Dublin and Galway at Easter (Part 2)

Holy Saturday (Continued)

So, we got in the car and headed towards Galway.

The journey was several hours and we kept the sat nav on as a guide. For long parts of the journey though it thought we were driving through fields....they had obviously built lots of new roads since our maps were sold!

It worked fine though and we soon arrived in Galway. We were staying at the Westwood House Hotel which was much more traditionally decorated than The Beacon.

We got our stuff sorted and then decided to head to town to take a look around. A quick bit of research suggested that Quay Street was worth exploring. We were going to walk but took the car in the end and in hindsight this was a good decision :)

After much wandering (a key feature of the Lizzi tour) we decided to find somewhere for dinner. The clocks were going forward tonight and so we ate a little earlier than normal to try and avoid the time change denting our planned early start for the next day!

Back to the hotel and off to bed.

By the way a common theme until now on this trip was loud children in hotels - on Friday they were in the room next to Rob and I (screaming at 6am). On Saturday they were running and yelling in the hall - until late in the night (grrr.)

Easter Sunday

We got up nice and early this morning and headed down to breakfast. The restaurant was quite quiet when we arrived but got a little busier.

All done and we packed up our stuff and checked out.

We had decided to do a driving tour which we found in one of the guide books that we had picked up. We also wanted to take a quick look around Connemara National Park which was along the route.

Jennifer had found the route and so she was navigating for this leg. I was therefore in charge of photography along the way.

The route started on a road called the skyroad (map courtesy of google below)

Unfortunately it was quite wet and windy for the start of our drive and no one wanted to get out of the car at the top of the skyroad....so here is a photo at the following link http://www.mydiscoverireland.com/blog/2008/08/08/clifden-and-the-sky-road/

Now, as you may have noticed from the map this was quite a twisty route. There were also very few signposts and so we spent a lot of the drive wondering if we were heading in the right direction :)

There are very few photos from the first part of the day but here are a couple:

We eventually found our way to the Connemara National Park and decided to go in search of some facilities (restrooms for my American readers) and also some snacks!

Despite it being Easter Sunday the café was open so we got a drink and snacks and decided to take a little walk.

We decided to do the blue route on the map below (borrowed from http://www.connemaranationalpark.ie/activities.html)

The red one looked a bit too much hard work - and the lady in the visitor centre suggested that the wind might make it a bad idea!

It was very windy and a little wet but the walk was quite fun and if the weather had been better the view would have been great!

The path to the red route!

Back down at the visitor centre:

We left the park and continued on our drive. We were headed towards Killary Harbour which is apparently one of three glacial fjords in Ireland (source Wikipedia). We told the sat nav to take us to Rossroe and off it took us.

We went along some very narrow and twisty roads along the way....

We then headed back towards Galway and then Dublin.

Along the way we got slightly stuck behind the most annoying bike race....

Whilst we were driving along Jennifer spotted a sign to the Quiet Man Bridge - some of you may be familiar with the John Wayne movie. Rob's mum is quite the fan so we had to go back to see the bridge.

Sign next to the bridge!

After our little detour we headed back towards Dublin. We stopped to get a little bit of diesel for the car (we had prepaid fuel and were taking it back empty.)

A few hours later and we were almost at the hotel.....but the sat nav took us to the wrong location and so instead we had to try and get back to the airport to drop the car back with a tiny amount of fuel.

Talk about the most stressful part of our trip!!!!!

Car dropped off (with zero fuel left) and we headed to the airport to take the shuttle to the hotel.

Took us a little while but we checked in, dropped our bags and went to get a late dinner in the bar.

Nice normal hotel room :)

Dinner over and we headed to bed. We were on the 5am shuttle bus in the morning as we had an early flight home!

Easter Monday

We were awake at a ridiculous hour this morning and on the 5am bus :(

We got to the airport and security was super busy. Luckily it didn't take us long to get through - Jennifer already had a gate announced so we said goodbye and off she went.

Ours followed soon after and we walked a million miles to the gate....then got in the line to ensure we had seats together!

Our flight seemed to be departing on time - we went through and had our boarding pass checked...then stood on the stairs with a door open at the bottom for half an hour (very cold) :(

Eventually we got on the plane and we left 30 mins late.

Thankfully we arrived at Bristol shortly after (we slept the whole way across), walked out straight to the car and we were home with the dog collected by 10am :)

It was a great trip.....if we could just have had slightly better weather....!

Where to next?