Galway

I have worked in tourism here in Northern Ireland for a few years and found that a lot of our visitors are touring the whole of Ireland. And almost all that I meet have brilliant things to say about Galway and the West coast of Ireland from natural beauty to the nightlife. As is often the case I haven’t visited half of the places on my own doorstep. When my sister and I were chatting about how we both could do with a wee break Galway came up as a handy option. And so I hopped onto booking.com and got booking.

I thought I would share here what some of our plans are for our visit and when we get back I’ll let you know how it goes!

We will hopefully be arriving at 5 o’clock on a Monday evening and leaving about 4 o’clock on Thursday afternoon. 

  

My sister and I are both keen musicians so first and foremost we are looking forward to hopfully enjoying some traditional sessions and a pint in the evenings. From what I can gather the places to be are either Tig Coili’s or The Crane bar and I think they both have sessions twice daily so hopefully it shouldn’t be too difficult to listen to some music. I don’t have any restaurant recommendations yet so I may need to wait and get some local recommendations.

I have a bit of an obsession with small islands, places were populations are sparse and the way of life is a bit slower. So I really want to visit one of the Aran Islands. The Aran Islands are made up of Inis Mor, Inishmaan and Inisheer. I see online that some people attempt to visit all 3 in one day. However when I travel I would rather do less but really enjoy it rather than being a slave to a schedule. So I think we will visit Inis Mor to which you can get a ferry from Galway and is the biggest of the 3 islands. The island has lots of monuments of christian, pre christian and celtic origin as well as a beautiful landscape. We are planning on spending a full day here and were thinking about renting bikes. I also wouldn’t mind picking myself up an Aran Jumper.

We were considering spending our other full day at Connemara National Park. It covers 2,957 hectares of mountains, bogs and heaths and has several walking trails. There are also a variety of old ruins and different wildlife such as ponies and red deer. The scenery and mountain ranges look absolutely beautiful so I am looking forward to exploring that.

That leaves us a half day before we leave. We were thinking about spending it chilling and perhaps doing a little bit of shopping. Galway seems to have a lot of little craft shops, independent shops and little book stores which is right up my ally.

So that is our plan for Galway!

 I haven’t included any photo’s here because I want to try and keep all photos on the blog as my own.

I’ll see you on the other side!

x