A String of Days

We woke up too late.

Could’ve been the long, overnight flight, the travel, the time change.

Or the whisky and Guinness. But by the time we pulled ourselves out of bed, it was 9AM. The plan was to head to Rossaveel and take the ferry to the Aran Island of Inis Mor. As it turns out, there’s only one ferry a day, and it was at 10:30AM. Too late for that!

Plan B: head out to Kylemore Abbey in the Connemara area. The plan was to do the “Connemara loop”. The Abbey itself is about 1.5 hours from Galway, but my camera and I insisted on stopping a few places.

Ok, a few dozen places.

The road up to the abbey is narrow, winding, but beautiful. Amazing Irish scenery graces the way; it is, however, what I come to term a “photographer’s nightmare” – beautiful scenery, no room to stop!! You see, the “highways” in Ireland are just about wide enough for one vehicle in each direction – there are no shoulders and barely any spots to stop. I spot some great scenes, but short of stopping in the middle of the road, there’s no where to stop the car!

Still, we do find a couple of places and I manage to capture some of the Irish landscape:

We get to Kylemore Abbey – the setting for this old home is amazing! Nestled at the bottom of a mountain, facing a lake, it just oozes calm, peace and serenity. We walk around the abbey, visit the nearby Gothic Church, and slowly stroll through the old-growth forest.

We hop onto the shuttle bus that takes us to the Victorian Walled Garden, but unfortunately the place is about to close down, so we must literally rush through the place. I manage to fire off a couple of good shots, but we could have easily spent much more time in there. The colours and textures of the wall were just amazing.

We loop back around Connemara National Park and head back to Galway.

Tonight, we have been more moderate in our intake of whisky and Guinness. It’s off to bed earlier, as tomorrow it’s “up and at ’em” early to catch the ferry to the Aran Islands!

Good night!