Ballinasloe to Boyle

  Boyle, Western Ireland, Ireland
Thursday, July 2, 2009

We'd missed the bog stuff at Allen (because it was closed on weekends), so we really wanted to do the Bog Train of Clonmacnoise this morning. We’d picked up the flyer on it at the tourist info yesterday, and it had a cool train ride, some bog cutting (whatever that was), and a trip around a bog garden.  So we went there, but must have missed the turnoff, so we went back, and missed the turnoff again, and went back a third time, and just turned off where we thought it should be.  We drove down that road a little bit, and found a pottery shop, so we asked there.  "We closed that over a year ago", the guy said.  Rochelle was really pissed off!!

Ruins and dead people at Clonmacnoise

Also at Clonmacnoise was a really cool ancient monastic town.  They had 3 High Crosses, several churches, a cathedral, and heaps of graves, dating from 600 onwards.  Individually, we’d seen better ruins, but as a complete town, these were pretty awesome.  They also had a visitor’s centre which explained a lot of the background to the whole story, and made it really interesting, even though it was raining really hard.

On our way to the next sight, we stopped at the side of the road to eat lunch, and a guy came out of the house we were stopped in front of.  He wanted a lift to the next town, explaining that he had arranged a lift to pick up his car that he’d left in town the night before after having a few too many bevvies, but the lift had called to say he’d be another hour.  So we gave him a lift, and it turned out he’d lived in Sydney for 5 years, and he couldn’t stop talking.  He was great!!  As we dropped him off, he told us him name was Richard Cullen, and he spelled C-U-L-L-E-N.  I still have no idea why.

Rochelle on the tree-top walkway

At Lough Key, we did “The Experience”, which was a tour around a house that used to be there, but burned down over a hundred years ago, and all that is left is a floor plan.  It was brilliant – NOT!  The rest of it was OK, though – including a tree-top board-walk and a trip through a couple of tunnels.  Actually, it sounds pretty crap when I write it down, but it wasn’t that bad, really.

We stopped at Boyle for the night, and walked around town to find a nice restaurant (for my birthday), but all the pubs and restaurants in town were closed.  It was very bizarre, until we asked the barman in the pub, where we were staying.  He said that the gypsies had come to town, and as they are not allowed to refuse to serve them, all the pubs and restaurants had closed Unless you were a local, and knew the secret password).  So we had dinner in our pub, which was quite nice as it was situated on the river, and we watched locals enter the bar across the road by knocking on the back door, and being let in.  We also saw Boyle’s answer to the Eiffel Tower light show, which was a couple of lights on the river, turned on and off a couple of times every hour.  Spellbinding.