Today started early.

I was up at 5 a.m. to do some writing before leaving for Cliffs of Moher and Galway on Wild Rover Tours. It’s clear across the country, as Dublin is on the east coast and rather central and this day trip would take us straight across the the west coast and the Atlantic Ocean.

We met the bus at 6:55.

We left the hotel at 6:30.

I experienced some unusual motion sickness. So M took that as an occasion to drug me on the way home.

We stopped at a service plaza where I purchased overnight oats that turned out to be the best oatmeal I ever had.

The Cliffs were gorgeous but they had a lot of wind. The wind tossed people around.

Ireland has stone walls that serve as property lines and date back 5,000 years. I knew that, in a way, but I did not suspect how many there are. They are everywhere. The Burren, as Stephen the tour guide said, had some of the most welcoming, beautiful scenery anywhere in the world. As M said, “I don’t usually get off on a field of grass but…”

I don’t have many photos because I needed to save my phone’s battery life as we were away all day. The bus had USB charging ports but I have a USB-C cord. Perhaps if M reads this he will send some of his photos.

But I do have a video of some unusual, but also ordinary, traffic. Keep in mind, they drive on the left in Ireland so that narrow passageway in the video is indeed the other lane. “This is what we call gridlock traffic” Click here.

The craziest part of the day was when we reached Claddagh Jewellers on Shop Street in Galway, I felt something family about the branding of the shop. I studied the window displays and I found the wedding rings Darrell Parry and I ordered from the Irish store, Donegal Square, in downtown Bethlehem. We spent hundreds of dollars on them and waited for months for them to arrive from Ireland.

And we got compliments on them all the time. In the last photo in the series, the gold ring directly in the center of the bottom row is the men’s version.