I am sitting at the entrance of Blarney Castle in the sun. Despite all weather forecasts for rain those of us visiting are lucky that the forecasts were absolutely incorrect. Rain and more rain is a common phenomenon in Ireland. Now in my hotel room back in Dublin I have just had a jacuzzi bath and feel great. The old hotel with ancient charm found me an updated room.
I returned from a three-day trip South: Galway, Cliffs of Moher, Killarney and Blarney Tour. I was going to try to do something like this by myself but this worked much better. It is too bad I could not get pictures of all the sheep, cows and horses in the fields as we drove around. The countryside is fabulously picturesque with an early spring glow. The first day we visited Connemara. [See earlier posts.]
We saw the only fjord in Ireland and Kylemore Abbey an old castle in a beautiful setting. We stayed in Galway and I think I found the best restaurant. The national initials in Ireland are B&B. The next day we went to an Abbey with a not-so-ancient graveyard. Then we continued on to an area of a barren stone landscape in a part of Ireland that that suffered the most in the potato famine.
Ireland's population was cut in half in the nineteenth century due to death by starvation and immigration to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. There are stone walls everywhere separating fields and one of the reasons is that the landscape was littered with rock and they constructed these walls with unwanted stones.
We went to the Cliffs of Moher which were amazing and even moreso since it was clear and we could see. We made a stop in Adare, a rich tourist destination with a golf course whose entrance looks more like a Presidential Palace. The shops have the ancient thatched roofs and a beautiful garden park in the middle of town.
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