LegenDerry city Derry with many names

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Day 9



Back to Londonderry/Derry to drop off Stan and Chris, dear, longstanding friends of Karen & Clive at the airport. Such a lovely couple with the same sense of humour as we have and it was great spending some time getting to know them while we all celebrated Rowan & Sadhbh's wedding. The name of Londonderry was confusing to us, but it made sense at the end of the day. While at Derry we did a tour while walking on the historic wall around the city. Our guide was so informative, giving us a good overall account of the history of Derry and kept the tour very interesting and fun with his sense of humour, covering The Siege, Emigration, Bloody Sunday and Modern Political history. It certainly has had a troubled past that adds to the conflict of its name. The river Foyle is navigable 16 kilometres inland, which I found quite interesting as that is something quite unheard of in South Africa. It is now mainly used for pleasure cruising and not exporting as it was in the past and apparently the main export was people!





While we ambled along the wall and streets of Derry, there were runners exerting themselves in the Walled City Marathon and for their effort they received a mighty fine medal, the size of a saucer! If no injuries were obtained during the race, they were sure to get a neck injury from carrying this heavy object around their neck after the race. Mind you, there were some tough hills around there, we only had to walk them, not run them and that was exhausting enough for me. I think I had more fun than what they did! To all the Comrades runners in South Africa, SORRY FOR YOU, you only get a small medal for a much longer distance!



Seems like there are some superheroes in Derry as well! Now I know where they all come from. Managed to capture some photos of a few.



After saying goodbye to Stan and Chris, we headed back to Strabane and then made our way down to Galway. I just love the beautiful scenery of Ireland and wish we could have more time to spend on this Emerald Isle, but I am more than happy to be seeing what we have so far and Karen and Clive are going out of their way to make this trip as interesting as possible for us. I thought Ireland was small – it may well be, but we covered some distance that day heading for Galway. Would have loved to have seen the Cliffs of Moher, but we had to head on towards Killarney. We had to make some difficult choices of sights to see as time was getting less and there was so much more to see with time restraints.

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Photos

If stones could speak
They sure would have a tale to tell!

Our tour guide
Famous or infamous?

Filming our our guide
Passionate about his topic