Irish Honey

This is only… one and a half years late but, uh, here it is: One time, Richard and I got suuuper married and then went to Ireland.

Why choose Ireland for your honeymoon, you ask? We came up with a vacation theory that we should alternate “doin’ shit” vacations with  “doin’ Jack shit” vacations, and our last vacation before the honeymoon was to Hawaii which, despite traveling for 10 days with all of Richard’s immediate family (love ya!), was still squarely in the relaxing, “Jack shit” category.

So we chose to “do shit” this time around, and we were feeling a European vibe. I’d been to Ireland for a few days while studying abroad and loved it, but it was a new destination for Richard. Despite my ginger features and freckles, I don’t think I have much Irish in my background—-but I do love what I know of the culture, the land, the wild broodiness, the down-to-earthiness, the music, and the folklore. I am happy to be mistaken for someone with Irish heritage. On the last night of our trip, our hostel receptionist asked if I was from Western Ireland because he thought he detected an accent. I died a little.

It was a whirlwind trip, only 5 days including travel, and if I had to do it over again I would build in juuuust a little more time. We covered a lot of ground, from Dublin to Galway to near the Dingle Peninsula back to Dublin, and although it’s a small country and easy enough to cover by car I wish we’d had more time to just relax and enjoy each spot.

Anyway, as an excuse to look back through our photos and reminisce, here’s how it went.

Day 1: Galway

We landed at a reasonable time in the morning, headed straight to pick up our rental car, opened the car door and remembered—oh right. They drive on the left side of the road here. Huh. Look, we had a lot of shit to keep track of with the wedding so the most planning we did for this trip was to figure out how we were going to get there, where we were going to stay, how we were going to get around, and purchased Rick Steves’ Drink Your Way through Europe: Ireland Edition. Or whatever it’a called.

So, dead tired after a long weekend and a transatlantic flight, we quickly mentally prepared for a serious disconnect, got in on the wrong sides of the car and zooped off to our first accommodation: a B&B just outside the city of Galway.

We arrived at Castle View House, the cute new-construction-making-a-slight-effort-to-pass-for-old B&B, and… couldn’t get in. No one was home. No one would answer the phone number we had. So we waited in the car, and eventually the nice innkeeper showed up and let us in. She recommended we take the afternoon to explore The Burren, which we politely ignored in favor of a nap. I felt really guilty for napping when we should be doing, but, whatever. I’m a married lady now and I do what I want. Breakfast in my room, thank you. (#DowntonAbbeyreference)

We roused ourselves around dinner time, then drove into Galway to check out a restaurant Mr. Drunk Steves recommended: Ard Bia at Nimmos. The place was awesome, actually a bit hipster now that I think about it, and my clearest memory was of the ambience and these lovely, wax-caked drippy candles everywhere. I believe mason jars were involved too. We walked around the town a bit then called it a night.

Day 2: The Burren and the Cliffs of Moher

We were the only ones in the B&B, but we got up at a reasonable time for breakfast because inkeepers make the rules at B&Bs. We had a proper Irish breakfast, the best part of which were the casingless sausages. I love me some sausage but there are always a few bites that make me question whether I really want to be eating something stuffed into some sort of translucent cocoon that’s maybe a size too small. Even now that it’s usually not intestine lining, it still grosses me out. Especially that first bite when you break into it.

And also somewhere in the middle, where the insides have sort of slipped out of the casing, onion-ring style, and you get a really nice bite of just the insides followed by a gross, stretchy bite of just the outsides.

Also the last bite is gross. I usually leave the sausage butts on my plate like a child with bread crusts. All the other four bites are good though.

Sidenote: our B&B was on the outskirts of Galway, in Oranmore actually, which was a very very small town. I don’t necessarily remember this, but according to my Twitter feed we witnessed the “local police working on a swan-related traffic jam.” I can’t dig up the photo evidence but it probably looked something like this:

Anyway. Irish fryup was delish, and off we headed to explore the Galwayish countryside. That’s probably not right, you’re thinking to yourself. It’s probably something like Gallish but that sounds too much like Gaullish and that’s in France, so who’s culturally-dense now?

Our main destination of the day was the Cliffs of Moher, and on the way we found a rather unassuming castle, Dunguaire Castle, just outside of Kinvara, to poke around. Apparently now you can tour the interior, and even enjoy a meady Medieval Banquet whilst players read Irish literature to you. How proper!

The drive to the Cliffs was lovely: beautiful moody countryside spied from hedged-in seriously-how-is-this-two-lanes??! roads. It was thrilling wondering if we’d encounter another car and trying to imagine where on earth we’d pull over to let them by.

We made it to the Cliffs of Moher, in time to wander around a bit before a rainstorm hit. They were lovely, and broody, and windy and imposing and so so green—in short everything you’d want them to be.

There were even some crazyfaces surfing at the base of the Cliffs. I mean, really.

We ducked into the cafe/museum to get some hot cocoa and coffee, then dashed back to the car to return to Galway. We made a detour to visit Poulnabrone Dolmen, ancient mystical gateway to unknown lands. It’s technically a portal tomb, built sometime between 4200 BC and 2900 BC. It was also very windy and moorish and weird things happened.

We stared down some blustery cows, hopped over clints and grykes (clints are the blocks of rock, grykes/grikes are the channels carved by water between them),  and commented expertly on the limestone (Bloomington, IN is a big producer of limestone. Just watch Breaking Away).

Back at the B&B, our kind innkeeper offered us a ride into Galway for the evening, and we had a fun journey as she picked up a friend on the way and we tried to understand what they were saying with their incredible Irish accents. We had dinner and Richard’s first Irish on-tap Guinness, then found a bar with live trad(itional) Irish music. Actually we walked by/in two bars that were way too crowded, then ended up at Taaffes Bar in front of a fantastic band. Hearing live traditional music was at the top of my must-do list, so it was probably my favorite night.

(Sorry for the crap video quality, I was imbibing.)

To be continued, in Southwest Ireland, in a castle!