Ireland - Day 5

On Tuesday we headed north. Our first stop was lunch at Durty Nelly's - one of the oldest pubs in Ireland. It was first established in 1620!

It was located right next to Bunratty Castle - a medieval castle.

The we drove to the east coast towards Ireland's most popular tourist destination. I took some photos from the car...this first one is a typical Irish house.

And some of the roundabouts had strange things in the middle....like these dancers.

and this guy who is missing an arm...

Finally we reached the Cliffs of Moher. If you look closely in this first photo, you can see tiny people on the top of the closest cliff. We knew the weather wasn't going to be great, but it didn't actually start raining until we got out of the car. With the wind blowing like crazy and the rain, we were quite miserable. I didn't take many photos because I was too worried about the camera and you really couldn't see much with all the fog.

We didn't hang around the Cliffs of Moher long, but by the time we left we were soaked. We drove another hour and a half until we reached Galway City. It was late afternoon so we set off to explore the city and discovered several places that were offering live music in the evening.

We had heard other musicians in the other cities, but we were still looking for the traditional session. We found it in Galway. We managed to find this group early and the pub wasn't too crowded so we stayed a bit. I was so excited there was a fiddler, but she didn't play much and when she did you couldn't hear her at all.

After a bit we left and walked to another pub. We heard very lively music coming out of this one and found a great session going on. But the pub was so crowded there was nowhere to even stand. Check out that violin shaped table, though. And look at all that rosin on the fiddler's violin!