Our Retirement Journey: Back to Ireland

We have left Northern Ireland and are now in Clifden, Ireland. It’s a small seaside community on the Western Coast who just happen to be having their big art fair. We stumbled upon a gallery opening before dinner and decided to check it out, despite not being dressed for the occasion. The artist was lovely to talk with and she made sure we had a glass of wine and answered all of our questions. Her work is interesting because she is both a photographer and oil painter.

Our B&B hostess and her 15 year old twin sons welcomed us, along with their rescue dog. He’s pretty old, but he lifted his head in greeting when we arrived. Our room overlooks her gardens and even has a dwarf curly pussywillow tree outside one of our windows. I had one in my gardens on 17^th street.

Ireland has only one fjord, so we opted to take the boat cruise to check it out. A nice break from all the driving time. We had been wondering about all of the objects in the water as we drove down. We now know that these are mussel farms. There were also salmon farms in this same waterway. They use large rings atop their farms whereas the mussel farms had long floating net buoys.

For the rest of the day we drove back roads along the coast and enjoyed the scenery. One of my favorite spots was at the Kylemore Abbey, which was built in 1867 as a private home for a wealthy London doctor. It became a Benedictine monastery in 1920 for Nuns fleeing Belgium in WW1. They established an international boarding school for Catholic girls and also established a day school for local girls. They were forced to close the school in June 2010. Not exactly a replica of our local high school!