Day 12

Day 12 (by Nic)

Hello again everybody! Get ready for an exciting blog!!! Hahaha

We woke up a little earlier thsn usual today, 8:30!!! Oh yeah! (sorry I just had 2 cups of coffee, plus we had a lot of fun today). Anyways, before I begin I want everyone to get out a map of Ireland, so you can see where we went (I think google maps is the best so you can type in the locations that we went to, but another map is fine)...


Ok now that you have your maps out, we started the day in Galway, that is the city of Galway, not the county. We took a tour bus at 10:30am from Galway city about an hour south along the coast to a region called the Burren. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burren ) I don't know how to explain it other than really rocky. The entire region is made of limestone and it looks similar to a moonscape. Here we went to a small town called Doolin where we stopped for lunch. Hannah and I had made spaghetti the night before so we had that to eat. After our lunch we went another 15 minutes along the coast to the south still to the Cliffs of Moher. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliffs_of_moher ) It sounds epic... and it was! The cliffs span a length of 5 miles and stand 650 feet tall at the highest point! It's so hard to picture, and i wish we could put up our pictures because it was so totally mind blowing!!! We did take tons and tons of pictures though.

After our 1 hour stop at the Cliffs of Moher, we took the bus inland to the east about 30 min and stopped at a place called Poulnabrone Dolmen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poulnabrone_dolmen ) that's the wikipedia link be causes I know I won't be able to explain it right. But basically it is a 5000 year old burial site. There was an excavation 30 years ago, I think, and they found 16 adults and 6 children. They aren't exactly sure what it was for, but they think it was a ritual burial type of deal.

Next we went about 15 more minutes inland to a cave called Aillwee cave ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aillwee_Cave ) wikipedia link. The first person to find the cave was a farmer in the 1940's who happened upon it while hunting rabbits when his dog chased one into the cave. There has been some blasting and excavation in order to make a safe walkable loop for us tourists to tour. It was wicked cool though!!! We both agreed that it was cooler than the lava tube on Maui, and longer too. We had a tour guide with us and had 6 different stops where he told us different things about the cave. Oh I forgot to mention, the cave was dimly light while tours were in session so we could see, but at one point our guide turned out the lights so we could experience "true darkness". Hannah was on the border of freaking a bit, but it was really cool!

After our 30 min tour of Aillwee cave we took the bus an hour back to Galway and out of the Burren. We got back at 5:15pm. We're just hanging out now, probably bed soon, I'm tired. We had more pasta for dinner. Yep... I hope this blog was exciting and educational for all of you back home! Alright... Bye!

Nic