May 10 - Cliffs of Moher

We ate breakfast in our hotel. They had quite an assortment of cold selections, and one of my favorites, freshly squeezed orange juice. Since we had been eating big breakfasts up until this point, I decided to try porridge for the first time. It was pretty much as I expected, like old fashioned oatmeal.

Today we decided to head to the Cliffs of Moher. There are two ways to see the cliffs, you can either drive up to them and see them from atop, or you can get on a boat and see them from the water. We asked the hotel manager which was better and he highly recommended the boat. So he called ahead to see the times, and we headed off for the noon departure. We were pretty close, so it only took us a few minutes to get to the docks. Our boat departed promptly and while the cliffs aren't far away, the boat takes about 20 minutes to get to the cliffs. The cliffs are a grand site to see. The boat brought us pretty close and we were able to see hundreds of birds that nest in horizontal lines alone the cliffs. It was a mixture of puffins and seagulls or similar. On the way back, the captain engaged us in some interesting conversation. I think we only got half of his conversation as his Irish accent was quite heavy and the Irish talk very fast. He had a great interest in talking about American politics, particularly our Presidential Elections. The Irish seem to be quite intrigued by the goings on in American, particularly when it comes to politics. So much so, that their bookmakers (yes such gambling is legal in Ireland), place odds on the outcome. Anyway, it was fun to talk with one of the locals, particularly one who was so colorful.

We didn't have much planned on this day and just drove around the local town - Doolin. We did the tourist thing and went into some local stores. They had a store for sweaters, one for local music, one for the standard Irish souvenirs, along with a pub. Oddly enough, after talking to the owner of the music store, we learned that the pub, only a few stores away, was the second pub we were looking for but couldn't find the night before. This pub had a very famous local musician playing that night, lucky we struck up a conversation with the music shop owner, or we probably wouldn't have found this out. Kevin decided to buy a CD of this musician, the only one he produced.

Since we had nothing on the agenda, we decided to hang out around town and see him perform later that night. We went into the pub, had a good pub meal along with the obligatory pint of beer, and waited for the performance to start. The reason we decided to hang out was that we wanted to reserve ourselves a good seat to watch the Irish musicians. We sat, read the paper, talked to a few folks, and waited for them to perform. We got to meet people from all over the world like PA and MI - yes we found a lot of Americans around Ireland. Germans and Australians seemed in numbers as well. The Germans we ran into only spoke limited English, so we tended to speak to Australians a bit more.

Well the music finally started, there were four men. The one we came to see played the flute, the bohdrum, and the spoons. This was much more in line with the traditional Irish music we wanted to see. You see the real traditional musicians sit around a table in the corner of the pub, chat a bit, and play. Traditional Irish music will generally have instruments like the flute, the bohdrum, and the uilleann pipes (the Irish version of the bagpipes). We stayed and listened for several hours. Kevin spoke to the one musician we came to see, and got his autograph on his CD. It was a fun night.