Friday and Saturday, I think

Today is Saturday, I think. Yesterday we drove from Derry to Galway, which is a long drive. Have I mentioned that I'm not enjoying driving on the left side of the road? Driving is not supposed to be relaxing but it's not supposed to make your hands hurt from gripping the steering wheel either. It just wears me out. People say you get used to it but I haven't after a few hundred miles. I guess I have in that I know where to look and how to make turns, and I've gotten very accomplished at roundabouts. But every second takes intense concentration.

Our route was semi-scenic, including a drive across an island in the middle of a huge lake, It's best known for having a little cemetery that includes these sculptures, if you can call them that.

It's called the Janus statue, because those are two sides of the same stone and there's a Roman god with two faces called Janus. But it's not, because the Romans were never in Ireland and it's a Celtic deity of some sort.

From there, it was a long slog (almost literally, as it rained for much of it) to Galway, but we made it to the very nice but very odd hotel where we're spending 3 nights. More about that later, but it was already fairly late by the time we go here, so we had dinner and went to bed.

Today, we went to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands off the shore of Galway. It's a nearly deserted, small island. Why people ever chose to live here is beyond me, but they did, and for a long time. One thing they did here was build a lot of stone walls. I'm not sure why, but there are hundreds of them, dividing the island into a lots of little parcels, which I can only assume were significant at some time.

We rented a tandem bicycle and rode all the way across the this ancient fort called Dún Aenghusa. By the way, a lot of things on this island start with Dun, but only some have the little accent mark. I have no idea why. All the signs are in Gaelic and there's no real way to figure it out. The is huge and made of stone, which is appropriate for a stone age fort. It's dramatically set up on top of a sheer cliff. Again, I don't know what it was they were trying to defend, aside from themselves.

I realize, I never took a picture of the fort. It's a huge circular ring of piled up rocks at the top of a hill strewn with stones place for the express purpose of making it difficult to get at. Fortunately, there's a path through some of the hill but it was not an easy walk up the hill, which I guess was the idea. The views were incredible.

Then we rode back. I'd never ridden a tandem bike before. It was fun. The island is hilly but nothing steep or really hard. I should note that as we've seen most places, there are not a lot of Americans here. We heard lots of languages, some Spanish and French and some unrecognizable, but really as much Irish as anything.

We went to and fro by ferry, which was that weird mix of efficiency and chaos that seems very Irish to me. We ate dinner back at the hotel in one of the many lounges, the 'highlight' of which was a server tripping on I don't know what and dropping an entire tray of food on the floor. He was visibly very upset, like to the point of tears, and our server, who was in the middle of taking our order, ran over to console him. I thought his empathy was very charming. Apparently the guy was brand new here and is a shy young man and was therefore crushed by the mishap. Hope he's okay.

After that to bed. Sunday is Ronnie's birthday. We're going to the Galway Races, but the weather has put kind of damper on that, so to speak. It'll be worth a look anyway.