Galway, Ireland
The road trip through Ireland continues. Since most of our time here has been spent in a car, I haven’t been able to document every moment on my camera. Just know that so far Ireland has consisted of a lot of toasties, Guinness, live music, and sceneries that look like this:
Yes, it’s true, I am living the life. But not as much as my mom is. She’s basically Irish royalty, just because she happens to have red hair. People ask if she’s a local, smile at her on the street, tip their hats to her, hit on her at pubs, wait on her every beck and call, carry her on their shoulders through the streets. In America, I am used to being considered to be a redhead, or a halfsie at the very least. But here, I don’t even fall on the ginger spectrum. I’m a negative. My mom is paraded around like the second coming of St. Patrick, and I don’t even get as much as a second glance.
Besides that, Ireland has mostly been living up to the high expectations that it has set for itself. Today we departed from Galway to head to Dublin and visited the Dunguaire Castle and the Cliffs of Moher. The Castle was originally built in the 1500s as a family home but was most recently purchased and renovated by a wealthy British woman in the 1960s who understandably wanted to live in an Irish castle.
At the Cliffs of Moher, I had dreamed of pulling a Ron Swanson like in that one episode of Parks and Rec when he goes alone to that isolated ocean-side cliff in Scotland with a drink and a Robert Burns poem to read. But unfortunately, the Cliffs were a bit crowded with tourists, I didn’t have any whiskey, and it’s wrong to read Scottish poets in Ireland. I wish I had Leslie Knope arranging my European trips, but alas.
Instead, we went to the Cliffs visitor center, where they have a hilarious soaring-over-California-esque virtual experience where you get to pretend that you’re a bird soaring over the Cliffs. You can bet I’ll be giving it a 5 on TripAdvisor. We then went to walk along the long stretch of the Cliffs, which are pretty beautiful and look like this:
Something unbloggably awful happened at the Cliffs of Moher, but it’s on my mind so I’m going to write about it. While we were overlooking the Cliffs, a coast guard helicopter suddenly came and hovered lower over the Atlantic, and the door of the helicopter opened with someone leaning out as if they were going to jump or were looking for something. We didn’t know what was going on but a man standing next to us told us that about a half hour earlier, a man was standing with his girlfriend at the edge of the Cliffs and suddenly took off all of his clothes and jumped over the edge, leaving her behind.
We didn’t know whether this was true or not, but as we walked further up the cliffs, a group of police officers stood communicating with the helicopters, and one of them was holding a grocery bag full of clothes. Then a coastguard boat drove up to where the helicopter was hovering, and we saw them exhume the man’s naked body from the Atlantic. I can’t even imagine what that felt like for the man’s girlfriend. Perhaps most frustrating, as tourists are natural voyeurs, plenty of people were just standing there and endlessly snapping pictures. It was basically the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and my thoughts are definitely with his girlfriend today.