Day 20: Cliffs of Moher & Scibbereen

We landed in Shannon after a very uneventful plane ride, thankfully! Mark and I enjoyed watching some Fast & Furious on the flight over; cinematically it's way before before its time. Customs wasn’t too bad, and once we had our bags we were off to The Cliffs of Moher. The Cliffs were beautiful and we had a nice hour hike on either side. We later learned from Claire & Jerry that the parking lot we parked in was highway robbery. Claire and Jerry were told of a cheaper option from their lovely BnB host (DM for intel). From the Cliffs, we headed out for Skibbereen in county Cork. The travel ended up being close to 4 hours on mostly back roads that were narrow and bumpy. We learned that all roads in Ireland start with one of four letters followed by a number. The letters are labeled from largest road to smallest: M (motorway), N (national), R (regional), and L (local). I was reminded that Bubs and I got lost on our way into Cork 10 years ago and the same happened to us this trip. Once from a wrong turn, and the other because Ireland’s president was in the area and we were rerouted. We had a good chuckle comparing the protocol for an American president. We got situated at our BnB in Skibbereen and had a drink in the BnB’s pub. We walked around town, found one other pub that had two lovely terriers out front and a big football match was on that had the bartenders very distracted from pulling pints. I had planned for us to go to Church Restaurant, which is in a building that used to be a church. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t have the restaurant’s current hours and they weren’t open on Sunday for dinner, along with the rest of Skibbereen. So we went back to Annie May’s BnB for a dinner, which was very lovely, much to our surprise. We struggled to stay up till half 7 in the evening and then retired. We fell asleep quickly and soundly but I was up from 2am to 5am, but then had a good couple of hours of sleep after that. The sun is up until 10pm and then again at 4am. The birds chirp slightly before sunrise. The rain plummeted down in the nighttime until the sun came up. It was cold and drizzly in the morning but then it cleared up.