Cliffs of Moher

On our third day in Ireland, Adam and I took a sightseeing tour from Dublin to the Cliffs of Moher, which are all the way on the other side of the island! We had originally planned to take a train over there and spend the night, but a sightseeing tour ended up being the most convenient and cheapest option. Our tour guide was hilarious! He was extremely worried about us having enough bathroom breaks. He spent about half the time discussing when the next bathroom break would be, the quality of the toilets, and so on. Before we got the cliffs, we stopped at this pretty castle in County Limerick on one of our many pit stops.

We left Dublin at 8:00 in the morning and arrived at the cliffs around noon. We were so in awe of their incredible beauty! Did you know that these are the same cliffs from the Princess Bride, where they're known as the Cliffs of Insanity?

It's always a little windy on the cliffs, as you can see from my crazy hair in the above picture, but on days when it's extremely windy people can be blown off! There were several signs warning visitors to be extra-careful.

We had about an hour to walk around the cliffs. There were railings along most of the area, but we found a section without them to take a cool picture. Despite my happy expression, I was freaking out a little bit while Adam snapped this photo.

We had lunch at a nearby pub and drove to our next scenic location, the Buren. Our guide book described this national park as something "just out of a fairytale" but it was actually the opposite. Buren means "barren" in Irish, so this is one of the few parts of the Emerald Isle that's not green. It looked more like the moon than a fairy wonderland!

Here we are on the west coast of Ireland. Pretty amazing considering we were on the east coast that morning!

We made two brief stops in the Buren. First, we saw an ancient Druid burial site, pictured below. Last, we saw an abbey that housed Irish monks in the middle ages.

We arrived back in Dublin at 9:00 that evening. We quickly grabbed a slice of pizza and then finally achieved our goal of listening to Irish music at a pub just a few minutes from our hostel. It was really weird because a ton of French people were in Dublin that weekend for a big rugby match. So, we were sitting in a pub listening to Irish folk music and the conversations of drunken Frenchmen!