By Stephanie
For our first weekend adventure we took the bus from Galway to Letterfrack to visit Connemara National Park. The national park is beautiful, with some truly challenging hikes providing an incredible experience of traversing the countryside, and also providing amazing views across the area, including Kylemore Abbey and the Atlantic ocean. That is, if you’re not completely fogged in or blown off the mountain! We had to abandon our first attempt to climb Diamond Hill on Saturday as it was simply too wet and incredibly windy, but we got to the top on Sunday. Here’s a picture of some goats we saw on our way up the “hill” on Saturday, and of us (pretty wet) on our way down.
So many lessons learned here! #1, small towns in Ireland don’t necessarily have a lot of accommodations: with everything booked in late March for some inexplicable reason, we ended up about 3 miles down the road at a B&B. That didn’t seem like a problem, we figured we could walk a few miles if needed. #2, much of Western Ireland consists of narrow roads bordered by hedges and walls, and cars that drive VERY fast; walking these roads is not wise! No, problem I figure we can call an Uber. #3, small towns in Ireland don’t have Uber: happily our B&B host directed us to the two taxis in town: Daniel and Patsy (yes, he directed us to them by name).
Daniel, who drove us around a few times over the two days, was incredibly knowledgeable about history, and by the time we got to Kylemore Abbey we were thoroughly up to speed on its romantic and tragic history (built by Mitchell Henry between 1868 and 1870 for his beloved wife, Margaret, who died in 1874 after contracting a fever in Egypt; Mitchell build a mausoleum as a memorial, never remarried, and when he died 36 years later his ashes were placed with Margaret.)
We also had a great dinner (and lunch on Sunday) at a local pub, enjoying local oysters and other seafood, and of course the local beer!