June 8, 2009
This entry comes to you from Nashville, TN ...a few weeks after my last trip which ended May 21...and currently I am waiting for my car to be serviced (not too exotic a place!)preparing for my next journey. That will be a car trip to Montana and Alberta, Canada...with my dog, Bonnie, as my travel buddy !
The April-May trip to Southern Spain, Wales and Ireland was "brilliant" as the Welsh say.
Landing in Madrid, we took the fast train directly to Cordoba, then to Seville, Ronda, Granada and to the lovely white villages of S. Spain.
Nine days later, we flew Ryan Air to Liverpool, picked up a rental car and drove to North Wales..driving there is no simple matter as it is on the left side of the road, sitting on the opposite side as usually the driver sits, and shifting a standard shift with your left hand. It require ALOT of concentration! Luckily, during the 2 weeks of driving in Wales and Ireland, we lost only two side mirrors!
We had beautiful hikes in Snowdonia National Park and along the coastal path near St. Davids in west Wales. Lots and lots of flowers and sea birds...including those cute, cute puffins on Skomer Island.
Taking the ferry from Fishguard, Wales, we landed about 3 hrs. later in Rosslere, Ireland for our 10 days in Ireland. We picked up our rental and drove across southern Ireland to Dingle.
It had been 10 yrs. since I was last there...still as beautiful as I remembered with the people as friendly and funny as I remembered. We had beautiful walks, lots of fun conversations in the local pubs with names like "Foxy Johns", "Dick Macks". These were the old styled
pubs with "snugs" just inside the entry door that women use to sneek into for their drinks. These pubs use to double as seed stores or shoe stores in the daytime when the pub biz was slower.
As we drove up the west coast--Cliffs of Moher, the Burren, Doolin, Clifden and Westport...
we heard great music, saw fantastic coastal scenery, yelled at trucks and buses who took much more than their share of the skinny roads, meet some very interesting and oh sooo nice B&B hosts, and had beautiful walks.
During this journey we were moving pretty quickly so little time for stops at internet cafes to do writing to this blog. Also, there seemed to be many fewer internet cafes than what we had experienced in Central and South America....we supposed that more Europeans have the internet in their homes than do people in S. America so the need for the public internet is much
less. And, we found them to be much more expensive than on our earlier trips.....so posting didn't happen!
I did get some good photos and will post them in the next day or so...
