Bus Trip to Galway (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Not Break the CD Into a Thousand Pieces)

I just want to sleep.

That's my sentiment pretty much every day at 6am, but especially when I'm in another country on vacation. I do not want to be awake.

Today's adventure is a day trip to the Cliffs of Moher, which are big and nature-ish and cliff-like and on the other side of the island. So we boarded a bus at 6:50 in the morning, bound for Galway.

I'm not great at sleeping in transit, but was tired enough that while I couldn't sleep, my attempts to stay awake by reading were pretty much useless. Not in that I actually fell asleep for any appreciable length of time, but more in that I'll have to re-read a bunch of things because it was all an incoherent jumble.

We stopped briefly in Athlone for some coffee, and then it was on to Galway by about 10am for a short tour of the city by a tour guide who, though very good at her job, was also at least an order of magnitude more awake than everyone she was dealing with.

Happily, Galway is relatively small and walkable, so running around the streets was pretty doable, even for a big large touristy group that is clearly a big large group of tourists. We were brought to a market street (appropriately, on Market Street) and were given the option of splitting off to either buy things in the market or walk around St. Nicholas' Church, which is big and very old and very made of stone. I wound up in the church (which had a huge number of memorial plaques and was getting ready for Easter services), while Marina and Alice headed off to the market. So good times for all.

After corralling the group, we boarded the bus again (minus two people, evidently) for the trip up the coast to the Cliffs of Moher with a few brief stops along the way to get out, walk to smaller cliff-like structures and take in the natural beauty of the place, mostly in the form of people taking pictures of it. Not that I was immune to that.

I assume this is from the future cover of an album of terrible smooth jazz I will make at some point.

We got a brief stop in a pub who clearly deals mostly with big obnoxious tour buses and continued to the Cliffs up roads that I'm really, really glad I wasn't driving on.

We were told, when we arrived, that we'd have two hours, and couldn't understand what we'd need all that time for.

As it turns out, we'd need that time for running around and looking at things. Which was incredible. I know that most of this has been repeated insistences that I don't have the ability to describe any of the scenery in anything close to a grand enough manner, and this isn't any different.

Look at this. This is nonsense.

One thing that this side-trip did teach us is that Skye was effectively deserted when we were there. It was awesome. Sure, there were some folks that we thought might break into our car and some awkward co-tenants at the B&B, but overall, there were just very few people. The Cliffs, on the other hand, have something like a dozen or so busloads of people, so while it's beautiful, there are just a ton of people running around doing things. Which is fine, but makes actually using the pathways a little slow and inconvenient.

Also, I've learned that my fear of heights seems to be based on whether the heights are man-made? I guess? I usually don't like heights at all, but as a city-dweller in a very flat part of the country, I'm more likely to encounter heights in the context of a building. For some reason, I was much more comfortable near the cliff edge. I have no idea why that should be the case.

We blew through our two hours and were back on the bus to Galway, and then to Dublin. At this point, the lack of sleep caught up with me and my attempts to stay awake to Dublin by listening to an audiobook were foiled; I drifted in and out and was absolutely baffled by the time we got to Galway. The trip back to Dublin was three hours, but it was three hours with the same four songs on what I assume is just a collection of traditional music that we'd had all day. We got off on the north bank of the Liffey and I swore that if I ever heard another about ripples in the rockpools I would set fire to something.

We crossed over into Temple Bar, which was orders of magnitude more lively. Street bands, pubs full of people, and general chaos. First things first, we went and bought the bottle of Talisker, then found a Mongolian BBQ restaurant (which helped my mood immensely, as I was still in a foul state after the bus ride),  We stopped by one of the less-crazily-populated pubs as it felt like we were more or less required to, then hailed a cab and headed for the hotel.

And that's it. That's pretty much our trip. Alice will continue on to other destinations, but we're headed home. Both Ireland and Scotland were great, but I'm also really looking forward to vehicles being on the side of the road I'm accustomed to.

Everything's Closed

The cab driver was sort of wrong!

Mostly still right though.

Our day started with a walk toward the city center, and here I should point out that Marina and Alice put a lot more faith in my Cub Scout-level sense of orienteering than they probably should. Happily, there are a bunch of signs indicating where the city center is, so we figured we'd walk that way and hope that we ran into something. Tomorrow's an early day, and we'd been hearing that everything will be closed, so we figured it'd be a relatively early night.

Happily, we eventually ran into the Trinity College gym! Which was not terribly exciting. But which was connected to the rest of Trinity College, which seemed to fit our goal of something that was both interesting to walk around and, more importantly, actually open. After some brief consideration of joining a walking tour (which we decided against in favor of standing within earshot of one for a few minutes), it occurred to us to check out the Library and the Book of Kells, because that seemed the sort of thing we were supposed to do as tourists.

Unfortunately, mostly every other thing was closed, so the closest we got to experiencing the majesty and beauty of the Library was in seeing the majesty of the line from across the courtyard. And that's sort of fine.

After a quick lunch, we did something that I'd been resisting. I know that earlier in this series, I'd mentioned that I've been trying to get over my aversion to being a super obvious tourist despite clearly being a tourist, but I'd resisted the hop-on/hop-off buses. Until now. Marina and Alice argued successfully for it (reasoning that among the things that were open, most closed early for Good Friday, so it made sense in terms of seeing things quickly and as a means of transport).

Cliche of riding around on a giant bus and staring at things aside, it actually served its purpose. If nothing else, it was a quick and easy background of a few of the locations we'd intended to swing by later in the day, along with constant reminders that everything was closed and that it was odd to stop at Guinness and Jameson and have no one get on or off the bus. Still, covered more ground than we'd have been able to on foot, even if we wound up more or less back where we started.

We walked around the things that were open by virtue of being impossible to close (the exterior of Dublin Castle and Christchurch Cathedral), through what I understand is a very subdued version of the Temple Bar area and into a bunch of touristy shops (one of which we learned was open until 9, so we'd head back there for late-night-for-Good-Friday-I-Guess souvenir shopping after dinner).

We actually wound up staying out a bit later than expected. Before heading back to our hotel, we stopped in at a grocery store to find some water, some prawn flavored snacks and, behind the counter and unavailable to buy today because of the alcohol ban, the bottle of Talisker that we'd lost at the airport! Success! We'll have to revisit tomorrow after getting back from the other side of the island.

We headed home, with Marina and Alice again trusting that I knew where I was going. Surprisingly, I actually did (allowing for a short detour the long way around St. Stephen's Green.) Dublin is really, really walkable, and walking home allowed a lot of opportunities for getting to hear what appears to be some sounds from Space Invaders, which apparently is used for the "It's safe to cross now" sound at pedestrian crossings. I'm a fan.


The hotel bar is actually packed, as apparently hotel bars are exempted from the alcohol sales prohibition, so everyone who's staying here is currently down there.

For us though, it's late and tomorrow, we've got to be up at 5:30 to make it to the bus that will take us to Galway and the Cliffs of Moher.