Our flight didn't leave until 7:00pm, or so we thought, so there was the last minute panic about arriving to the airport too late to get on the plane even though we left around 3:30. We had seats A and C. Normally, this means that there's no B on the plane, but this time there was. The guy who was in B moved to the aisle and had the worst trip ever. First there was a 90-minute delay due to a storm over Conn. Then the stewardesses weren't all that good. They gave the last copy of the newspaper he requested to another passenger. Then they took every opportunity to run into the guy's elbow that they could.

We arrived only a few minutes late thanks to a strong tailwind, went through customs, got our luggage, then waited in the longest line: the car rental. We took our four huge bags out to the rental lot to find that the travel agent had selected the smallest car available. It was a Ford Ka. "Ka" because there wasn't enough room on the vehicle to write "Kar". They asked who was going to be driving and my wife actually wanted me to drive. "So that means you'll be reading the maps?" She drove.

We went from Shannon northward, just because, and wound up going through Ennis and spending about three hours wandering around, looking for the Tourist Center. After we found it, it was time to wander off again.

We went down through Quin, to see a ruined abbey (Quin Abbey) and a castle (Knappogue Castle, one of the many castles the MacNamara clan built), and a 14th Century reconstructed, um, place (the Craggaunowen Project). It had the same tower as the first castle, but had some other things, like a fortified artificial island and a fortified ringhouse. I thought it was going to be like a living museum with costumed guides ala a RenFair, but instead it had sullen Irish teenagers playing with looms.

After that, we went back to Quin, where I had an authentic Irish meal (deep-fried cajun chicken in a barbecue sauce). Now we're back northish of Ennis, about to see the Cliffs of Moher. The postcards we've seen of the cliffs look interesting.

Culture Shock:
In Ireland, they do a few things wrong. Bacon for one. Another is driving on the left. It's just wrong. God meant for us to drive on the right. The pedals are in the same orientation (clutch, brake, gas), but the shifter is on the left and the driver is on the right side. I know that the wife is a good driver, but she slipped once into the "drive on the correct side of the road". I'm not worried that she'll do it again -- I'm worried that some yahoo from Louisiana will do it and slam into our cute little car.

Food Note #1.
The Irish versions of bacon and sausage suck. The bacon is a boiled ham thing with a strip of fat. If you are lucky, there will be a one-inch strip of real bacon attached to the salty ham, but it won't be cooked. The sausage itself looks like sausage and is called "sausage", but it's really a tube of wood filler.

Back to our trip to the Cliffs of Moher. We wound up stopping at the Foley Grocer's (the wife's Irish roots are called Foleys) in Ennislymon, riding up to an abandoned church/active graveyard (the church building now holds about eight graves. After making a wrong turn (easy to do with the small signs that contain way too much information for anyone to read at 50mph), we wound up going through Doolin and down the coast to the Cliffs of Moher.

The cliffs were pretty cool. There were about five thousand people ignoring the "Do not cross" signs and "Danger: Food and Mouth Disease Prevention" hanging out along the cliff's edge. We then headed to Lahinch where we attempted to find a restaurant that had seating. The one we were going to settle on had a poster on the door that read "Babes of the Emerald Isle" promising that they'd put on an all-female version of The Full Monty. We went somewhere else.

Food Note #2:
Never order lasagna in Ireland. That should be obvious. It came in a brown sauce. It had an interesting taste, but it wasn't lasagna.

Silly town names: Hurlers Cross, Newmarket-on-Fergus, Doolin, Lisdoonvarna

-FP