We’ve appreciated some days that haven’t started so early and we had enough time today for Patti to work on some more of the text for the blog while Dick cooked us a hearty breakfast and then uploaded photos for the last several days. Then, we were off for a tour up into the hills to a beautiful area north of Galway.
This is a smaller van tour with only 12 tour members. We decided it was worth splurging for the small group rather than the bus tour of this beautiful area.
The tours all play music sound tracks. We heard an old song that we had heard before called “The Galway Girl”.
Michael was our driver and guide. He had a lot of information about the area and the history. Our tour would especially focus on going around the largest lake in Ireland. This is one that’s really known as being a great fishing lake. The Connemera Lake is so popular, and generally the anglers have to make hotel reservations five years in advanced in order to come and fish.
We came to a small stone bridge which was in the 1951 movie The Quiet Man. We will now have to go home and watch that movie having taken a pictures by the bridge. Dick remembers seeing it years ago. This movie starred John Wayne and was his first movie that wasn’t a western. We would later see some other locations where the film was shot.
We made a stop at an old castle, the Aughnanure castle. We saw a number of castles on this trip, but this was a nice one. It was built in 1500. We learned about the connection of this castle to Galway. It was being part of Britain under King Henry the VIII taking over the Irish. We had a splendid tour by a docent who told us some more of the history. And then we had a chance to climb up into the tower of the castle. We read about a young woman Grace, married very young to one of the chieftains who was eventually killed, and then she took over in the role of the chieftain for many years.
It is said that the family that lived here enjoyed all kinds of music, except for bagpipes. And only did they not like piping, but they regularly killed pipers. Our guy told us a gentleman is somebody who knows how to play the pipes, but doesn’t.
And there was more opportunity to learn more about growing peat, or as they call it in Ireland ,turf. We had a chance to walk down and see the peat in process. We have become much more familiar with how peat has been such a vital source of energy in Ireland, especially with so much poverty. Now, few people cut or burn peat.
We stopped at the only fjord in Ireland. 20,000 years ago, you could have walked in ice from there to Norway. The lake and the mountains were very beautiful there. Then to a charming town Leenan where we had time on our own for lunch and strolling the streets. This towns is on the only fjord in Ireland.
After lunch , we made of stop at a Joyce’s Sheep Farm where we saw an amazing demonstration of using dogs to move sheep around. These were well trained, intelligent dogs, border collies and it was so fun to watch them. They were could quickly, on command, bring some
sheep from an upper pasture down lower. We also had time to pet some sheep and some dogs. Our driver called it puppy therapy with the puppies. Actually these puppies were so sweet and our whole group totally loved playing with the puppies. And we got to bottle
feed a couple pet sheep and then watch Joe, the sheep farmer, hand shear a sheep. What a fine visit!
All along, they were beautiful scenes of wilderness driving near Connemera National Park. We saw so many mountains and lakes. Part of what we hoped was to get out of the cities and experience some of Ireland’s fantastic countryside. This was a success.
We ended our tour in the little village of Cong, where our driver pointed out a few more scenes from the John Wayne The Quiet Man movie. We could’ve had a chance to walk around and see some more sites there, but everyone was pretty worn out after eight hours of touring. So we all voted to return back to Galway.
During our time in the British Islands, we have come to look a lot at the clouds, trying to read the signals. We figured we would be happy if we managed to dodge rain for the day, but would not have been surprised if we needed our rain gear that we brought along. As it turns out, it rained for a few minutes while we were on the van, but the rest of the time the weather held. There was a lot of gray and foreboding clouds, but no downpours.That was lovely.
When we got back to the city, the sun was out. We strolled back to our flat, and then just hung out for a bit. We then went down to the kitchen and cooked quite a good meal with leftovers from our previous cooking. It was nice just to kick around and not have to deal with restaurants or shopping. A little more relaxing, and working on the blog time this evening. Our sights were now turned to the last move we were going to make, because tomorrow we leave for London.
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