Kylemore Abbey & Other Stuff

Back at the airport. Dublin airport this time – homeward bound! I say that with an exclamation point as if I am excited (and a part of me is), but let’s be real. If I had an opportunity to stay here another month or more, I would do so in a heartbeat.

But since we are going home, I’m excited to go home. :-)

Speaking of going home, we're in a bit of a funny position right now. We're at the airport too early. Has that ever happened? Our drive to the airport coincided with rush-hour traffic, so we gave ourselves plenty of time. And accidentally ended up here about 1.5 hours before our check-in counter opens. So we're here plenty early, but haven't even gone through security. Still, no complaints hee. I'd much rather be early. No stress. We're just chilling. Kenny so much that I think he'll be asleep within a few minutes. Aaaaand, yep. He's asleep. I'm staying up to keep watch for when our check-in counter opens. I can sleep on the plane - at least the first one.We're going to try to stay awake on the second one in order to reset our clocks and go to sleep at the right time tonight. So sorry to the Noffsingers who are picking us up - you may be picking up two sleep zombies!

But since I am just waiting here, I thought I might as well be writing. :-)

Outside of my little ode to my brother in picture form, I think I last left off after the Dingle Peninsula. Is that right? Ah, not quite. I guess I last wrote in Doolin, which is north of Dinlge and close to the Cliffs of Moher.

The Cliffs of Moher were kind of our last thing on our "itinerary", which would be a very generous term for the lose to non-existent plans that we had coming into the trip. There was a lot more we wanted to do, but most of it was quite a bit north and probably best saved for a better trip. There wasn't anything that we particularly wanted to do that we believed that we could do at a leisurely pace. Except I did find out that Kylemore Abbey was nearby. . . and by "nearby" I mean a couple hours - but what's a couple hours when you've driven as far as we had by that point?

I've probably pinned Kylemore Abbey (formerly called Kylemore Castle) a dozen times on Pinterest. It's one of those places that you secretly kinda think only exists on the internet, but  you can't actually go there. I figured it was Oprah's Ireland Getaway or something. I'd drooled over it for a long time (I think there's even a picture of it on my wall?), but never even thought to look up where in the world it was. I had NO IDEA it was in Ireland until we saw a picture of it on our map.

So we looked it up, and we went, and it was totally awesome. Absolutely beautiful. Every bit as beautiful as it was on the internet, if not more so. I love it when that happens. :-)

/this is a picture of our memory - use the internet to find better pics of the abbey :-)

After the Kylemore Abbey, though, we literally had no idea where to go. We got in the car and were like, "So . . .  do you have any ideas?"

So we looked at the map, and I don't for the life of me remember how we decided which direction to go (ended up going North), and we started going. I think we had a vague idea of where we wanted to end up that evening. . . but even saying that might be giving us too much credit.

We ended up on a beautiful drive (which I truly think you could say about any drive in Ireland). This drive was along Ireland's only fjord. Granted, I don't technically know what a fjord was, but I think Ireland only has one - and we were on it! It was pretty in a way that I didn't know existed in Ireland - desolate and harsh. Not nearly as green as other places had been - in some places, not green at all.

Beautiful drive! And we ended up in the town that we were aiming for: Westport. Now that I've heard about how much everyone loves Westport, I feel a little guilty and embarrassed that we nicknamed it "Worstport". Sorry, Ireland! But you have to understand, at the time we entered into town, we had been driving for awhile, we were hungry, and we didn't want to put up with traffic. Maybe it was rush hour or something else was going on, and the city wasn't greatly laid out for traffic, so it felt congested and overcrowded. Which is a bit of a shock to the system after driving for a few hours on open roads! So. . . not a great first impression. So we decided to blow through and not stop. Parking, turning around, anything sounded hard and like we didn't want to do it, so we didn't.

We blew through town and ended up finding a delightful B&B in the middle of nowhere about 20 minutes East of Westport. And they recommended dinner in - you guessed it! - Westport. We didn't have a lot of options, so we went back into town, passed all the way through town, and had dinner on the other side of town over looking the. . . lake? harbor? fjord? Whatever it was, it was beautiful, and we were greeted with a giant rainbow just to confirm we were in the right place.

We stayed at our B&B (where Ken got to pet a horse and a dog - happy days!), and the next day hit the road again! We were thinking of checking out Clare Island (because we didn't know what else to do), and so we drove through - you guessed it! - Westport. We were laughing that this town that we had decided not to like, we had now passed through 4 times. Probably more than any other town.

This was the start of two days ago. I should warn you that if I write what happened two days ago, it will probably seem like a bit of a miss-adventure. But I hope you know that we had a great time and even though things went a little skewy, I'm not complaining! We still had a great time. :-)

So it started out with us driving to the port to catch the ferry to the island . . .  which we missed by a few minutes. No worries! We weren't sure we wanted to go anyways. Plus, there were a bunch of signs for a bike race in the area, and we wanted to get out of the area before that started. So we charted a new course on some side streets to lead us over to what looked like would be a pretty drive. And we got pretty dang lost on the roads. Well, lost is a relative term. It's not like we knew where we were trying to be, exactly, so we weren't worried. AND in the middle of absolutely nowhere on a road that isn't labeled in real life and wasn't even on our map, I got one of the things I had been hoping for! Road sheep! Literally farmers (shepherds?) moving their herd from one place to another, using the road. The road was COVERED in sheep, and they all ran right by us. It was hilarious and loud and awesome and funny enough, probably a highlight of the trip for me. I'd show you a picture, but it's they're on the black camera, and that's int he black & green bag, which I'm a little bit fearful we'll never close again if we open it before we get home. (Because it's so full, not because we broke your bag, Marshall. Don't worry!). So, no pics. But it was very, very cool. Certainly not something you'd get in the tourist parts of the country!

So from those weird back-roads, we eventually popped out onto a bigger (relative statement) road - right in the middle of the bike race we were trying to avoid!!

So we and about a million bikers took a very beautiful road for a very long time.

We eventually ended up in Cong (I don't know where the bikers went). Cong is where the shot the movie The Quite Man, which is apparently a great movie.

And then from Cong, we headed inland, moseying our way back to the Dublin area. I kind of thought that we find all of these secret treasures that weren't mentioned in the guidebooks, but it turns out that there's nothing in guidebooks about inland Ireland because there's nothing in inland Ireland. Like, really. No B&Bs, no pups, no points of interest. Mostly nothing. 

We ended up finding one pretty cool thing, though!!! And we found some gold at the end of a rainbow. But those things will need to wait, because our check-in stand just opened, and I have a sleeping handsome to wake up.

As always, thanks for reading!!

P.S. This post was supposed to be published awhile ago, but it apparently didn't go through. Oops.

P.P.S. Kenny and I are at breakfast in the airport now! Now that he's mostly awake, here are his thoughts.

Kenny's Thoughts: I was sad to say goodbye to Doolin, I really liked that little town. . . of like eight buildings. The whole drive was really pretty and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Kylemore Abbey was really pretty. And I don't know why it wasn't more talked up, but I thought it was a really nice part of the trip to stop there. And I loved our drive from Westport through the mountains to Cong. It was just beautiful, rugged landscape that I didn't expect to see in Ireland. It was quite lovely. It was also fun having our car surrounded with sheep. I think that's all my thoughts.