All Aboard the PaddyWagon!

We arrived in Dublin (Ireland) on Sunday 11 October in the evening and caught the free PaddyWagon bus for our first night at Paddy's Palace. Don't let the name fool you, it was no palace and being our first night in a hostel let me just say it was interesting. We luckily booked our own 2 person room but we both had a terrible sleep because we were right next to a train line and there were lots of weird and wonderful noises throughout the night. Oh well it was cheap and got us prepared for the week ahead.

We started our 6 Day Southern Tour with PaddyWagon Tours on the Monday morning. There were about 35 people with the combined 3 day and 6 day tour. We drove through Dublin and headed west through Ireland. We drove past some peat bogs where they harvest the peat for industrial uses (energy). There were also big piles of the dried peat bricks along the side of the road that they also use for heating etc. in houses. We stopped to have a closer look and when you are standing on the peat if someone nearby jumps on the ground, because of the consistency of the peat, you can feel the vibrations through the ground. It was pretty cool.

We stopped at Clonmacnoise an early Christian site founded in the mid 6th century. It was mostly ruins of churches and round towers and very old graves. We headed into Galway on the west coast for our stop off for the night. We spent a little bit of the afternoon having a look through the streets of the city and we stayed at a pretty nice hostel. For dinner we went to a local pub and I had the biggest and best Irish Stew that I had whilst I was in Ireland. So of course there is a photo here for you to check it out! I found my drink of choice, Bulmers Cider (sold as Magners Cider outside of Ireland) and most of the tour group tried the local beer, Galway Hooker (no it is not named after what you think, a Hooker is a type of boat).

When we had finished dinner the pub had a live band so we all had a bit of a sing-along. We made our way to another pub that had a band playing traditional irish music. Galway is a party city and when we were heading back to our hostel (around 11.30pm) there were heaps of younger people out (18 to early 20s) lots of them completely drunk and this was a Monday night! It was crazy busy and we went to the Irish fast food joint (SuperMac's) for some cheese fries and the locals and the sights we saw there were quite amusing!

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