Traveling in W Ireland

OK, we've laid around Knockbrown long enough. Time to go see the rest of Ireland. So we planned a 7 or 8 day driving tour of west and north country. Francie was particularly excited about the north country since we'd never been there before.

Drove up to Clare, Ennis today, stopping at the Kanturk castle and Lough Gur.

Kanturk I think, was for a time, the home of the infamous O'Malley clan, about which you can read more in

Grania, She-King of the Irish Sea

by Morgan Llywelyn

The Lough Gur area has a number of interesting sites, including several 13th century castles and

The Grange, the largest stone circle in Ireland, a magnificent artifact some 50m in diameter. While it's marked and has interpretive signs, it's in a farmers field in which he runs cattle, and asks for a donation too! Incidentally, if you're interested in this sort of thing there's lots on the web, for instance Megalithic Ireland

Planned on staying at the wonderfully homey AvonLea B&B (phone: 353-063-6821632), as we have before, but it was full. Julie took care of us though, getting us into the Greendale B&B just around the corner. It was just fine.

The main reason for Ennis (besides Julie) was Josie O'Shea. He had a sport shop in Ennis that we walked into on a previous visit. Turns out he's probably Francie's 2nd cousin. She has exchanged email with him over the years since our visit, and we were looking forward to a reunion. Surprise! His shop isn't there anymore. He sold out to a pub, reputedly for a goodly sum. Nobody seemed to know for sure where he is, but perhaps in Spain, where's he's been known to be investing in property. Oh rats.

4/20

County Galway and Oughterard
On to Oughterard today, with stops in Galway for some shopping and boat gawking.

Galway was very busy with both tourists and locals walking, shopping and pubbing along a central promanade.

Oughterard is famous for the Fough East B&B, featuring Justin, who is Connor's age and liked toy guns the last time they met, 6 years ago. At least that's why its famous in our family. It has other charms too, such as Krista, Justin's mom, who in addition to running the very finest B8B, runs a preschool daycare, rents out the back lot building, helps her husband run his very fine butcher business,

and hosts a legion of kids who show up to play in their soccer field. Did I mention Francie thinks she's Wonder Woman?

Other features of Oughterard that should not be missed include several walking trails, on the lake and along the stream near town. Also the Pizza and internet cafe on the same street as the B&B. It was so nice in Oughterard we stayed and extra day. The kids got in a lot of soccer time.

Brigit's garden, a few km south, deserves special mention. It's a garden, artwork and historic site, all managed by a non-profit. Really exceptional interpretative landscape and art.

4/23

It was hard leaving Oughterard, so hard that we had to stop and tour a shaft mine on our way out of town. Well, I mean, the way Josie goes for gems, how could we not? Turned out to be a galena mine sunk in white marble and dolermite.

A whole cave of white rock makes of an unexpected visual. It was interesting, and Josie loved all the rocks in the gift shop and the mine itself. Galena is the ore lead and silver come from. It's shiny black with a regular cubic crystal structure - very distinctive. It comes in chunks near veins of copper something in the contrasting white marble and calcite. Made it pretty easy for the guide to show us what they had to do to keep on the vein.

By the time we finished at the mine it was raining and blowing like crazy. So we just motored on through some spectacular mountain country and coastline near Louisburgh and Westport. Eventually landed in Ballina, where we stayed in the totally nondescript Down the Hill motel. This place didn't even have a sitting room, other than the bar, which was dominated by one of those one man bar bands that play Clancy Brothers Irish, and the occasional Van Morrison. But Francie liked it for some reason.

Sunday


Drove up through Joyce's country into Yeat's country. Stopped at an interesting church. Turned out to be W.B. Yeats' final resting place. Also an abbey with a circular tower that was hit by lightening in the 14th century. That must have given them pause!

Mon Apr 24 22:21:22 GDT 2006

Stayed in the Independent Hostel, a very nice place in Donegal. Couldn't decide where to go, so went to town and had a nice breakfast without the kids (they preferred to stay at the hostel and "play with the dog". Of course what they really did was turn on the TV as soon as we left. You can lead a horse to water... Anyway we eventually settled on going out the penninsuly where the overhanging cliffs are, and a big Gaeltech area with lots of churches and some pre-Christian ruins.

It was pretty cool, especially the museum in Gleann Cholm Cille.

Then across the middle of the penninsula to Artura and on to Letterkenny. This was one of the more awesome scenery drives I've seen - all high bog country and steep glaciated valleys. Hardly a soul lives up here. Just you, the turf and the wind. Oh yes, the wind. A front blew in again - it rained part of the afternoon, and blew the whole afternoon into evening. Wild spring weather.

Tue Apr 25 22:51:24 GDT 2006

Stayed in the Port Hostel in Kilkenny. Not too well maintained, but has potential. Next morning wandered the length of the "longest main street in Ireland", mostly Francie hitting the charity shops, but also me oogling the baked goods in a bakery, Josie checking out the jewelry shops and Connor the music and computer game shops. By the time we got to the end of the street Connor was tired of something and wandered off. We headed back to the car expecting to find him there, but he wasn't. There's only one street he'd be on, so we went back up main. Didn't find him. Dropped Francie off to walk back and went around to check at the hostel. No Connor. Meanwhile Francie called the Garda, and I came back to the central square. On a hunch I said, "Check that game shop over there." Sure enough, he'd been in there for an hour or more playing some stupid game, not even thinking we might be wondering where he was.

This latest bit of arrogance comes after a week of obnoxious, rude misbehavior on his part. Francie decided she wasn't going to have any more of this and we should just go back to Bandon. I was pretty tired of the warfare too, so went along with her. 6 hours later we were back in Bandon. It doesn't feel good to have done this. We basically gave in to Connor's dislike of road sightseeing. He's really hurting our family and I don't know what to do about it.

End of road trip.

Barcelona

Apr 5-9

Having had enough of cold and rain in Ireland for the moment, and knowing we wanted to at least get a glimpse of "The Continent", I got on Ryanair's website and looked for where we could go for cheap. Although Corghaigh remains a backwater, with flights limited to Dublin and London, Ryanair has recently expanded offerings from Shannon. We could go to Barcelona (Girona, actually) for E29. Hurrah, although that doesn't count the 1 hour bus ride to Barcelona for another E11.

So without a thought to planning, off we go. Well, actually a day or so before we left I finally found a hostal (that's the correct spelling) that had room (the week before Easter is the start of vaction in Spain).

Hostal Eden is right off Carrer de Gracia and Ramblas Cataluyna, pretty much the center of Barcelona (which BTW is pronounced Barthelona).

There are Gaudi designed buildings all around, and Ramblas Cataluyna has a large central plaza used for markets and just going for walks.


Speaking of walkies, we noticed that in Barcelona everybody cleans up after their dogs, unlike Ireland or Istanbul. The city is very clean, and despite all the warnings about pickpockets we never felt threatened or in danger in any way.

Preparations for Palm Sunday were well underway. There were vendors selling palm fronds and frond creations in the central plaza all week.

On Sunday there was a large crowd gathered before the Christ symbol singing and pounding the palm creations on the pavement. They take Catholiscm seriously here.

Not knowing much about Barcelona, and lacking return calls from our friends who had lived here, we got 2 day tickets for a tourist bus. This allowed us to ride around with the other tourists in a topless double decker, see the sights, getting on and off when we wanted. It's a good introduction to a big city I guess, at least to the tourist parts.

The most spectacular building in Barcelona, possibly the most amazing in the world is Sagrada Familia. This temple, designed by Gaudi, was started in the late 1800's and is still under active construction. It's not expected to be completed before 2020. Part of the reason for the long construction time is the founders decreed it would be built only with donated funds. The other part is that some of the structures envisioned by Gaudi simply couldn't be built before the middle of the 20th century. There are elements that have been deleted from the plan as too difficult (at least for now). He designed many of the structures using a inverted load model, hanging weights from strings to see in a very visual way where the lines of force are. From there it's a simple matter to invert the model and put compression columns where the tension strings were, yielding a minimum material design.

The result is an open, organic structure with graceful flowing lines. Much of the design work he did was at odds with current practice and many believed it would not stand. However, modern computer analysis has confirmed the validity of his work.

We also spent most of an afternoon at Tibidabo amusement park on top of ??, which it shared with a church. I didn't think much of the amusement park, but the ride up on a 100 year old tram and a "funicular" was fun. Oddly, the tram wasn't running any more when we came back down so we had to hoof it the rest of the way down.


The popular food in Barcelona is tapas, basically starters or finger food. Pork, salmon, stinky cheese, aubergine and roasted pepper on crispy bread, or chicken croquets and fries. But squid, cuttle fish and octopus seemed to be the most popular, and certainly the cheapest.


People here live to a different rhythm than the rest of Europe. Many shops close from 2-4PM, which is when lunch is served. Many restuarants don't start serving dinner until 8:30 or so, and serve dinner into the wee hours. There is talk of changing this to conform to the rest of the EU, but I think it ought to go the other way. A midday nap seems a most civilized way to get through the day.


There were other parts of the city, including the Olympic park and waterfront that I would like to have seen, but it was time to move on.