Galway - Here we come!

Castle ruins outside of Kinvarra

Feeling refreshed and raring to go the next morning, Liz has designated our itinerary for us to go up to Galway City to stay there for a couple of days.  Since I am just the driver, I leave it to her to figure out our directions and to plan our day.  Liz does a great job at reading maps and figuring out the mysterious Irish signs.  I know that I am in good hands when she is in the co-pilot seat.

We left Moira, our proprietress, and made our way north to Connemara.  Before we had even left town we were stopping to take pictures of some castle ruins that were just on the outskirts of Kinvarra.  It was at this point that I recalled the "Kodak moment" stops that were very prevalent on our last trip.

Kinvarra across the bay

We arrived in Galway fairly early and after a search, found the B&B we wanted to say in.  The name of our B&B was Lawndale and it sat right on Galway Bay.  Our room had a wonderful view that made up for the hard beds that came with it, however, Margaret was very nice and accommodating, given we had no reservations for a room.  The B&B was just outside of the city and seemed to be in a great neighborhood.

After settling in and getting ourselves freshened up, we decided to go into Galway and discover what it had to show us.  We parked the car and walked around Eyre Square, which is the central shopping district.  We managed to get ourselves lost a couple of times, which seemed to be quite the habit we were getting given there were no street signs and we didn't have a map.  After I got frustrated of walking in circles, we headed back to the car and went in search of Galway Cathedral.  It is a huge 16th century cathedral that takes up Galway's sky line.  It is well worth all of the traffic that we had to go through to get there.  We walked around the cathedral for a bit, taking plenty of pictures, and Liz lit her candle for her mother as she promised.

After the church, we went in search of the Irish Crystal Centre.  We browsed the pretty trinkets for a while, and I ended up buying a couple things.  We didn't take the tour because Liz didn't seem to be too into the place, so we headed back to our B&B for a rest.  While at the B&B, Liz beat me in a 2-1 Backgammon match, then we sat down to plan out our next day's events.  After looking through our tour book and the map, we decided to do a circle tour of some towns up north.

Once we had all our plans set, we were hungry for dinner and went to a pub we found in one of our books that looked good.  The difficulty came in trying to find the place with a town that doesn't really believe in street signs.  We parked the car again and decided to walk.  This was a very bad idea.  It was pouring rain and Liz had no idea where the place was.  I was at the point that I didn't care what we ate or where we had it, I just wanted out of the rain.  We stopped at the first pub we found, and Liz decided she didn't want anything from the menu because she needed "real food" not pub grub, so we had a couple of Guinness and some fried mushrooms then went to tackle the streets once more.  We still couldn't find the pub we wanted, so we settled on O'Flattery's a pub/restaurant set below a hotel that was a bit modern, but had good food and the waitress was nice.  After dinner and a couple more drinks, we were both done and ready for our beds.  We went back to the B&B and were snuggled in our beds by 9pm.  It was a hard night's sleep on those beds, but we woke up ready for another day.