Saturday, October 1, 2011

Donegal

Next up on our trip around Ireland was somewhere that neither of us had visited before, Donegal!


When we got into Donegal we decided (against the advice of the women at the visitor's center) to walk to our hostel. The walk itself wasn't too terrible, but the rain and crazy wind made it a bit miserable. After one more trip out to the shop to buy food for dinner, we hunkered down for the night to stay out of the rain, so, naturally, the sun came out. This is the view from our hostel room with a bit of sun.

The next day we booked a tour so that we could go to Slieve League. Like all other coach tours, we made a few other stops along the way. The first stop we made was in a port town. If I'm remembering correctly, it's the main fish exporting port (maybe importing too).





This was part of the town itself.

Mom took this picture of me at the ATM because of the army guy in the background. The armored car was going around to all of the banks in the town and there were tons of these guys following the car.

A pretty picture stop along the tour.



We finally made it up to the cliffs!

These are said to be the tallest cliffs in Europe.





We only went up to the end of the railing. Other people went farther and got caught up at the top when the rain started up again and they said that it was hailing on them up there.


The cute little cafe where we stopped for a snack/lunch break.


This was right after I fell in the mud, but I was fine. Just muddy :P

Our last stop was in Ardara. It's a little village/town known for its weaving.


Back in Donegal town we decided to walk around while we had some daylight (and energy). First we stopped at the Donegal Friary.






After wandering our way through town we decided to stop for dinner. I got spiced battered haddock. SO GOOD, but really big.

This was the place that we got dinner.

I'm not sure what all of these places are, but they are in Donegal town.




And we made it back to our hostel!

It was definitely my favorite hostel of the trip. And the woman who ran it was awesome.

That night I decided to go out with a few of the people staying in the hostel. We went to go see some live music at a pub in town. This is Pete. He's from Philly. We decided that the picture on the wall was what he was going to look like in about 50 years.

These are the other people that I went out with. On the left is Natalie. She's from Switzerland. And on the right (making the crazy face) is Reem. She's been living in Edinburgh for the past 6 years but she just moved home to Qatar a few days ago.

I'm definitely glad that we were able to make it up to Donegal. It was super cute and the people were great. We had a blast...it was just a bit of a wet blast :)

1 comment:

marbea said...

Another wonderful place! We're certainly not put off by a little bit of rain. I think that fishing port was Killybegs and the army men were quite fascinating, I took a few pics of them.

Tacy you have been a busy girl here, is there some article you don't want to read ;-)