after attempting to get on ireland time, which neither of us did very successfully, we were up early. we had a huge breakfast at the hotel - gotta love the included breakfasts! then we set out to the electronics store as our power adapter we bought in the states for some stupid reason was not a grounded plug which did us no good for charging the laptop.
we spent some more time walking around the city and taking pictures. we spent a fair amount of time walking through the city center, eyre square and down past all the shops and such. there be poles in galway! we saw a lot of signs in polish in the shop windows and even caught a few polish shops!
outside the collegiate church of st. nicholas, we saw a truly old school skull and crossbones -- weird!
then it was back to the hotel to make last minute decisions on our route for the rest of the day and check out.
back in the car we headed off west on n6 to loughrea. we walked around the town and visited st. brendan's church.
this was a cool old church that still had an ancient moat that ran through its grounds -- which once surrounded the entire city of loughrea.
we took some great pictures of the church and its moat, as well as the old medieval town gate.
then it was back to the car where we ventured out on some small local roads in search of the turoe stone. this is when we first learned that tanya, the gps system, was lousy at directing us towards areas of interest. so we drove around, nearly got horribly lost, and ended up finding a farm slash petting zoo. we looked out at a big rock in the middle of a field, decided it was the turoe stone, and said "wow, that's cool". so it was back to find the bigger roads and concede defeat.
we made it back to the n6 and headed to ballinasloe. after rolling through ballinasloe we thought we would press our luck again and venture off onto the rural roads (r357 to r444) in search of clonmacnoise. these are ruins of an old monastic community. again, the gps system offered us no guidance. we did get a bit closer to our goal this time, but we clearly missed a left and drove by clonmacnoise at 40 miles an hour. getting BACK there was more of an issue than we can describe here -- turning around on small rural roads is NOT easy so... we continued on. r444 lead us to n62, which we took north into althone. after rolling through althone, it was time to head to our ultimate destination for the day…. the marriott johnstown house hotel & spa in enfield.
enfield is about 45 minutes driving time east of dublin, so we had crossed nearly all of ireland from west to east today. we checked in at the hotel, relaxed for awhile and headed down to the hotel coach house bar. it was nice to enjoy a relaxing dinner and drinks! this evening also began our on-going discovery of new irish whiskeys! after a few jamesons, eric ventured out of his normal routine to have a tullamore dew and paddys.
we talked with the bartender a while about tullamore, and learned the distillery was not too far a drive from the hotel, so we decided we must go on the distillery tour!
it was then back to the room to try and sleep. but first we indulged in the champagne the flight attends had given us on the flight to ireland. ahem.
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