Day 26: The Aran Islands are all Greek to me

Walked this morning from our accomodation about three kilometers out of Doolin into town and out another two kilometers to the pier on the other side, to get on a ferry that would take us to Innisheer (Inis Oírr in Gaelic). It took quite a while but we did arrive on time and took a lovely half-hour journey across the water to the nearest (and smallest) of the Aran Islands. It's a beautiful little town, full of traditional Irish culture (which mostly surfaced in the street signs and maps, which were conveniently written in Gaelic without an English translation, so we had some fun with that).

The beach of Innisheer. Gorgeous waters, lovely soft sand. 

We tried out the island's bike hire company, and they were much nicer than the guys in Windermere (way cheaper too!). The girl handing out our bikes just said, "Hey, if you'd like a taller one go ahead, try this one out," and it actually ended up working really well! No condescending salesmen, no rain, and probably most helpfully, no insane mountain bike trails. I am, after all, an experienced road biker.

So Mom and I hopped on our bikes and headed out to tour this lovely little island! We saw green fields and stone walls...and more stone walls...and basically there are about ten times as many stone walls on this island as there are inhabitants of it.

I think the ground is so rocky that they had to dig this much rock out of it to get enough soil to farm, and they had to put it somewhere so they did this. 

Cheryl here: I had a blast riding bikes here! The roads were little lanes between walls, with more walls branching out every which way, and beautiful flowers along the roads and cute animals (ponies, sheep, cows) in the fields (more flowers too). The roads twisted and turned and went up and down, sometimes reasonably smooth and sometimes quite rocky. It's hard to describe, but it was beautiful and fascinating and crazy fun all at the same time.

Wildlife notes: Saw a puffin on the way out (just a quick glance before it dove), very beautiful gulls on the island, and a gannet on the way back! Didn't know what a gannet was but it looked different than the gulls, and fortunately our host a couple of days later had a bird book on the shelves, and it was unique enough for me to identify. I think I got a glimpse of a dolphin while we were waiting for the ferry.

Erin again: After an hour or two of biking along the south beach, we took a break and got some lunch, then went to the beach to sip on a Diet Coke (yep everyone, Mom drinks Diet Coke pretty much all the time everywhere). We were approached by a dog that just walked up and stared at us at his eye level: so apparently my shins were really exciting. I petted him a little bit and he seemed to enjoy it, and then I went on my way.

Then he approached us again. He actually went and found a bit of seaweed and dropped it on my feet. I threw it for him, and he ran and got it and brought it back to me. It was adorable.

DOG

This carried on for a few throws, and then he got bored and stopped chasing them. We separated for a bit, and he brought over a couple of other bits of seaweed before I found out what he really likes doing. I was playing with digging my feet into the sand by slowly wiggling them side to side, and he just stared at them. He even pawed at the sand in front of me.

I thought I'd try an experiment. Much like I occasionally do to Misty, I wondered what would happen if I startled him by yanking my foot up into the air. A big clump of sand went flying up into the air, and he loved it. He had finally gotten me to do what he wanted all along.

So I spent the next two hours standing at the beach kicking sand for this dog who never tired of it. He would look right at me (eye contact now, he wasn't trying to tell me anything about what I should do with my feet) with such excitement, and if I moved my foot back a little bit in preparation for a swing he would crouch a little bit more, like a compressed spring. It was so fun to watch.

I started throwing them higher so he could jump for them; he loved it even though he got sand all over his face and probably swallowed about a cupful of it

Mom left at some point to continue actually touring the island, while I stayed until it was time to regretfully say goodbye to Dog and catch the ferry.

Well, it was supposed to be time to catch the ferry. There was some huge snafu with the fuel truck and our ferry didn't arrive for over an hour; we kept being told that it would arrive in twenty minutes (a ferry did arrive then, but it was never the right one--ours was of course the very last ferry to show up).

We finally did hop on and enjoy some lovely birdwatching (this is where we saw the Gannet) and jellyfish sighting. When we got back into the mainland, there was a school (I don't know if that is the proper term) of jellyfish of unbelievable size. The school, not the jellyfish; they were only about six inches in diameter. But so many of them!

I'm not sure how well you can see them there but there were millions

We returned to the pier and walked back through Doolin to our accommodation, stopping at O'Connor's Pub again for dinner and more Guinness (when you're in Ireland I feel you have to have as much of it as possible, without over-imbibing). It turns out that getting to the pier and back was over six miles of walking--good thing we didn't have our packs on!