A Drive up the West Coast of Ireland - Day 2

A fantastic night’s sleep and Marde and I were ready to head out for another long day of driving.  We left Clifden around 11 AM after a large breakfast.  The day’s drive started much less eventful than the previous and I felt I had possible overcome the hump of comfortableness of driving this stupid car.  My starts were not exactly smooth, but at least they were happening at all.

We headed North, destination Westport, and drove out of County Galway and into the unknown.  We headed through Cleggan and then to Rinvyle Point.  We had seen a nice drive in the area on one of the tourist brochures we picked up in the hostel but somehow missed the sign pointing us in the right direction.  The roads started to get narrower, then they were unpaved.  Suddenly, we were on a one way farm dirt road passing tractors, acres of livestock and about a dozen or so people who followed the car with their knowing gaze, “another lost tourist.” We were completely lost.  For about an hour we drove around every road, sidestreet, paved or unpaved.  We were determined that we were going the right way, but that the roads were just this small.  We were wrong.  Eventually, we turned back around and headed where we came from.  We saw a decent sized passenger van (which NEVER would have been able to fit down most of the streets we were driving on) so we decided it was probably headed in the general direction of a town.  Fortunately, we were right and we ended up right where we had started.

Getting lost was actually pretty high on my list of priorities for this trip, so I wasn’t exactly bothered with the little sidetrip.  We head out of the area and on through Letterfrack and back past the Kylemore Abbey.  If you had told me the day before that the amount of sheep we saw on the side of the road was small, I would have laughed.  Today.  I understand.  There were sheep EVERYWHERE.  On the road, on the mountain, on the guardrail, on other cars.  It was madness. 

We stopped in Leenaun on the Killary Fjord for lunch at a lovely little pub which served four things: chowder, ham toasties, Guinness and Bulmers.  My kind of place.  The Killary Fjord was beautiful and we meandered around the area through the Dhulough Pass and North towards Westport.  The scenery was again, beautiful, with waterfalls, lakes, trickling streams and snow-capped mountains. 

Because we felt like getting lost again, we turned down a street near Old Head promising a castle (or so a sign seemed to say). But we found out quickly that the little symbol that looks like a castle is actually supposed to be a SAND castle and thus pointed us in the direction of the beach – which was nice – but not what we were looking for.  Finally we pulled into Westport and checked into our amazing hostel in an old mill building.  Our room was a stone lined (and freezing cold) dorm room with SO much character.  We grabbed some food from the Tesco for dinner and then went trad session hopping.  The trad sessions here were fantastic, and we stumbled in a bar with an adorable kid playing the fiddle (extremely well).  We stayed out pretty late as the music was going for hours and I’m typically pretty bad at saying no to another cider. 

Comments

[kool]

kool dude