The Hills of Connermara

My favorite traditional Irish song - and this is relative, because it can change - is "The Hills of Connermara" performed by Gaelic Storm. So i was pretty excited when we headed west into the hills of connermara. This is desolate country - and not like a desert desolate, but it's so rocky that making any kind of traditional living here (farming and livestock) would have been very difficult, so it's remained mostly unsettled. there are some houses and small towns (mostly right along the coast and i think they're fishermen) but of the parts of Ireland we visited, this was the least populated. It was gorgeous, though.

Around this part of the trip, really probably on Tuesday, it started to rain pretty much every day. our original plan was to get to Clifden and do some sight seeing and some exploring, and then spend the night. Well, it was raining, and as you can tell from the picture in that link, it's not a very big place. 2 streets big, to be precise. So the people there don't have much to do but drink. so we went to our B&B and met our tied-for-first place favorite B&B owner. This woman called kim 'dearie' and skittered around the house kind of giggling to herself. we had some fun there, and then went to dinner at like 7 pm. now i'm a night person, and i was bored by 8. so we decided to drive what is called the "Sky Road" which is a gorgeous little path out of town to the Atlantic coast of Ireland. it was awesome. And it really summed up Ireland for me - there isn't a terrible lot to do if you don't like music, food, people or beautiful views. Kim and I drove west as far as the road went and sat there and talked for awhile, then went back to our B&B. and all in all, that's about perfect.