Time for a spin in the countryside.

In the back of my mind, I have this little nagging voice that says, "don't ruin the trip to Ireland by spending too much time in the car." These were the couple of days where we kind of overdid it. The first one was necessary if we were going to do our lap; it's not a short distance from Galway to Kenmare, no matter how you dice it. But of course we couldn't just drive there, we had to check out the natural wonders on the way.

And they were, in fact, quite wonderful. I've not found that all so-called wonders are actually so, but that does not apply to either the Burren or the Cliffs of Moher. The Burren is most certainly not to everyone's taste, and to be honest, we experienced only a small part of it, which is conveniently located near a small megalithic tomb.

This is the small version of a megalithic tomb. Random tourist included for scale.

It's these weird "pavements," they call them, of limestone with grooves and ruts and layers and all kinds of shapes, and part of what's cool is that they're all filled with plants. Hundreds of flowers and different kinds of foliage. Really quite remarkable looking. There are lots of things here that make me wish I knew more about geology.

So once we were through the Burren, we headed for the cliffs. Not surprisingly, there was a long, narrow raod headed up toward the cliffs, which we could see was ending in a snarl at the parking lot. Fortunately, I had seen a sign for another car park a bit earlier, so we turned around and went that way.

From either parking lot, the cliffs are a hike. I guess it wouldn't do to let people just park up there. The place where we landed was a mere 800 meters from the cliffs. That doesn't sound that bad, does it? Of course it was all uphill and with what must have been a steady 25mph wind. So it was quite a grind getting up there, and then you had to deal with the windiness on the tops of the cliffs themselves. Fortunately, the direction was onshore, so no danger of being blown over. And really, the spots I took these pictures from had another level about 8-10 feet down, so if I'd fallen I guess I could have hurt my knee or something, but it wasn't dangerous.

It was, however, very hard to stand still and take pictures, but here's what I got.

Not too bad, for a bunch of cliffs. And, of course, since human beings are what they are, what do they need to do when they get to the very top of something?

Of course, build a tower. Why? Really, I mean it. You needed to be 40 feet higher on top of these 400 foot-high cliffs? Was the view that much better?

So back down the 800 meters in the wind and finally we were on our way to Kilmare. On the way, we got stuck in a bad traffic jam around the noted tourist town of Killarney, which should have been a warning to us. Finally got there close to 7. Looks like a nice town.

To be continued.