We went and walked around a little, and went into some of the shops she'd pointed us to, and ended up buying some wooden thing you hand on the wall with a tree on it. As mentioned earlier, the Flanagan family seal is pretty much a tree, so it seemed like a good fit. What we didn't know is that from that point on, every time we stopped from then on, we would see the exact same display, with the exact same wooden "hand crafted" wall plaques. We didn't ever see the exact same one we bought, so I guess we did pretty good. I could probably walk over to it right now, and tell you what it says on the back about what it means, but it's way over there, and once you get going with this writing thing, it's probably best for me to move on.
We decided to take off because as nice as our lodgings were, Sligo was a little bit of a working town, in that, there wasn't much to really do outside of walking through the main area where we'd alr
eady done a lap or two. We had a short drive north to Donegal in front of us, so we got going. I think the most telling thing about Sligo was that we only took once picture the whole time, and it was of an orange Volkswagen Beetle. This is because I'm a fan of orange cars, and I'm a fan of Volkswagens, so it was sort of a must. This picture has no real significance however.
The plan was to stop at a place and go horseback riding between Sligo and Donegal. I've got this thing that when I go on vacation to someplace more rural, I like the idea of riding horses. It turns out that the Irish are wild about horse trekking. As such, it appears that you can't just show up, and you should have an appointment. Oh well, moving on. I did see a very tiny pony tied up outside of the place, supposedly to bring in passersby, which is odd, since they didn't take walk-ins. Either way, tiny ponies still poop plenty, so watch your feet.Our evening's lodgings were procured and selected by myself. It was a little place outside of Donegal town, situated on a hill beside a lake. After a couple of wrong turns, we started up a much longer and more windy road than we'd anticipated. The loch (lake) was stunning, and the day was again totally clear and beautiful. We finally found the place, and as luck would have it, she had no idea who we were. A moment of confusion, and some checking of the book revealed that she had written us down for the next night, and she was totally booked tonight. But it was still early, about noon, and she was nice enough to call a whole lot of places before finding one that had an opening just outside of town in Donegal. We were told to scoot down there as they were tentatively holding the room for us. This was a little bit of challenge, because, as you know, all directions in Ireland are not really based on roads and exact distances, rather by approximations and vague generalities. It's part charming and part annoying, but mostly it worked out.
The B&B was called the Lake View house, or something like that, which was funny, since you could really only see the lake from one specific angle through a long corridor of trees. From that specific vantage point, it was a nice view, but you really had to lean oddly against the window to see it. The guy who checked us in was a middle aged man who was very gentle and quiet, which according to every creepy movie ever, made us think he was probably a killer, so we left for lunch as soon as we could.
Donegal Town is basically a big roundabout with a bunch of shops around it. It's a bigger roundabout than most, so it's a bigger town centre than most. But it's never as big as you'd think it would be. We used our book to find a little place called The Blueberry, with the hope of eating some of their blueberry pie, which looked fantastic after the lunch. For some reason, I decided to order an asian stir fry, which wasn't bad so much as A) not at all Asian, and B) it came on top of spaghetti, which threw me off. But it was actually normal enough that I enjoyed it. It was a neat place, and if you were looking for lunch, and you happened to be in Donegal, I'd tell you to go there. The unfortunate postscript to the story is that they sold their last piece of blueberry pie just before we tried to order it. Sweet irony!
I was still without Irish Sweater, and as Donegal was famous for their Irish sweaters, so we went into a sweater shop, which turned out to be perhaps the biggest mistake of the trip. We ended up in a place with a man who spent a great deal of time telling us that Aran Island sweaters were in fact a load of "codswallop" and nothing ever really gets made there, and people who buy sweaters there are in fact fools. Then he proceeded to make me try on a bunch of sweaters that, were I an actual fisherman concerned solely with warmth, I might have liked. Yet as a someone fashion conscious American, New York City dwelling male, I was forced to concede that there might just not be the man for an Irish fisherman sweater. Lindsay couldn't figure out why I kept indulging the man, and putting on sweater after horrible sweater, and honestly, I couldn't tell you. Finally, a mailman came in, and we used the distraction to leave. Before that it was a tractor beam I couldn't escape. Banana Republic might be an evil corporation, but it never made me feel guilty.
We decided to drive off to Slieve League, which I have to admit, I didn't really know what I was going to. But there wasn't much else to do, but go drive around and look at things, so we went. Honestly, at this point, it just seemed like, "what else could there be to see?" We'd seen so much natural beauty, and of such diversity so far that we may have been a bit burnt out on the idea of it. Yet we were both kind of surprised that there was still more goodness to be had. As such, we took more pictures here than we would anywhere else. That might have been because of the sheep though.We go around the edge of these cliffs and little towns, and then at one point, there was a tiny little sign pointing us seemingly away from the cliffs, so obviously we drove right past it, and had to come back around. Then it was through some very rural looking areas with tiny, sort of poor homes. This might have been the only place in Ireland that didn't have a brand new car in every driveway. Slowly and surely we wound up and up, until we got to a gate, where there was room for one car. I had to get out, open the gate, drive through, and then go back and close the gate. There was a small parking area at the bottom for those who wanted to walk up to the cliffs, rather than dr
ive what was promised by our trusty book to be a harrowing drive. Apparently, it was a couple of kilometers up to the top, and it was late in the day, so we elected for the road. This was a good move for several reasons. It took about 20-30 minutes to drive to the upper parking area, and I'm fairly certain we would have turned back and missed the whole thing. We also would have missed the scariest, most narrow, most right-next-to-the-edge-of-a-giant-sea-cliff road ever to exist in the history of driving. My insurance company would cancel my policy right now had they any idea what I was doing. There were parts where the top of a crest would be so steep that you literally couldn't see over it until that roller coaster like moment when you drove over it. Add to that the fact that there was the previously mentioned one car's width, and two way traffic, and I'll admit, I'd slowed way down from what we were used to on the trip. We crawled up the hills with a few butterflies in the stomach, but no life altering incidents.
The view at the top was indescribable. Well, I mean, there was a cliff, and some green hills, and a gorgeous sky, and I guess that's describing it, but really I'm doing the scene no justice. From the car park, you could keep walking up the cliff, seemingly forever, which I thought about doing. Eventually, Lindsay refused to go any further, and the ground was a bit muddy and slippery for my to deal with in my sneakers, so I turned back. Had I been wearing more rugged footwear, it's possible that I might still be wandering around up there, but we'll never know I suppose. Had I stayed, I'm sure I wouldn't have tired of the view.
Another curious feature of the area were the sheep. As you know, there are sheep everywhere 
in Ireland. But this was just nowhere. The idea of someone actually tending to sheep here was crazy. The place was huge, and I don't know how the sheep got everywhere, but there wasn't an area of un-nibbled grass anywhere. It was the best lawn maintenance I'd ever seen on an area impossible to mowers. Granted, the sheep poop was prolific. There's always a downside. Lindsay was finally in a position to shoot pictures of sheep close up, with no one around to scare her away. Of course she learned that sheep are in fact the most timid creatures in the world. Any slight movement in their direction causes them to start in the opposite direction. This didn't stop her from shooting about 8 dozen pictures of them. She made physical contact with them only once, and it was a fleeting contact. The sound of their nibbling is unceasing, and much more rapid than you'd expect, by the way.After draining the camera batteries, and shooting every possible view of this monolithic natural wonder, we headed back down the road of very probably death, and safely made our way back to Donegal Town.
Back at the giant roundabout, we set to find a place to eat, and finally, at long last, decided it was, at long last, time to go back to the pub food well. Since leaving earlier in the afternoon, tour buses full of retirees had taken over. We went into one restaurant, and there was one of those movie moments where someone walks in the door, and a record scratches, the music stops and everyone looks up. We went in, took one step through the door, and saw the largest group of septuagenarians possibly ever gathered in Europe. There was a brief moment of realization, and it's very likely that we actually slowly backed out, not moving a muscle. They, like dinosaurs can sense motion, or so I've heard.
We went a couple doors down, and ate in a slightly more youthful pub, while we watched a match from the US Open, which was located very near where we live in Queens. We noted, with delight just how ridiculously hot and humid it was back at home at the time. This night was all about beef, and the return of the ubiquitous chips. Lindsay made with the beef and guinness pie, and I with a classic steak sandwich. Enough with this futile attempt at cuisine in Ireland. It was a night for roots.
After the dinner, it was pointed out that I had gotten off track with the Guinness, and we went to a local pub. It was maybe the most local of all the pubs we'd been to, with real regional accents, and a vague sense of "should we be in here?" Of course nothing happened, and while I, for reasons really unknown to me, turned down a local's offer for a game of pool, I was pleased that he'd offered. Shyness will kick you in the ass if you let it, which I did, and I'll likely regret not playing that game for the rest of my days. For the record, he put the quarters in and cleared the table by himself with such skill and accuracy that I was a bit pleased to be spared the embarrassment of my ineptitude at yet another bar game. Some locals started singing, not badly, but not particularly well, and we made our exit to go back to the creepy man's bed and breakfast with the nearly non-existent view.
The upcoming day would be one with nearly no plan or goal, off the coast for the first time, and down through the middle of the country. Things did not bode well.
