Ireland #1

We caught a taxi out to Dublin airport where we collected our Toyota Auris Hybrid. It's a fantastic little car and so quiet and seems to have all the extras such as lane change warning.
We set off west towards Galway across flat wooded countryside. The roads in Ireland have been very good and even the narrower roads down the west coast have great surfaces.
We spent our first night in a small fishing lodge on the shores of Lough (Lake) Corrib which is the largest in Ireland. They seem to use 7 metre long boats for mainly fly fishing. The edges of the lakes seem very shallow. I had quite a yarn to the owner Michael about fishing and politics.

The lodge was well off the main road and we got really lost on the way. There were heaps of wonderful stone walls everywhere and some of the boulders were huge.

Next day we stopped at a very touristy place called The Cliffs of Moher where there were bus loads of tourists. The Cliffs were impressive but I thought the place was over rated.

Decent slabs of rock for a barrier

They even had Hobbit-like shops.

Traveled south past the Trump International golf course out in the middle of a reasonably desolate part of Ireland and stayed  in a tiny village called Killimer right on the shore of the Shannon estuary. There was a pub across the road from our bnb where there was the aftermath of a wake as there had been a funeral that day. The place was really humming with accents that we could barely understand. We had a good chat to a local dairy farmer who was down to 35 cows as he had to sell 25 because of TB. It seems that badgers are the main spreader of TB here.

We crossed  the estuary in a vehicle ferry and had good views of two power stations, one oil fired and the other coal.

At Foynes we visited a museum which housed a Boeing float plane which operated between Ireland and the USA during the late 1930s. It was a huge bulky machine and only carried about 77 passengers.