Ireland: Achill Island

We are still in Ireland for another week. I am unable to upload pictures until we return home but we have been very busy. We flew into Dublin on Friday the 6th of March. We awoke in the morning to discover it was snowing outside. Anyone who has experienced traveling with Mom knows this is a major crisis. She was hoping our flight was canceled so she wouldn't have to take off in the snow. I tried to remind her that even though it snows in Lausanne it usually doesn't snow in Geneva. This did little to alleviate her state of panic. Dad went to work for the morning so the phone was ringing back and forth between the two of them. I had the lovely job of trying to keep Mom under control. Of course Dad was going to get home from work early enough to meet us, and we were all going to go to the train station together. Of couse he was running late and decided we should finish packing his bag for him and meet him at the station instead. You can imagine what that did for Mom's mood. We had to haul our asses down the snowy streets carrying way too many suitcases to find Dad waiting at the station wondering what had taken us so long. Then we had to run to the platform to make the train on time. Of course it had not snowed in Geneva, but I took Mom to the bar to calm her down while Dad insisted on making work calls from the airport. He was almost the last person to board the plane. (Mom and I didn't wait for him). Just as we landed he got an email from work that put him into an even worse mood, and by the time we had rented the car the both of them were in equally nasty moods. The fours hour drive to Achill Island was spent with me in the back seat of the car, Dad driving, and Mom absolutely freaking out that Dad was about to run off the road. (The roles were reversed when Mom started driving and it was Dad's turn to freak out). Now that each of us has had a turn driving on the opposite side we are a bit more sympathetic.

So we finally arrived in Achill, late at night. The next day was very nice. We drive all over the Island, saw ruins of a village from the 13th century, the remains of a castle belonging to Grace O'Malley the famous pirate queen, and hiked to the top of a huge cliff where an od lighthouse once stood. We enjoyed dinner at the hotel and went to the Annexe for a few pints and enjoyed some traditional Irish music.

The following day we drove into Westport and saw the Westport House, built on the foundation of another Grace O'Malley castle by her descendants. That evening we apparently waited too late for dinner and almost found ourselves out of luck. We went to one spot for dinner but the chef had just left. They recommended we try the Cliff House (our hotel) so we returned there to find they too had just stopped serving. Most of the Island is closed as it is not tourist season so we were apparently running out of options. It was just after 8pm. In Barcelona no restaurants open for dinner before 9pm, here we couldn't find anything open after 8. We finally found a Chinese restaurant called Graceland with a note on the door handwritten "Due to Recession, Take Away Only." In true Irish fashion, the Chinese food came with a free order of chips (that's fries to you).

Dad and I went to the pub that night and Mom stayed at home. All the same faces were there as the previous nights. All the locals were impressed that I was drinking the Guinness and asked me how I liked it. They were convinced you can't get it in Arizona and even when I assured them you could they insisted it was not the same. We also met an man who informed us he was the president of the Geoge W Bush fan club on Achill Island and went into a tirade of jokes about the "idiot son." Everyone was very friendly, wanted to know what we though of Barack Obama, and especially whaqt we thought of Ireland. They all insisted Paddy's Day on Achill was better than anywhere else.

So far it has been rainy off and on, with bits of sun here and there. It is very muddy everywhere we go, and I am fairly certain there are more sheep than people here. We continued to Ashford Castle at the edge of County Mayo. I'll add more of that later, we very much enjoyed it.