Connemara Marble and Kylemore Abbey

One quick note from our visit to Durty Nellie's pub yesterday: they had an "I closed Wolski's" sticker on the wall (that's a pub on the east side of Milwaukee) and several stickers advertising Milwaukee's Irishfest. Between that and my dessert last night, which had some fancy French name but was a cream puff, it was like a little taste of Wisconsin right here in Ireland.

Today we went to the village of Cong, which comes from the Irish word "conga," meaning not a dance but (and this is truly relevant for those of you back in Madtown) an isthmus. The reason this little village is known among tourists is because the John Wayne/Maureen O'Hara picture (or "filim," as our tour guide pronounces film) The Quiet Man was filmed (filimed?) there. We took a walking tour of sites from the movie, and when it began to rain on us, our tour guide asked someone to play Gene Kelly (who is not in the movie), so one guy from our bus kept singing, "I'm singin' in the rain!" at the top of his lungs, over and over, because he didn't know any of the rest of the words. Then the tour guide picked a guy to play John Wayne's character, and wouldn't you know he could do a dead-on impression of John Wayne. I didn't have a part in the re-enactment of the movie, but Travalon got chosen to be the young cleric Father Paul because he is the tallest guy in the group.

After leaving Cong, we drove through the countryside of Connemara, admiring breathtaking scenery like Lough Caragh ("lough" means lake) full of wooded islands and surrounded by mountains. We went to Kylemore Abbey, a Victorian castle built by some guy for his wife, and when she unfortunately died of fever at the age of 45 while they were visiting Egypt, he built a miniature neo-Gothic cathedral the size of a chapel for her memorial. We had lunch in a tearoom with a stunning panoramic view of the mountains and lake.

On the way back to Galway, we stopped at the Connemara marble factory for a brief tour and to purchase some marble pieces to bring home. I added yet another rosary to my collection. Why not, it's been way over a year, maybe two, since I've acquired a new rosary. Then tonight we are going to a traditional song and dance show that is supposed to be one of the premier ones in Ireland, so hopefully it will be quite a bit better than the one we saw in Dublin. It runs very late, and of course we have to be up early again tomorrow, so we're going to be short on sleep until getting to Scotland, where we have no breakneck agenda.

Famous Hat