Plan B

Jane and Assunta were going to take the bus back to Dublin then rent a car and drive up the west coast. The lack of automatic transmissions in rental cars scotched that plan. So I hatched another plan, which we executed today. I drove them to Derry, where we took an hour-long tour of the city walls. This gave them a dose of history (both from the 17th century plantation and from the 1970s civil rights movement) which their time in Ulster has lacked. Here’s a photo from Jane’s Facebook page of me and the tour guide by one of the city gates.

Here’s Jane on a yarn-bombed bike:

Assunta and I in Derry’s Guildhall:

The Guildhall was built by the London guilds who turned Derry into Londonderry and built a wall to protect themselves from the restive natives. Here are some of their windows, although the colours are much richer and more vibrant in real life:

So from Derry we drove through the mountains to Donegal, secured a B&B for the night, went on to Killybegs for dinner, then back to the B&B to bed. In the morning, I took them almost to Sligo, where I handed them off to an old high school friend, Richard Bigger, who leads fishing tours on the west coast. Over the next two days, he drove them along the coast and through quaint villages, giving them better narration than I did, no doubt. They spent one night in Westport and two in Galway, from where they booked a bus tour down to the Cliffs of Moher and another bus to Dublin. Plan B worked out pretty darn well, if I may say so. Lucky for them, Richard was game to be their chauffeur.
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