Ireland - Day Four

Today (4/7) was mine and Bryce's one year anniversary and we started it off by being woken up and told we had to leave to catch the ferry in one hour. So we had one hour to get ready and eat breakfast! They forgot they hadn't told us the plan the night before.

We took the ferry over to the Aran Islands. This was quite possibly my favorite experience of the entire trip. The Island is 9 miles by 4 miles with about 600 people living on it. A lot of people rent bikes and ride around to the different things while on the Island. On the ferry on the way over this is what we decided to do (much to my dismay because it was freezing!) but when we got off the ferry there were lines of tour vans and you could pay for them to drive you around the Island, which is what we quickly decided to do. Our tour guide was named John and I think he'd lived on the Island his entire life. While he was talking he'd sometime slip into Gaelic (the Irish language which is still heavily spoken on the Island) which was kind of fun. He first took us to Dun Aonghasa. It's a semi-circular fort built on a cliff side. The fort was built in 2000 B.C.! John dropped us off at the bottom and it was about a 20 minute hike up and about 35 or so on the way down (because it's fairly steep and very uneven.) Here are pictures from the fort and cliffs.

When we entered the fort we saw this sign. It's Gaelic for "no throwing rocks"

It started raining on us while we were up there. Look at that wall behind Bryce! That was stacked by HAND!

They had a few of these little cubbies.

Looking left off the cliff edge.

Looking right off the cliff edge.

Looking inside from the cliff edge.

Looking down from the cliff edge.

This was on the walk back down, the entire Island is filled with stones, that's why there's over 10,000 miles of stone walls on the Island. They are used to divide families properties! Here are a few pictures of some of the walls.

After we hiked back down, we grabbed some food before John picked us back up.

Me and Bryce

Mike, Dan and Me

My mom, Mike, Dan and me

John then picked us up and took us to Na Seacht d'Teampheall (The Seven Churches) - it's the remains of 2 churches and five 15th century monastic houses (no one is really sure why it's called The Seven Churches.) They were all demolished by Oliver Cromwell when he sent by the Queen to basically destroy Ireland back in the 1600's.

From The Seven Churches, John took us past the Islands Lighthouse (I was on the wrong side of the van to get a picture!) and we stopped off at the Seal Colony. John was telling us that sometimes they get 50-60 seals up on the beach in the low tide. I tried to zoom my camera in as much as possible, but we still couldn't see the seals with it.

If you can see seals, let me know!

Dan tried to get a close as possible!

We were content to just take a picture of us :)

After the Seal Colony we headed back to the dock where we went to the Aran Sweater Market. Aran Sweaters have become fairly well known around the world. They started out being made for the men when they went out fishing and the children as they walked to school. The different families invented their own stitches. They said one of the reasons for the family stitches was to be able to identify bodies that washed up on shore if they went overboard while fishing. They have since branched out from strictly hand made sweaters to including machine stitched sweaters, so that's what we purchased (since they were about HALF the price of the hand stitched sweaters!) I did buy a hand knit hat. From there we got on the ferry and we back to the mainland.

Here's John's van

Here is my hand knit Aran Island hat.

This was just a cool picture while we were waiting for the ferry.

Once we got back to the mainland we decided to take the "scenic" drive home which was much more windy and narrow then the way we'd come and we subsequently got a flat tire. It took probably 15 minutes before we found the jack and another 15 minutes before we got the car jacked up, unfortunately it wasn't high enough to get the spare tire put on. Luckily (for us and unluckily for them) a few cars got stopped because they couldn't get around us (on account of the narrow roads) so we were able to borrow a jack and get the rest of the job done and get on our way.

This is where we were when we got the flat! It's gorgeous, but it was freezing because the sun was going down!

One of our new friends helped us out thankfully! Do you see how narrow the road is?!

Now a funny side note. When my mom rented the van, she got the MOST insurance she possibly could and they told her she was covered for everything except THREE things: Keys (don't lose them!), Gas (don't put the wrong kind in) and..... you guessed it, TIRES, so we had to buy a new tire to replace the flat since it was unfixable! Talk about bad luck, huh?!

Another funny side note was one of the cars that stopped while we were fixing the tire made a comment about us staying at the B&B we were staying at and we asked how he knew that and he said he lived next door and had seen the van when he left that morning for work. We were only 10 miles or so from the B&B when we got the flat! When we finally got back we called it a night.

I will close this post by saying this was probably one of my most favorite experiences of the trip, visiting the Aran Islands, I wish we could've stayed longer and seen more of the Island. If you ever make it over to Ireland I HIGHLY recommend making it out to the Aran Islands!