June 22 : First Night In Galway

 Today was a very long day for everyone on the tour. We went from Enniskillen to Galway with multiple stops. It meant that we didn’t get into the G Hotel in Galway until 20:00 pm. Our usually crowd in the lounge was down to only four of us tonight.

Also, it seems that the cold I caught earlier in the tour has now spread to multiple passengers on the bus. In our group, Trudy seems to be the worst off, but Keith has a sore throat and Ron has little energy which are symptoms of this virus.

Our first stop was at Knock. The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Knock, commonly referred to as Knock Shrine, is a Roman Catholic pilgrimage site and national shrine where in 1879, locals claimed to have seen an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist, angels, and Jesus Christ in the form of the Lamb of God. The Vatican performed a Church Commission of inquiry. The commission's final verdict was that the testimony of all the witnesses taken as a whole was trustworthy and satisfactory.

A stone from the original church, where the apparition was seen, has been preserved in the wall of the new church. Believers can touch this stone and pray for a miracle.

Five different Popes have visited this site and performed a mass. Mother Teresa was also a visitor.

In anticipation of a steady stream of foreign pilgrims a large airport was built. Unfortunately, this steady stream did not materialize, and it is now used a refuelling stop for NATO planes.

Next along the route was the little village of Cong. Cong was the film location of the movie “The Quiet Man.”  This 1952 romantic / comedy starred John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara and depicts an American in Ireland. It is still quite popular and plays on Amazon Prime.

We arrived in Connemara National Park after leaving Cong. Situated in the West of Ireland in County Galway, Connemara National Park covers some 2,000 hectares of scenic mountains, lakes, grasslands, and forests. The southern part of the Park was at one time owned by Richard Martin who helped to form the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals during the early 19th century.

Connemara National Park is the location of Kylemore Abbey. Kylemore Abbey is a beautiful structure nestled in the forest overlooking a serene lake. It has been home to a Benedictine order of Nuns for the past 100 years, after they took over it from the bankrupt Martin family. We were able to visit 8 rooms within the Abbey and they were wonderfully decorated. In one of excluded rooms, there was a nun providing piano lessons for a young boy.

There is a the 6-acre Victorian Walled Garden, which is highly publicized for its beauty. It turns out that the majority of the garden is a functioning vegetable and herb garden used to feed the nuns and visiting students.

On the way from Kylemore Abbey to Galway, we stopped to see a peat bog and see how truly unstable the ground is.

Once we arrived in Galway, we were forced to grab a quick dinner at a fish and chip shop, so that we could check in at the hotel. Even though we got there early in the evening there we no porters for our luggage and a lady from the front desk had to help move our bags from the bus to our rooms. I decided not to wait and took our bags myself. This was very bad planning and poor timing.

I’m really beginning to like the taste of Guiness beer. Peter our tour guide proudly states that Guiness in Ireland is the best because it is the freshest and has the purest water.