PaDDy WaGoN ToUr DePaRtS

Friday, December 5th

Our 3 day tour of Ireland left this morning at 8:00am. There were about 12 or so of us, and after a quick drive through Dublin, the first stop was Phoenix Park, the largest park in Europe. This is also where the U.S. ambassador lives. We drove up to a big monument to the pope where we saw a good view of the park and some deer grazing in the fields.

After we left here, we drove through the countryside for a while, and passed through some small villages where the locals all sported flags for their county’s rugby team. As we drove further, we saw more road signs, each with two languages on them. There are two languages spoken in Ireland: English and Irish/Gaelic, which is really cool to listen to, and crazy to decipher on these road signs…

The next stop was Clonmacnoise, which is an early Christian settlement, a monastic site. Here we saw ruins of an old church and castle, in addition to many old, intricate gravestones. We then passed over the River Shannon to continue our journey. We stopped in a small town called Ballinasloe for lunch, and here, Cody and I ate our packed PB&J sandwiches, and walked around to explore. A nice old Irishman tipped his hat at us as we were walking around- he was a friendly old man.

The remainder of our drive was to the city of Galway. Here we checked into our hostel and walked around town for a while. The town center was filled with cobblestone streets lined with souvenir shops, other shops, lots of pubs, and street musicians. Cody and I walked down to the port and then we walked back to the hostel. The plan was to relax for a bit there and check out some things, but then another friend of ours from the WI group, Chad, was there. He was doing another PaddyWagon Tour and happened to be staying in the same hostel as us. The three of us ended up going to a coffee shop just down the street and we ordered some Irish coffee.

We met up with the rest of the group for dinner and went to a pub. I ordered some traditional Irish stew and it was amazing. I sat with a few people from our tour that were really fun, and one of the guys seemed almost more American than me! He was an Australian (of course he was Australian- they are everywhere!), and he kept rambling on about American shows and events. Him and his cousin, Katrina, were so much fun! Anyway, we all hung out in this pub for the remainder of the evening, where we had some Guinness (you are in Ireland… you kind of have to, even though I hated it…) and listened to some traditional Irish music. It wasn’t too traditional though… they mixed a few other songs in there too… such as some Pink Floyd and such.

We stayed in the pub till pretty late, so after that, the group I was hanging out with left to go back to the hostel because we had to wake up pretty early the next morning. It was a good time.