Although still feeling a BIT green, this trip has been a dream of mine for years to do – to visit the Aran Islands which are just off the coast of western Ireland – best accessed from either near Galway or Doolin. As we have already visited Doolin with the bus tour to see the cliffs of Moher, way back when planning this trip I thought the trip from a city near Galway would be better and a shorter passage on the boat as it can get pretty rough in these waters. Not like that bothers me at all! There are 3 inhabited islands in the Aran Island chain – Inis Mor, Inis Meain and Inis Oirr. Inis Mor is the largest of the islands and our destination today.
First, we drove for about 45 minutes to the town where the boats depart from – Carraroe. A very nice drive to meet the 10am ferry over to Inis Mor and the 4pm ferry to return. Each direction was about an hour ride. Here is a map of where we stayed, where we drove to and then we crossed to Inishmore and landed in the bay on the bottom right of the island, where it looks like a bite was taken out of it!
When we arrived in Inishmore, I realized there was an issue – we were traveling during king tides and it was a VERY low tide currently. Tonight was supposed to be the Harvest moon. The dock, which we were supposed to dis-inbark from the lower level, where we were sitting was incredibly high and instead I had to climb up to the upper deck of the boat and go up the gang plank to get off the boat! There is nothing link parking next to a wharf and all you see is a ladder going up and up… wish I had taken a picture of that! Once we got off the boat we were met by a man offering a van ride around the Island. I had tried to book one of these and it said online that you will receive the best price when getting off the boat – so that is what we did! He had lived his life on the Aran Islands and he and his son ran this van business taking visitors around the island everyday. So off we went on our island adventure which included a drive, a stop at a 4 store village so people could walk to some ruins and get lunch and then return to the harbour in time for the ferry home. Off we go!
The van dropped us off back in the main village where we had departed from at about 3pm so we could go have a drink or shop prior to walking around the harbour to catch the boat back to the main island. At this point in time I was VERY puzzled. We are ON the Aran Islands. There is WOOL that comes from these islands – where are the wool shops? I had come prepared with a big bag to carry my wool onto the boat but wool shops (as in ones that sell skeins of wool) are missing! All that was there were stores that you can find all over Ireland that sell sweaters etc that are already made! Oh dear, I need to find some more wool! This is not going to be a beer and wool trip if I do not find more wool!
Now we are back on the main island of Ireland, we made our way back to our hotel. I was not feeling up for eating dinner so Andrew decided to have some of the seafood chowder from the restaurant downstairs, which I went down to get for him as I also wanted to get some ice. Holy smokes things can be expensive here! The to go coffee cup (medium size) of seafood chowder was about 2/3 full and cost me 11 Euros! That was quite expensive and later I found out it should have come with bread too! Andrew seemed satisfied with it and we then went to bed as we were driving to Killarney tomorrow to spend 3 days at an apartment that I had found online. I know that I had said we were not going to move around a lot, however the B&B that I had booked for Galway did not work out (12 stairs to our room) and then were not honest about the stairs so we had to cancel that booking. As Galway was pretty busy still, we decided just to stay the 2 days to go to the Aran Islands and then go back to Killarney, which we liked when staying there on tour for the balance of the 5 days that we were to spend in Galway…
However the story does not end there…. a few hours into the night Andrew got sick! Not as sick as I got however rightly so, pretty sick. So that put a wrinkle into our plans!