Ireland Day 7: Clonmacnoise and Galway

Day 7 was probably my least favorite day.  We had wanted to go explore Conmarra National Park but I underestimated the distance from our AirBnB, and so we will have to do it next time.  Also everyone said Galway was amazing.  It was a two hour city not an all day place, so it was kind of a bummer.  I am glad we threw in Clonmoacnoise Abbey at the start of our day.  It was the opposite direction of Galway, but worth it.  We also had our only day of grim weather this day.  Also because of the fender bender the car was making terrible noises and we thought the fender would fly off as we drove on the motorway. Fortunately we were able to pop the bumper back in place (thank you fiberglass) to fix that problem.  The Abbey was cool, minus the awful obnoxious German teens.  It seems to me that life was pretty craptastic in the middle ages and the monastic life was probably one of the more shelter and nutritionally sound options for life.  No wonder there were so many monks and nuns.  It sure beat starving and freezing. 

Galway is a univerisity town.  It has a fun medieval shopping area with a famous fish and chips place we ate at.  Honestly most of it was destroyed, like much of Ireland was by Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell.  We did a hop on hop off tour which was interesting.  The cathedral is newish and it had a plaque to honor JFK, but that got covered up with a curtain when his less than stellar morality was discovered.  Kind of funny. Eventually we kind of ran out of steam and ended up heading back to Kinvarra for a pub dinner.