy bit lost at one point and drove OVER a mountain that we did not intend to drive over, and this was the narrowest road yet, but the views were spectacular and no logging trucks came trundling along the other direction, and we made it safely down Corkscrew Hill which had signs telling us it was a 12% grade for quite a few miles… so it ended up being an enjoyable adventure!
Burren National Park was… such a neat experience. We decided to hike up into the park a ways. Oh… and something I haven’t mentioned yet… did you know that Ireland is further north than Calgary, Canada?
We didn’t!
It wasn’t until we had been there a couple of days that we started to realize that the days up in Ireland in June are really long. Like… sun coming up at 5:19am and setting around 10pm. It doesn’t really get fully dark until close to 11pm!
These pictures in Burren National Park, for example…. were taken around 6:30pm!
It was such a unique and beautiful and rugged place to hike around, I’m so glad we went back to our hotel in Limerick via the scenic route!
We spent the night on the 7th story of this hotel in Limerick, overlooking the city. It was kind of a weird culture shock to have spent the day driving around in what kind of amounted to a fantastical rock wasteland that was by and large wholly uninhabited (after leaving the Cliffs we barely saw another living soul for hours as we drove through the Burrens) and then come here for the evening in a bustling city.
But we were coming to the end of our journey, and it was time to go back to Dublin and from there home.
However, we had a whole day to cover the three hours to Dublin, and as you’ll recall, Dublin hadn’t left a very good first impression, so we decided to stop by Kilkenny and see one more castle on the way back there.
We were both enchanted by Kilkenny, and we ate at a darling little three-story cafe while we were there.
I got the picture of the sign for “Caladh an Treoigh” or “Castle Troy” because our pastor’s name is Troy and I wanted him to see how very difficult learning how to spell his name might have been had he been born in Ireland.
That final picture is of me in “The Butter Slip” an old alley that cuts through the buildings in a sort of secret passage between streets… but it also has actual shops in there!
Back in Dublin, we were staying at The Buswells, on the opposite side of the city from where we had been before, and the experience was night and day different.
We were greeted by Emily, an extremely cheerful and talkative host who told us a little about the hotel—it used to be four Georgian houses that got remodeled together into a single hotel. Then she handed us our key for room 401 and told us, “But it’s on the second floor… spoiler alert! We don’t have four floors.” Then she told us how to get to our room, warning us, “Hogwarts has nothing on this place!”
She wasn’t kidding.
We had to go UP three flights of stairs and then down a hallway, up a little set of three steps, to get to a kind of skyway set of steps leading down, then down another flight of stairs to get to our room.
And yes. That was the quickest way to go. We tried using the elevator, but that ended up being even more convoluted!
I did something ridiculous… and left our plug adapter at the hotel in Limerick… which discovery when we unpacked was a bit stressful, since it meant we couldn’t charge anything for the plane ride the next day, but Emily was an absolute dear and helped us find a store that had some adapters and we managed to get there before they closed!
We had some dinner at the hotel dining room, where the manager was incredible and gave us all sorts of information on the different dessert options and chatted with us for a while, and then he told us we should head on down to Donoghue’s for incredible live music.
It was super packed, so we only stayed for one song, but it was absolutely lovely and the music was wonderful.
I’m so glad we were able to see a different, far more pleasant side of this city. We went to bed Sunday evening with a much revised and improved opinion of Dublin.
Our trip wasn’t destined to end smoothly, however… as Derek received a text in the middle of the night that our flight from Dublin to Minneapolis had been cancelled and that they were going to re-book us automagically onto flights that would get us home on Wednesday…
That was not a pleasant scenario to wake up to, as Derek’s parents were scheduled to go home on Tuesday, and we really didn’t want to pay for 2 more nights in Dublin.
After much conversing with the chat-bots online and a real person on the phone, we decided not to take the flight that would connect us through Paris (though that kind of sounded fun… except that we weren’t keen on having to be stuck in France… still on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean should something happen to our connecting flight), and instead got on a flight that would take us to JFK airport in New York, where we had to claim our bags, hire an Uber, and drive to LaGuardia, where we had to re-check in and go through security so we could get back to MSP.
Not quite the relaxing non-stop flight we had anticipated, but we got home while it was still Monday, and that was the important thing!
Thanks ever so much for letting me share our Ireland adventures with you! I have really enjoyed taking you on a recap of our trip and sharing our pictures! It was a really beautiful trip and I would definitely go back. I hope you’ve enjoyed the stories and the pictures!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work on editing Towers of Might and Memory.
And prepping for the 9th Annual Silmaril Awards, which will be returning here to the blog-o-sphere on Monday, September 2!