Travelogue

Today we took an outstanding bus tour of the Burren (pron. "Bern") region near Galway. Desmond was our guide aboard the O'Neachtain bus (pronounced O-nawk-ten, with a hacking noise at the end of "nawk"). He's been doing these tours for 7 years, and "hasn't killed anyone yet."

The Burren region was once a green countryside covered with rocks. Thanks to the work of thousands of peasants, it is now covered with freestanding (no mortar) rock fences that are a sight to behold.

After stopped at some castles and ancient burial tombs, we finally arrived at the Cliffs of Moher. They are amazing. The winds are very strong, making it is intimidating to be close to the edge. I crawled to the edge of the cliffs on my stomach and looked 600 feet straight down to the Atlantic Ocean below. Next, at a pub in Doolin, a small town famous for its traditional music, I ate beef stew in Guinness for lunch. Finally, we made our way back to Galway.

I saw my first Notre Dame football game of the season at a pub in Galway. American football is almost never shown here in Ireland, but this was a special case because two prominent Catholic school were playing each other (ND and Boston College). Thankfully we had the other amazing events of the day to distract us from the (disappointing) final score.

We spent some time at another pub before retiring to our extraordinarily sketchy hostel. It was a night to remember. I can summarise by saying we had 8 beds for 10 people, my clothes smelled, and even the hostel owners described our room as a hellhole. But, every sketchy hostel has a silver lining: the spectacularly incompetent management didn't charge us for the room. That was a good thing—if they did, we wouldn't have paid anyway.