We both had a better night sleep last night and got about our morning routines: some breakfast, worked on some photos, and we packed everything up. We were happy this time our walk from the apartment to the train depot was just 10 minutes. We walked in some sunshine for a while, which made us happy and then we hopped on the train to the western part of the island of Ireland, the city of Galway.
You can go across the entire island of Ireland in less than three hours. As we went on the train, Dick entertained himself by looking at cows and horses, sheep, and how green everything is in Ireland.
Galloway would be our place that we will settle in for the next four nights. We’re feeling appreciative to not have to pack up quite so often for our next two stays.
We arrived at the train station and it was an easy eight minute walk to get to Saint Bridgets Terrace where we would be checking in, kind of a townhouse with five different separate rooms and shared living room and kitchen. We’re ready to settle a bit more. That will be just fine and we were able to use a little time in the afternoon to do some laundry. It was our first go actually using the washing machine in a place that we’re staying. Most places do not have a dryer, but use4 clotheslines. Between the two of us, we were able to negotiate the washing machine with only a little bit of some problems trying to figure out how to get it unlocked at the end of the cycle. Eventually, we got all the laundry out. We were hopeful that we get things dry before the rains come back. The sun came out briefly in the afternoon and everything did dry on the lines. We felt rather proud of ourselves having negotiated laundry for such a long trip. So far, we have paid twice to have it washed and dried, and we also had a host family who washed and dried clothes for us. We are getting to laundry while traveling specialists.
Galway is a small city and there’s going be a lot of things happening here over the next several days because it will be the start of the International Art Festival. We are glad to arrive before things get too crazy and we hope we will enjoy some of the events during this time. We heard from our Airbnb host that if we wanted to get tickets, we needed to snap them up soon, and we were able to negotiate the ticket website to grab a couple of tickets for two days from now for an interesting play.
We did some initial exploring of Galway by walking downtown to a farmers market that had been held by old church, literally for centuries. We were late in the day and there wasn’t too much available. However, we were able to stop at a nice vegetable stand and pick up some potatoes, mushrooms, onions, peppers, summer squash for a nice potato sauté tonight. When we were paying and talking to the woman at the stand about what we were going to cook some dinner, she said, “just between you and me and the wall, I would’ve picked out some better potatoes for you than the ones you picked. Some true Irish potatoes.” We had picked out some generic looking potatoes, but put them back and paid a little extra for the genuine Irish potatoes complete with dirt on them. When we got back to our Airbnb, no one else was doing any cooking and we took over the kitchen and chopped and cooked up some really nice veggies for dinner. We were not certain our pallet could tell the difference between generic potatoes and genuine Irish potatoes, but they tasted really good.
We rested a bit and contemplated going out to catch some traditional music or enjoy some of the street life. However, in an abundance of caution, we decided to stay in to get some extra rest. Our host told us that Covid was fairly rampant around. Dick just read an article saying one of the best things you can do if you’re vaccinated against Covid is also make sure you’re getting enough sleep. So we decided to go for that.
Off to bed early knowing we are for several more days in Galway.
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