After Dingle, we drove up to stay a couple of nights in a little town called Oranmore, just outside of Galway. Although we enjoyed our time in Oranmore, if I had to do it again I would probably just stay in Galway so we would have been able to spend more time there. We spent a few hours on the first day wandering around Galway Old Town, which was adorable, and eating pretty much everything they had to offer. Most notably, we both shoved an entire pizza from Dough Bros Pizza into our faces, and it was one of our favorite meals of the entire trip. The next day we took our time driving through the Burren and then to the Cliffs of Moher, which is every bit as spectacular as anyone has ever said. I remembered/found out from some other American girls that the cliffs was where they filmed that great scene in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince where Dumbledore and Harry went to find a horcrux together. Obviously when I got back to our room I watched the scene in its entirety. I think that was one of my favorite things about Ireland. It doesn’t matter where you are or who you are talking to, everyone is so nice and welcoming. Even other tourists are more delightful.

On the third day, we were planning on going to the Aran Isles, which I’m sure would have been amazing. But we had just been seeing a whole bunch of cliffs so we thought a change of scenery might be nice. Instead we decided to go to Connemara. Oh man did I love Connemara. I felt like we were in this isolated magical place with mountains, lakes, bogs, and sheep (lots of sheep). The drive through the park is truly unbelievable. We visited Kylemore Abbey which is right in the middle of this mystical, beautiful place, and it pretty much blew my mind. Ask Corey, I was jumping around like a maniac the entire time I was there. The abbey has a romantic and tragic back story, where a man built the home for his wife in the late 1800’s after they fell in love with the area on their honeymoon. The wife tragically died 14 years later, and the home transferred ownership several times until it ended up as a school.

I started with the Connemara pictures and ended up with the Cliffs of Moher because I liked the order better that way :).