Galway

Arriving in Galway, from the Connemara area, we made a beeline to the harbour, which often represents a promising spot to park for the night. This time, it didn’t look so good — somewhat on the industrial side, not surprisingly — so we pulled over for a quick stint of online research, and found out that the nearby promenade had unlimited parking and was okay for motorhomes. We drove there and found a park beside the water, amid no less than six or seven other motorhomes.

That little piece of housekeeping complete, and bellies rumbling, we walked along the promenade and through some residential streets, crossed a bridge over a particularly fast running stream in which swans battled the current, and into Galway’s pedestrian zone. There was a festival atmosphere which we’d remarked on as soon as we drove into the city, the colourful alleyways teeming with people, buskers on every corner, and pub clientele spilling out into the streets. One busker had a large tray full of sand which he had shaped into two eerily-lifelike sleeping dogs. Neat.

One final little errand, I ducked into a Three store and bought a pre-paid Internet kit (bye-bye, Meteor, bane of the last few days!) for some ludicrous amount of money, with the rather devious plan to take it back in two weeks when we leave the country. That’ll teach ‘em to force customers to buy modems they don’t want!

We spent a moment shopping around for a restaurant with prices that didn’t make us gag, and settled on a cowboy-themed establishment that was slightly less tacky than it sounds, where we had two extremely satisfying burgers with chips and cider. Man, that’s the stuff.

After a rather fitful sleep interrupted by passing traffic — well, for Katherine anyway; I tend to sleep through anything — we took the next day ‘off’. We wandered the pedestrian zone, had a run-in with a Nazi-automated-three-sheets-of-toilet-paper-is-enough bastard toilet that still makes me angry when I think about it (whoever designed and installed that abomination has a seriously sadistic streak. Galway city council, I’m looking at you. Bastards!), and spent a rather silly amount of time post-processing photos. Our home-based afternoon activities were amusingly interrupted by a marathon, runners passing by inches from the window. We may have felt our fitness increase slightly by osmosis.

A rather time-consuming search for a quieter place to stop for the night ended with a rather successful Google search, and we stopped at the side of a tiny road mere metres from a quite pleasant pebbly beach on Galway bay — aside from the basilisk glare we copped from two elderly pedestrians on the way in, for reasons apparent only to them! The wind came up late in the evening, and we went to bed to escape the howling gale blowing in around the edges of the kitchen cabinet. Brr.

An errand-day followed, necessitated by an empty LPG tank, and exacerbated by the fact that lots of the allegedly-LPG-carrying petrol stations we visited were either out of gas or had broken equipment. We finally found one, and the friendly petrol station attendant, who looked like he should’ve been hitch-hiking with a guitar slung over his shoulder, suggested some places for us to visit on our onward journey, and also suggested we duck into the mechanic over the road to talk about Nettle’s little fuel issue.

A rather uncomfortable experience followed, when the mechanic responded to my brief introduction with silence and a stony glare and proceeded to ignore me for several awkward minutes until I gave up and went away. Eek. I found a recommendation for a mechanic on an online forum — having Internet access as we travel is fantastic — who happened to be five minutes’ drive from our neat bayside wildcamp, so we spent another night there and dropped in on Phil the mechanic the next day.

Phil sorted us out on all fronts, including fixing our leak, lending me a hex key to fix our little draft issue, and recommending some more places to see.

So, with Nettle sorted, we headed onwards.

Connemara National Park

After a very scenic drive through the mountains, we arrived fairly early in Letterfrack, at the slightly-disappointingly-crowded visitor centre. With, refreshingly, most of the day ahead of us, we decided to do the 7km walk up to the top of a nearby mountain, Diamond Hill.

The beginning of the walk, starting at the visitor centre, felt a bit like being with a tour group — a very crowded pathway. The view was beautiful, though, over the surrounding bog, which was nicer than it sounds. Glossy luminescent red-and-green grass waving in the breeze, dotted with wildflowers, and with mountains in the background dropping into the sea. We broke away from the worst of the throngs once the walk departed from the ‘easy’ version, changing rapidly from boardwalks and gravel pathways to ad-hoc steps made out of haphazardly-placed rocks, ascending the steep mountainside in vertiginous switchbacks. The breeze increased to a crisp, strong wind, sometimes threatening to take one’s balance. Man, no way the public liability lawyers would allow this sort of thing in Australia. Brilliant!

We turned a corner, and the wind dropped away to nothing. A few tens of meters further and we were on the top ridge of the mountain, along which we walked with 360° views of the surrounding area. The mountains ahead of us had an amazing crinkly texture, deep fractal ravines in the otherwise smooth surface, through which creeks ran.

The track descended the other side of the mountain, and wound around through the bog (I just love saying that word — it works best pronounced “borg”) back to the visitor centre.

Some time spent futzing around trying to find a place to fill up our water; a quest we gave up on as evening progressed. We found ourselves a quite brilliant wildcamp spot, right on the bay with a splendid view of a nearby mountain.

The following day, we had a late start and drove out just before lunchtime. After ducking into the visitor centre again and asking for suggestions for walks we could do, we plotted out a route covering some of the driving tour around the area.

One promising-looking walk circumnavigated a lake nearby, so we drove down a likely-looking side road, which got narrower and narrower, and terminated at a highly un-promising-looking gate. Time to turn around, but where? We tried to do a six-point turn at the gate — there was a driveway nearby that gave a little width — with Katherine at the back window letting me know how close to the fence we were. There just wasn’t room, though, so I decided to just reverse back along the road as far as was necessary to find a place to turn around.

About 20 metres reversing and, as usual, we saw two cars coming our way, thwarting the manoeuvre. Every time! Once they pulled up and realised our predicament, I got out and went over to discuss tactics. They made the universal apologetic shrug and told me they were French and didn’t understand, so I mustered up my meagre French and told them we were trying to back out. Then, a third car came up the road, a local wanting to get in her driveway. Brilliant.

I don’t quite know how we all did it, but like those puzzle games where you have to move cars and trucks around to make space for a car to exit, somehow we made it out.

So, on with the driving tour, which was satisfyingly pretty, the road weaving through the grassy hills, past a few loughs bordered with copses of pine trees. Still looking for water, I did a quick Google search to see if anyone had any suggestions for topping up in the area. Quite luckily, I stumbled upon a council press release which declared that the local water was not safe to drink after a cryptosporidium outbreak. Just missed the Letterfrack-belly there.

So, driving tour complete we ended up back in the place we wild-camped the night before. Wanting a change of scenery, we pressed onwards, as the road quickly narrowed and started steeply up a hill. Nettle’s engine did it’s worrying running-out-of-juice thing, and we barely made it up. A few minutes later, while passing another car, the engine stalled completely — even the power steering stopped working, and I was left hauling the steering wheel around to avoid the oncoming car. The engine started again immediately, but we were quite shaken and worried, and pulled over in a convenient place beside a nearby lake for the night. Whew.

The next day, Nettle coughed to life and we limped at an excruciatingly slow speed out of the Connemara area. Within 20 minutes, she was her old self again and we sped off, bound for Galway.