Our time in Ennistymon

After a day in Dublin we headed off to the west coast of Ireland, to a very little town called Ennistymon. When we booked our bed and breakfast on the website it sounded like it was about "5 minutes away" from a number of different places. That sounded good to us! However, when we got to our bed and breakfast we realized that it was "5 minutes away by car" from everything. Since we hadn't rented a car we had to make some different plans. However by combining walking into Lahinch (the next nearest town (about a 3km walk from our B&B)) and catching buses from there, and with the help of our amazing hostess who found rides for us to other places, we actually managed to see a fairly good chunk of the area we were in.

Ennistymon had a gorgeous river dividing it. If you walked over the bridge, heading to the right out of the picture, and continued up the hill about five minutes, you got to our B&B. It was a lovely spot to stay.

This is one of the pubs in Ennistymon where we
drank some Guiness and listened to music.

One of the fixtures of our B&B was Shadow, the dog. Shadow was hilarious. He would hang out outside our window, waiting for us to come and play. His favourite game was "Fetch" but he was hysterically bad at it. As you can tell from this picture, he would bring you the stick and as you reached for it, he would turn his head away!

Dave attempting to reason with Shadow.
Sadly, it didn't work.

This is the road we walked along to get into Lahinch. Since it was a major road in the area, it wasn't actually that pleasant a walk. Although the scenery was beautiful.

Lahinch was bigger than Ennistymon. It had more choices for eating and a beach -- when the tide was low enough. The one sunny day we experienced, we went to the beach. It was only about 15C out but for the Irish, this must be the hottest summer day, since the water (which was freezing) was packed with people swimming. We ventured in with our toes but didn't wish to go any further. We did enjoy tossing a frisbee around though. Although it was quite windy which made the accuracy of our throws... challenging... to say the least!

Another day we took the bus to the Cliffs of Moher. They were gorgeous, although filled with tourists. We would have enjoyed it a lot more if there had been less people and more places to walk. However we did manage to get a picture of the two of us, without other people in it. The day we were at the Cliffs was incredibly windy so although we had planned on staying longer, we ended up not doing so; it was too cold.

After about five days in Ennistymon we headed back to Dublin for a night and then flew home, via New York City, where we stopped to visit Dave's grandpa for an afternoon.