Connemara

Yesterday I visited another popular destination in County Galway: Connemara. I was not really sure what the attraction was to Connemara, not having heard much about it, but the tour buses go there so I decided it couldn't be too bad a place. We tried another tour company this time. O'Neachtain Tours got our business but I'm not sure I would take their tours again. The guide was not as good as the one from Healy Tours.

The Connemara tours have more photo stops along the way to the main destination. At our first stop, we saw a few houses with thatched roofs.


The cozy Irishness of this house is marred slightly by the telephone lines, in my opinion, but I suppose we shouldn't deny the Irish modern comforts to keep them picturesque.


Molly and I hung back from the group when they went back to the bus to get good pictures of ourselves in front of the Irish cottages. As a result (and because I stopped to take pictures for my flower post) we had to sprint to catch the bus. In all likelihood they would not have left without us, but we were not taking chances.


We drove through bog land. This picture (taken from the bus) shows what is called "blanket bog" because it covers the land like a blanket. There is also a bottomless lake which I did not manage to get a photo of.


At our next stop, our tour guide pointed out this leprechaun house, which is about the size of a dog house. We looked for gold hidden in the grass but we didn't see any.


Across the street from the leprechaun house was a little waterfall and we all took turns taking each other's pictures in front of it. There was no gold here, either.

Kylemore Abbey was our main destination for the day. We spent a total of two hours there and that included lunchtime. The abbey was once a castle built by a surgeon from Manchester. He lived there with his wife who fell in love with the Connemara region. When she died young, he could no longer bear to live in the castle he had built for her so he sold it. It changed hands many times before finally becoming the Benedictine abbey it is today.


The view of the abbey from across the water is very impressive. As the bus got closer, we could see it better and better. It is set at the bottom of a mountain and about three quarters of the way up the mountain is a white statue of Jesus. I could not get a good picture of the statue because I was too far away, but it's really cool to see.

The inside of the abbey is a sort of museum where things are set up as though people still live there. The sisters do live in the building but not the part where people walk through all the time.


There was a very old piano so I had my picture taken beside it. I put my backpack down to take the picture and when I bent down to pick it up again I almost knocked the chair and the partition over. It would have been a very unfortunate circumstance if I had dismantled the entire drawing room with my tourist backpack.


At the end of the short tour through the abbey, I lit a candle and put my name in the guest book. I was an idiot and spelled my own name wrong, but not as much of an idiot as the twenty people before me who wrote the wrong date on the paper.


We also visited an old Gothic church on the grounds of the abbey. It was very small but very pretty and built with different shades Connemara marble running through it.

On our way to eat lunch, we were fooling around and generally acting like Americans on vacation and we took really corny pictures of ourselves on this big flat rock. There are mountains in the distance and the cloud cover was pretty neat. We had a different weather day than we had for the Cliffs, but not necessarily bad. We didn't see the sun all day, but it didn't rain either. I like the clouds sometimes.


We met these older tourists because they offered to take a group picture of us. Most of them are from Oklahoma, but a few are from Utah and they were so awesome. When we were posing for our picture, they kept saying how they wanted us to marry their sons and how beautiful we all were. They all had the midwestern accent and it was so funny. We took their picture, too, of course, and we all sang a few rounds of "Oklahoma," "Goin' to the Chapel," and even "Amazing Grace." These are my new favorite tourists.


One of our last photo stops after Kylemore was at a place where we could see the mountains really well. I absolutely love mountains (one of the reasons I love West Virginia) so this was really cool.


And here is me with the mountains. There was also a very big rock to climb on during this stop and that was fun. I have many more pictures from Connemara, but these are the best. Although I enjoyed my trip to the Cliffs of Moher more than the one to Connemara, it was still a great day. It's hard not to have a fun time in Ireland.