The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
Galway and Beyond

We're ready to go home. Even though the trip has been pleasant, we're finding our energy level is dropping seriously after about 2½ weeks. Perhaps it's a function of age or maybe just a symptom of the way I scheduled the itinerary. Possibly the issue is with too much packing and unpacking and we just need to make fewer stops for longer periods to avoid the one or two-night pit stops. I'll have to reflect on all this before we start scheduling the next big trip ... and we usually start that process of planning next year's big trip shortly after we return from this year's big trip.

Also to be considered is whether we will once again dodge the need to decorate the house for the holidays and take off over Christmas. My 70th birthday is coming up in November. Will we head to another appropriately spiritual place for that one? (We were in Machu Piccu for my 60th!) There are still lots of frequent flyer miles in the accounts and the airlines seem determined to make them worth less and less every year.

There's no right answer to this puzzle, of course. I just need to relax and quiet my mind until the insight strikes me. That always works.

But back to the task at hand. Today is our last day on the west coast. Tomorrow we head east and will spend our last three days around (but not in) Dublin. Where to go? What to see? What to do? Or perhaps just do nothing and not worry about it. But Margene wanted to see Dunguaire Castle and a few things she missed in the Burren when we were traveling from Ennis. I have come to understand that the correct answer to requests such as these is always, "Yes, dear" ... and so after a big Irish breakfast at Madeline's, off we went in the drizzle to seek photo opportunities.

We still hadn't sat in on a real trad (traditional music) session in an Irish pub because they always start around 10pm. We're rarely out and about that late. There's an outside chance it could work if the pub is within walking distance, but I prefer not to drive on a strange roads in a strange country in the dark, particularly after a couple of pints of Guiness! The Aussie couple we met in Cong told us of a couple of pubs in Galway that had an early and a late trad session and since we wanted to see at least a bit of Galway, we headed back there mid-afternoon to see if we could put the last few pieces together.

I suspect most of our visions of castles come from movies and fairy tales. There are surely some grand castles out there, but for the most part, they are small, dark and drafty. Dunguaire Castle [meaning the castle "dun" of the 7th century King Guaire of Connaught], whose court here was renowned as the haunt of poets and balladeers. The present castle, a classic tower house, was built in the 16th century and now is one of the Irish castles I mentioned that do a nightly medieval dinner and show. Don't imagine a vast hall full of light and dancing, though. The banquet hall (three flights up the spiral staircase) is tiny with a stage perhaps ten feet across. Hardly a sweeping production scene!

Speaking of spiral stairs, an interesting fact: they were always built to spiral up and to the right. If the defenses were breached by invaders, the direction of the curve gave a fighting advantage to the generally right-handed defenders (and a marked disadvantage to the generally right-handed attackers) as the battle raged up the stairs to the upper levels.

A few odd shots from our mini road trip of the day. Our B&B is located on the shores of Galway Bay. The combination of sea and fog is quite familiar to me, having grown up on Cape Cod. There are tower houses (and ruins thereof) all over coastal Ireland, reminders of more predatory times. With the tongue-twisting title of the Poulnabrone Dolmen, the table-like construction is a tomb from 2500-2000 BC.

The surrounding area, known as the Burren, is a desolate ten-square mile limestone plateau that was once described as "a savage land, yielding neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury him." It is, however, a diverse biosystem with plants and flowers that have adapted and thrived since the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. The surrounding area does have its share of ancient trees, however, and we've seen more thatched roofs than we encountered in the south. I thought this one in particular was a nice job. Properly done, a thatched roof can remain strong and waterproof for 500+ years. Not many modern building materials can make that claim! ith

Central Galway on the Saturday of a three-day weekend (Monday is a bank holiday. They have 12 of those a year) was a zoo! There were people everywhere, many soliciting money for their charitable causes (like the group of harpists) or themselves (the ubiquitous street performers). There were also still a few stands in operation from the morning street market. McDonald's also has a presence in Ireland, but mainly in the cities. The arches are still golden but in Ireland, the red background we're used to seeing in the US is green!

Our late lunch/early dinner/meal of the day was in a restaurant/pub complex called Busker Browne's. It has several distinct seating areas on several levels. We opted for the quieter downstairs pub where I got an exceptional steak and Guiness stew and Margene got her beloved sweet potato fries along with a lasagna-like layering of eggplant, sweet potato and cheese. Very filling and quite reasonably-priced. Turns out the waitress/bartender was from Vancouver, British Columbia, just across the border from us. She came for a two-day visit three years ago and never left!

We made another stab at a trad session, but the scene in the pubs was just too crazy for us, even to catch the early music. We'll have a few other chances before we leave, but it will probably have to be late evening. If that doesn't work, well, we can always come back!

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