Ireland day 5 – Limerick and Cliffs of Móher

Before we left Cork we visited St Finbarre’s Cathedral, a big impressive building with lots of spiky spires, grinning gargoyles and rich sculpture on the outside. We paid an entrance fee and went inside. The building was as impressing on the inside as on the outside. We’re not at all religious in anyway, but those guys sure knows how to build houses.



We are on our way to Cliffs of Móher, a coast line that rise to a height of 203m. It’s entirely vertical and the cliff edge is abrupt. Sounds like something we’d like to see! It’s taken us most of the day to drive north on the west cost from Cork so we hope it’s worth it and that it doesn’t rain too much once we get there.



We got the best service so far in a small town called Ennis. We stopped to get some gas and as soon as we pulled up to one of the pumps, a woman (we think) started filling up the car. We could just sit back and relax – Tobbe managed to get a few seconds of sun, sitting on a nice little stone wall.



Ok… wow… what a view. The Cliffs of Moher was really fascinating to see, these high cliffs going straight down into the blue swirling ocean. There was a hard wind blowing and we had to literary hold on our hats or they would have been blown of, you had to lean into the wind to be able to walk forward.








On our way to Galway, we stopped by at “Aillwee Caves”, a cave system that goes about 600m into the mountain and was at some point inhabited by a bear (so they said anyways…). It was a nice setup with a tour guide and fancy lightings but the cave itself wasn’t really that much to see. With your entry ticket you also got free samples of their locally made cheese in their little farm shop. It was really pretty neat from a guy’s point of view – and even though we might have wanted to buy a bunch of the stuff they offered (including the personnel) we didn’t feel like carrying the dead weight and the cheese might go bad and nasty before we get back home. Tobbe bought some marmalade and jam for his mother though… such a sweetheart (yes HE IS!! YES HE IS!). At this time Daniel was getting really cranky, think 5-year old cranky, as we hadn’t eaten since this morning. After bumping the car, hitting the rear mirror against a stone wall we figured it was due time to have something to eat – which later should turn out to be VERY well needed since we had a lot more driving to do before this day was over…









Being very hungry we were now feeling desperate to find our nightly hostel AND a frikkin parking spot. Finding parking lots in Ireland seem to be very hard at all times – and once you find one you end up having to walk half the town to get to the place you wanted.
This time we found the hostel pretty quickly – even though parking seemed to be a bigger problem we decided to call the hostel to check if they had any beds available – PROBLEM. The whole town was fully booked – all the hostels and bed and breakfast was just out of beds and we had to find a new town to go to in search for a bed, oh, btw… the time is now 21. We were all feeling rather tired by now, so we decided to find a pizza place, we found a place called New York Pizzas and had a HUGE lunch/dinner and semi-breakfast- tasted rather good, but nothing at all like the American pizza’s you are used to.

Trying to find some place to sleep we got in to a little bit of a trouble – after circling Galway basically calling every hostel and bed and breakfast, we manage to find a hostel in Westport that would be open for another two hours, so we had to haste to the place thinking it would take us 45 minutes to drive there, as the hostel owner had said it would. We felt quite worried when we got half way and found that it had taken us over an hour to do so! Thank god for the GPS and that this town was actually awarded the tidiest town in 2004, we manage to find the place and a parking lot very quickly. Old Mill Hostel, a lovely hostel, can truly be recommended.