Ireland Day 3: Walking Man tour and Galway

Today we spent most of the morning driving through Conemara area of Ireland.

Before we left Galway and stopped at St. Nicholas and Our Lady Assumed into Heaven Cathedral (I think that's the name, it's at least something like that). The cathedral was beautiful, though it was hard to get good pictures because the lighting wasn't great. In the one room was a larg mosaic of Jesus, and at each side was a smaller mosaic. One was of Patrick Pearce who led the Easter Rebellion in 1916 and the other was John F. Kennedy, who was apparently just as well loved in Ireland as he is in the states.

Conemara is a beautiful part of Ireland, though it's extremely rocky. I hadn't realized how rocky the terrain was. It's amazing. I wouldn't want to try to farm this land, that's for sure. We stopped for lunch at Eddie's Bar or Pub, (I'm really having trouble with names). Apparently Eddie is related to one of the four men who discovered the Comstock Lode and also has a relative who married a Vanderbilt. This all came from Eddie himself.

In the afternoon we went to the village of Cong and toured some of the sites used for the filming of The Quiet Man, including Pat Cohen's Bar. Now the bar was not a bar at the time and actually just opened as a bar for the first time a few weeks ago. Apparently only the exterior shots were filmed here the rest were done in the states. Thanks to this tour I am now "married" to Ken our tour guide. If I ever get those pics posted I'll show you the "family photo." They pick people to dress up and I had to play Maureen O'Hara's part. It was kind of emabarassing.

Before dinner we had some free time to wander around Galway, which is a nice city. I bought myself a zip-up sweatshirt that says Ireland on it. It's pretty cool.

Dinner was fancy again. I wasn't expecting any less. Then afterwards we went to an Irish pub for a little while. As I'm still exhausted I didn't stay long. I wanted to come back and pack some stuff up as we leave Galway tomorrow and I wanted time to post this.

Tomorrow we do some driving around in the morning and visit some random places, one of which is the grave of William Butler Yeats. I'm really excited about that (that was one of the places on my "must see" list when we were selecting the tour). Then in the afternoon we're touring the Beleek pottery factory. I have no idea if I'll be able to post tomorrow, I've been lucky so far. I still haven't uploaded those photos (sorry!) I'm starting to think I might just wait till I get home. I will try hard to get at least a few posted before then, but I already have almost 200 photos so it's unlikely that I'll get them all posted. However I promise if I don't get them posted before I get home I will when I get back.