The GPS says 2 hours 54 minutes. It took us the entire day! That’s what Nina’s mother would call a “Uncle Wiggly Day”. We picked up our laundry which was kind of folded in a big black bag (we needed a bag to put dirty clothes in, so that was good), filled the car up with gas, and headed north to Limerick.

At least at the gas station I used, one first fills up the car then goes inside to pay. Not every place takes American Express (this one did), but I also have a Visa card that we can use. The car runs on diesel which is $1.54 per liter which comes out to be $5.83 per gallon. Fortunately, the car gets better than 40 mpg.

Limerick was an interesting city. It isn’t mentioned at all in the Lonely Planet guide book. We stopped first at the St. Mary’s Cathedral:

Then walked down the street to St. Ann’s Catholic Church. The cathedral is part of the Church of Ireland (Angilican) whereas the church was definitely a Catholic church. We enjoyed them both for very different reasons.

We had a nice lunch in a small corner restaurant and headed for the Cliffs of Moher.

That drive got interrupted a couple of times. First, we ran across a derelict church in a very small town.

Then bought some water at a small convience store where the electriciy across the town had just gone out. Fortunately we had the exact change as the clerk couldn’t open the register.

Then we saw another church ruin on top of a hill with a huge cemetary. Of course we had to stop there!

While we were walking around the cemetery, workmen using power tools began to remove the fence around this gravesite:

The church building itself had stopped being used as a church long enough that the interior was being used for gravesites as well.

As we got close to the Cliffs of Moher Visitors Center we stopped for ice cream at a small shop as we could see the ocean and needed to stretch. When we got to the visitors center, the parking lot next to the center was full, the auxiliary lot was quite a distance away, the center closed at 5pm and it was 4pm already. We kept driving.

By now the scenery was significantly different. Rather than hedgerows dividing fields and along side the roads, there were stone fences. Stone fences everywhere!!!

Rubble stone was also available in some areas in huge piles. No cultivated crops in this area were to be seen, because the soil was just too rocky??? Lots of cows and sheep, though.

We got to Galway right a rush hour and the traffic was quite brutal. There isn’t any kind of a ring road around the city. The only way was right through the city and out the other side as our B&B is about 10 miles west of Galway. The GPS got us kind of close. Putting in the lat/long coordinates got us much closer.

This B&B is quite nice. We’re in a double bed which should be interesting. There are two outlets in the entire room. Good thing I bought an extension cord/power strip back in Dublin! The wifi seems to work pretty well.

We had dinner at O’Donnelly’s Pub in downton Bandra, which has no ATM machines! That’ll be a priority stop in the morning as we’re both out of cash.