Day 20 ~ Glencolmcille & Silver Strand

Today was our last day of touring. And to celebrate, I'm not going to hold back on the pictures! Believe me, it's still only a fraction of the ones I took but I can only sit here and upload for so long.

So, for the last time we packed up our little Golf and headed towards the seaside village of Glencolmcille. It was about an hours drive over a very bumpy and winding road. We passed through an intense rainstorm, many fields of sheep, villages and magnificent views.

This is a little roadside shine on the road up through Glenesh Pass.
We stopped briefly for a quick photo op of Glenesh Valley.

Yes, another village! Those Irish don't like to slow down....still 80 kph!

As we approached the beach, the sun decided to make an appearance.

Our destination at last. Silver Strand Beach. Now we had to get down to it!

What's that you say? Only 166 steps to descend to paradise? Piece of cake!

This beach was worth every single step....down AND back up again!

Once again as you can see the beaches in Ireland are terribly crowded :)

Watch out for the sheep dung, Keith! I guess they prefer the steps over the cliffs for getting up and down too.

Looking back up the steps. We'll tackle those later.

Ahhhh...we made it! It was cool but quickly warmed up to a beautiful temperature.

Hmmmm...my pics are out of order and blogger isn't letting me rearrange them. So we'll just have to jump around. Here we are heading back up to the car park. The climb confirmed the fact my cardio fitness is horrible.

I just wanted to drink in the scenery. Imprint it in my mind. I knew I'd be back but don't know when. I loved this beach.

Emma is one pretty girl.

Emma is giving Liam a friendly little ear tug. He's a brute though and didn't seem to mind at all!

Aren't they a beautiful family?

Don't want to get those pant legs wet in the surf!

A family shot. We were sad to leave but there was a big black cloud coming and we were all famished. Two good reasons to head back to the village.

Bye bye beautiful beach.

Some of the cliffs we saw on our way back to the village. Spectacular!

We stopped at the only place to eat really. An Cistin means 'kitchen'.

My fish and chips were excellent. Keith had the Beef Guinness casserole. The kids sat at their own table ( did their own ordering) and enjoyed being on their own. They were most well behaved and it sure made me pleased to know my kids are 'trained' well enough to be able to handle that.

Taken for Keith, of course. The fire station.

Sheep aren't quite as pretty once they've had their hair cut.

Our original plan was to go and visit more cliffs (highest in Ireland) but at this point we were all tuckered out. We pointed our cars back home and decided enough was enough.

During our whole time in Ireland I had seen these big plastic ice cream cones in front of every petrol station. Sometimes these ice cream cones had a brown stick stuck in the side of them. Sinead told me they are called '99s'. Basically a soft serve ice cream with a Flake bar stuck into them. I knew that before I left Ireland I HAD to have one. So on our way home we stopped at a petrol station and Darryl bought us all a 99. Yum. Yum. Yum.

But what was the best thing was that Keith came out of the store with a handful of chocolate bars saying: I found them, I found them!

What he had found was Cadbury's Double Chocolate bars. You see, last year Sinead had sent me one of these bars and I found it to be the most heavenly thing I had ingested in a very long time...chocolate-wise. I ranted about it to my fellow chocolate lovers, Keri and Kori and promised them if I ever went to Ireland I would bring them back a big bar of it. Little did I know that when I actually got to Ireland I could not find this particular bar for love or money. I could find every other bar Cadbury's makes but not this one and I looked in every single store we went to. I had basically given up and was feeling very sad about disappointing my friends. So you can imagine my delight that when Keith came out with the chocolate bars I was very very happy! You can ask Keri and Kori if it was worth the wait :)

So, happily we drove on back home. We had to make one emergency stop to change the most disgusting diarrhea diaper of all time. Let's just say Liam went home the rest of the way without his pants :)

Back home to our last full night in Ireland. Sniff sniff.