Ireland

Ireland
My favorite picture of the Irish countryside

20 February 2009

Enough about the internet

We have the internet back at Gort! That is all I'm going to say because if I get too excited about it, it might go away again...

Now that the problem is fixed, I will tell you about our trip to the Burren we took on 7 February! We started out waiting at reception for the bus at 9:30. We saw a bus drive by, then leave, so we got a little nervous that it was our bus that left - so we call the tour company, they say he'll come back, random guy comes and asks if we're going on a tour. We say yes and get in the van (unmarked, white van...maybe not a good idea?) Halfway to Eyre Square, Katherine gets a call from our bus driver asking where we are. We start thinking we are epic failures at tours and that we're on the wrong bus, but it turns out they just had two people coming after us! We left Galway at 10:00 and our first stop was at the Aillwee Caves. They were discovered by a guy chasing his dog in the 1930s who then proceeded to keep them a secret for 20 years! We got to see 1000 year old bear bones (bears are now extinct in Ireland) and lots of cool rock formations. We then met up with a group that started the tour at 11:30 in Ballyvaughan and saw a cool church while we waited. We then went to see the Dolmen (our tour guide described it as the Irish Stonehenge). It's basically two slabs of stone standing upright with another slab ontop like a roof. The Celts used to sit inside it to connect to the other world without the distractions of this world. The terrain in the Burren is so rocky! To get up to the Dolmen, we had to kind of hop from rock to rock....we kind of felt like mountain goats! Our next stop was the Cliffs of Moher...this was my 3rd time there! On the way to the Cliffs we saw some pretty cool castles and a fairy ring! Legend says that if you tear down a fairy ring and build on top of it, your house will be cursed! Naturally, people tend to leave them alone. We went to some other cliffs after the Cliffs of Moher that I liked a lot better...probably because we could actually go out to the edge of them and get really cool pictures! I wouldn't go out to the edge, though, so Kelsey had to take a picture for me! :) Then, on our way back to Galway, we stopped by a castle where my camera died (actually, the batteries became exhausted) so I didn't get very many pictures of it. :( Here are some pictures from our trip:


A cool waterfall inside the Aillwee Cave


The Dolmen


Fairy ring!


Cool cliffs
Just a pretty picture :)

No comments:

Post a Comment