I finished the last blog by telling two lies, although I didn’t know it at the time. I said we were going to climb Croagh Patrick and we didn’t and I said we were going to an Irish music festival, which we sort of did, but not the way we were thinking.  The mountain climb came down to us having our dog with us.  We’d assumed that Ireland was a dog friendly as Britain, or much of mainland Europe, but it isn’t.  A lot of places on farmland strictly ban dogs and Croagh Patrick is one of those. Ipso facto, we never set one barefooted toe on Irelands holy mountain.

Chloe, the dog in question, is also not allowed in too many pubs and the music festival was spread throughout Louisburg’s pubs and town hall.  We thought maybe we could check things out one at a time and as we hustled Kerry into the first venue at the allotted time, everything was going to plan.  That was until she realised it was a school performance and the doors were shut before she could silently slip outside. 

She said it was delightful, and insightful to witness the Gaelic speaking community come together to express pride in their culture.  But I’m glad I didn’t go, I’m not a parent which means I can be honest, it was a school performance and the standard at these things is normally pretty shit.

We’ve done a bit of too-ing and fro-ing the past couple of days, much of it kind of lost in Connemara, which is blessed with lakes, mountains, tiny towns and coastline… all of them simply too beautiful for me to describe. We spotted dolphins swimming past from the vantage from our camp which was metres from the beach and we could have stayed a lot longer but made up for it by amending our ferry back to Britain, which gives us a few more precious days in Ireland.

The weather has helped because the heatwave has passed but the rain has stayed away and we’ve been blessed with blue skies.  Sunshine just makes everything better.  You can see how bad life might be with poor weather because Ireland is still littered with downed trees and powerlines from Storm Éowyn back in January.

We’ve had little side trips to Galway and to the delightful little town of Cong, It was a town I faintly remembered from a trip back in sometime around 2000 with close friends, one of whom is sadly no longer with us.  I was little more than a young boy back then, to stupid to realise how lucky I was and I was stunned by surroundings of the town and Ashford Castle, which was something I never noticed 25 years ago. Later, I had a bacon and cabbage dinner in the pub where I spent a night of laughter and raised a Guinness to Andrew Goddard who was there the first time I was in town.

Galway was a pretty happening place when we visited on the May long weekend and as we walked the causeway to the lighthouse on Mutton Island, we thought we had our third Irish island in the bag.  Turns out, the lighthouse has been decommissioned and the island is now home to Galway’s sewage treatment works.  So, three islands, two of them pristine and one full of shit.

We’ve now moved South of Galway where we had an oyster dinner at Paddy Burke’s pub, got lost in the single-track roads of The Burren and found Father Ted’s house.

If I’m being honest the light was too bright to get a moody shot of the stony hills of the Burren, but I won’t complain about too much sunshine.  Unfortunately, I will complain because we are now in tour bus territory and after all those weeks of glorious isolation, tomorrow we’ll be jostling with other tourist at the Cliffs of Moher.

Life can be tough sometimes.

Kerry has been keeping up with her reels and you can find them here and here.