We woke up this morning feeling really congested. Must have been carry-over from the horse allergies. We were able to avoid most of the meat with breakfast which will help the calorie and cholesterol intake. Our destination today is Galway City. The drive will take us north, crossing the mouth of the Shannon via ferry. Unfortunately, our luck with the weather turned and we had to deal with clouds and showers throughout the trip. We had both good and bad experiences during the ride. On the positive side we saw some dolphins as we crossed the Shannon. Unfortunately that was overshadowed by the fact that it had gotten so cloudy that we weren’t able to see the Cliffs of Moher. We somehow found the B&B again in spite of those wonderful Irish directions. By the time we got there, we were both ready for a beer.

We were greeted by our host’s daughter who informed us that they had put us in the wrong type of room, a double instead of a twin. In fact she told us several times. She offered us some tea and said that they would try to switch rooms with a man who was in the twin. Her mom arrived a little while later and reassured us that she would be able to get the room situation straightened out. We agreed that the best thing to do would be for us to head into town, taking with us a key to the outside door and her leaving the room key in the door of whatever bedroom we would be staying in. She was even nice enough to walk us part way into town in order to show us a shortcut.

Due to the long, painful drive we decided that this would be a big pub crawl night. The shortcut brought us to College St and our first pub, Fox’s Bar. It had the look and feel of a hotel bar, a quiet hotel bar. We headed up a road on one side of Eyre Squire. There we found O’Connell’s which must be a popular after work place. There were a number of professional looking people enjoying pints there. We continued up the same road to Fibber Magee’s. On the teles was a soap opera that all of the patrons had their eyes glued to. Steve was preparing post cards for the boys back home that had Guinness rings on them. The barman was nice enough to place the cards on top of the dishwasher to dry them. We were able to tear ourselves away from the soap and moved on to the Hole in the Wall where we got a trainee Guinness pour from a barmaid with a Flobee haircut. One of the other barmaids was exchanging digs with a customer who told her that she should wear a plastic bra. We then went to McSwiggan’s which was huge. It had three floors and a tree growing through there in back. Each of the three floors was packed. Our next stop was The Cellar Bar which had good tunes playing on the jukebox. This was a new occurrence. While there, Steve found a pub/club listing. At Trigger Martyn’s we overheard some deep conversation. The last pub of the night was the King’s Head where we had another £1.95 pint of Guinness. We’ve noticed that the price of a pint varies by town but is pretty consistent within the town. For some reason two local women felt the need to make fun of my age. Of course my brother was right there to defend me…not. Even with the shortcut we felt the walk home was longer than we wanted so we hailed a cab. When we arrived at the B&B we were pleased to find that our host had been able to switch us to the twin room.