Another Island Getaway, or: It Rained a Lot, Again

I’ve blogged about Dublin before, and I’m not sure I really have anything new to say about the city itself. Again, it was raining when I arrived, but this time I totally knew where I was going and how to get there, so I got about 150% less wet. I also knew to buy a Dublin bus pass before leaving the airport, since the cost of a day pass for all city transportation is the same as the cost of the bus from the airport. The elderly woman with inexplicable three-tone hair who was single-handedly running the airport convenience store spent a few minutes looking for two day passes. Her search was somehow both deliberate and vague, and failed to produce results.
“I don’ have any more of those,” she decided. We stared at each other.
“Did you want one for each of you?” she continued, meaning Jesse and me.
“Yes, two passes. One for each.”
“Oh, dearie you’ll be wanting a Family Rambler Pass. Good for two adults and up to three children, all day!” The way the lady was peering around, as if to discover the up to three kids I had stashed behind me maybe, was a little startling, but price of the pass was less than the price of two airport shuttle tickets, so buying it was kind of like having Dublin Bus pay us to ride around all day. Jesse may not have realized the savings we were experiencing, as he was frozen with the same glassy-eyed, searching-for-the-nearest-exit look that had stricken him when the woman said the word “family.”

Anyway, we made it into Dublin and ate delicious things at many of the cafes I had been missing for more than a year. Here is one of them:
Another great thing about Ireland is that you literally cannot walk down a street without encountering kegs. Please note that these were all full. Awesome!
In Ireland sometimes they speak funny. Here is me, maybe at Trinity College, practicing the universal hand sign for “I have a tummyache.”
Jesse drew some of the buildings we saw, and then we saw a building that looked like Jesse might have drawn it. So I made him pose for this picture. Jesse: “I look like a tool.” Me: “shut up and hold the pen a little higher.”
Ireland is so green it kind of makes me zone out.
That was on the way to Galway, where we are now. Galway is much more pleasant this time around, probably because I am not lonely and terribly cold, because for this trip I brought another person and adequate rain-weather clothing. Also, Galway became much more interesting once I had developed the theory that all of the Irish giant-letter-making companies ceased manufacturing sign letters sometime in the past decade. Sometimes the original meaning wasn’t hard to guess at, as on the side of this building, which might be run by a distant relative:
Other times, the missing letters make words look Gaelic. Here is me looking up the Wests de Bu iness Cen e in Let’s Go. I think it might be an island? Like Inis Meain?
Here is the real Inis Meain (Inishmaan). How did we get this picture of the dock and the ferry if we were ON the ferry? It turns out, Jesse can FLY!!!
To get to the island, we took a ferry. Jesse, who likes to point out boats to me much as a three-year-old might, up to and including tugging at my sleeve until I actually turn my head toward the boats, was pretty psyched about the ferry ride.
The man at the helm warned us that if we stayed up top once the boat got up to speed, we would “get absolutely soaked.” I made my way into the passenger cabin, but the sea air tends to make Jesse a little reckless and more than a little drenched, as became evident when he joined me in the cabin about three minutes later.
On Inishmaan, I met the second-best cat ever.
I named her Mrs. Bitey, for reasons that would become clear about three seconds after this picture was taken.
Inishmaan is very cool and there are lots of walls. Inside the walls are lots of cool animals like cows and sheep, none of which Jesse would allow me to attempt making friends with. “They will probably bite you and it’s three hours until the ferry comes to takes us back to a place with a doctor,” he would say. Or, “those animals smell weird, and they look like they might have rolled in manure. Get back on your bike.”
Oh yeah, we rented bikes. Which just sort of emphasized the hilliness of the island, and the unfortunate state of the roads. Luckily, there are no bike thieves on the island (there are pretty close to no people on the island to begin with), because often we would have to just leave the bikes by the side of the road and run around among the walls and rocks.
At one point, we found the seacliffs on the southwest side of the island. They are in the middle of a slow but very one-sided battle with the Atlantic. I thought the view from here was really pretty fantastic...
Until we came to these:
Keep in mind that these cliffs are like, several thousand feet high, which would make this wave like a thousand feet as well:
Sometimes the cliffs were more stepped, which left lots of puddles and scum from the last high tide:
Obviously, we walked out onto one of these flats. I informed Jesse whenever I noticed another fossil in a rock, which was about every five to twenty seconds. Jesse pretended he couldn’t hear me because of the wind, but even he had to admit it was cool when I found a tiny trilobite. I didn’t take a picture of the trilobite, because I got distracted by a puddle which looked EXACTLY LIKE THE SHAPE OF IRELAND.
“OH MY GOD!” I yelled.
“WHAT! Are you falling off the cliff!?”
“NO, THIS PUDDLE LOOKS LIKE IRELAND.”
“.... No it doesn’t. You’re crazy. Do we have any more gummy worms?”
This conversation kind of continued in a similar vein for a while, until Jesse tried to “prove [me] wrong” by opening the Let’s Go book to the map of Ireland. Then the conversation ended, because Jesse didn’t want to talk about how I was TOTALLY CORRECT. Well, as correct as you could reasonably demand. I mean, it’s a puddle.

We also saw some other things north of Galway, like cute towns and a desolate lakeshore dock and lots of wet countryside and an old castle with a stream around two sides of it and many of the walls still intact. I demonstrated the ability of the castle defenders to locate and aim at attackers.
And I enjoyed a few seconds of sunlight when some clouds briefly dropped the ball in terms of covering the sun.
Jesse drew a picture of the castle, and I watched some water striders float around on the moat, and resisted the urge to climb on the walls in locations where signs expressly prohibited it. Then I took pictures of Jesse. This is a picture of him asking me to stop taking pictures of him.
On the road to the castle, I made another friend, somehow without getting bitten on the face.
And that’s pretty much it, so far. Anything else I’ve done was either while still severely jet-lagged, or is too boring to blog. In conclusion, here is a picture of a graveyard in Connemara.