Fwd: 25/04/08

Last night at Macdermott's Pub a couple of musicians played
traditional music on a concertina and banjo. After a Guinness there,
we moved to Mccganns. The musicians played an eclectic mix of of jigs
and ballads. When the next Guinness was gone, I should have liked
another but it was home time for the musicians and us.

The plan had been to stay in Doolin for two nights but, when you carry
your house on your back, so to speak, it makes sense to keep moving.
Galway is today's destination, after we have walked to the cliffs of
Moher and the Burren. After visiting the Cliffs of Moher (which would
have been alot more amazing if we were actually able to go close to
the edge instead of 15 metres back so the camera always got a big shot
of grass in the foreground) we headed for the (seemingly) barren
landscape of the Burren.
2020
Galway will have to wait til tomorrow, we are recovering from keeping
late hours for the last 3 nights and so have parked up in a country
lane in the Burren. We have assured the local Garda we are only here
for the night though so Galway tomorrow here we come.
The Burren is quite like no other place. Its name is an Anglicization
of the Irish word bhoireann (a rocky place) and it is a 300 square km
lunar landscape of limestone or karst. This evening we went for a
short walk along 'Green Road.' Along the way we drank from a holy well
and ventured (with permission) onto private property, sitting for a
while by on the pier of a private lake.
We then had potato salad and black pudding for dinner (time to go
shopping?) washed down with a surprisingly nice bottle of wine that
had been saving from our trip in Slovenia. This wasn't as
inappropriate as you might think, for it was in Slovenia that also saw
what the Irish call turloughs or disappearing lakes. The karst
landscape causes lakes to appear and disappear with changing levels in
the water table.