Connemara in the Sunshine

Sunday, May 20, 2012--Connemara, Ireland

Our guesthouse has limited parking.  When we went to breakfast this morning, there were 10 cars parked in a small area.  Our car was blocked in with one on each side of it and a row of cars behind the 3 of us.  By the time we were ready to leave for the day, the two cars on one side were gone.  Somehow, the owner of the guest house managed to maneuver our car in about 15-20 moves to get it out of our tight space and into the open lane where the two cars had left!

With it being a sunny day (Lucky Lads, again!), we headed along the coast to Spiddal which was not as interesting as we had hoped.  From there, though, we headed for our main destination, the Connemara region of Ireland--another rugged, isolated region with mountains and bogs.  We stopped at the Connemara National Park where we saw exhibits at the visitor's center and walked a nice trail through the bogs and up the mountains.  People were very friendly on the trails with greetings to each other the way people do with strangers in Texas.

Our next stop was Kylemore Abbey.  It is a gorgeous house in a beautiful setting with nice gardens.  However, there were crowds and long waits for tours.  We took photos and headed onward.

Our last stop was the Country Life Museum, a branch of the National Museum of Ireland.  It had very interesting displays about the life of people--their clothing, the jobs they did, the chores they did, the difficulties they faced, etc.  One interesting panel compared idealized paintings of ordinary people with photographs and descriptions of what their lives were really like.  One level of the museum was dedicated to the upper class country people to show the contrast in their lives with those of the peasants.  It was interesting to note that Halloween came to America via the Irish who celebrated it, wore masks, and made jack-o-lanterns from turnips in Ireland before immigrating to the U.S.  We spent 1 1/2 hours going through the exhibits building and then toured the nice manor house there on the grounds showing how the upper class lived.