Before I get to day 3, some pictures from dinner day 2. We went to a place called Bloom which was under street level. It was a beautiful room and the host and service couldn't have been more charming. Eydie and I ordered the Bloom"g" tonic. Their take on a gin and tonic. It was like any gin and tonic but with mint and strawberry. The meals were, lamb carpaccio and lamb chops, lobster on potatoes, scallops on cauliflower puree, duck salad and ribeyes. We couldn't see the outside but apparently it started raining like crazy so the host plied us with Baileys until we got the all clear. It was an incredible meal and a fun night to remember. We promised the owner we would give him good social media reviews and Rebecca and I did one better by giving the Minister of Foreign Affairs the hard sell.
We met our driver this morning who will be our guide for the rest of our trip. His name is Kevin Murphy. He's a lovely man who seems to be in his early 70s maybe and gave us good gab for the 2 hour drive to our first stop. It was nice to have someone to ask all of the questions too. He's a very positive guy who is very enthusiastic about Ireland. He's also an avid golfer and so he and Otis and Eydie have plenty to talk about.
He took us first to a place called Clonmacnoise. It's pronounced just like it's spelled (clon-mac-noise). It's a settlement from the 11th century. It is basically a walled ruin with a lot of old gravestones on the banks of the river Shannon. We spent an hour or so walking around which was challenging because it was raining fairly heavily and steadily.
We stopped for lunch on the River Shannon and had seafood chowder and fried brie and fried black pudding and were waited on by perhaps the world's ditziest waitress. I won't go into it but as one example - we walked in and she asked if we needed a table for 3. We said 4. She sat us at a table for 5 and then ignored us for 10 minutes because she thought we were waiting for another person. Meanwhile, there were only about 2 other people in the place. The food was lovely however.
The rest of the ride into Galway was great but it continued to rain. We checked into our hotel and sat in the lobby and had coffee, tea and cake while they took our luggage up. We went for a walk through the town but it was quite rainy. We found solace in a pub and had a drink until the all clear and went back to our rooms for a couple hours of rest.
By dinner time the rain had stopped and we wandered through town. The restaurant we wanted was booked so we just walked next door to the pub and had a good dinner of sea trout, roast chicken and squash ravioli. On the walk back we stopped in a few pubs that had music and Otis and I forced one more pint down before heading back to our digs for the night. Oh, and this was happening. They had a chin up bar on the street and if you could hang from it with your chin over the bar for 100 seconds you won 100 Euro. We had high hopes for this guy but he dropped at 60 seconds. The crowd was very helpful telling him that he only had about 3 seconds left when he had near a minute.
Tomorrow we go to Connemara which looks to be beautiful. I hope we can see it and have a bit of non rainy time but that seems pretty rare. At least I'm sure Kevin will learn us some more stuff about Ireland and there's bound to be fries!
Cheers,
R
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