Ireland: Cliffs of Moher and Burren.

Our adventures started early this day. Our plan was to leave Dingle and drive about and hour and fifteen minutes to Tarbert , take a 20 minute ferry over river Shannon, cross over to County Claire, drive up another hour and a half to the spectacular cliffs on the west coast of Ireland called the Cliffs of Moher. This route, although more expensive, was more time efficient and promised to be more picturesque. We booked our ferry tickets online, a roundtrip to save money, and thought we were set.
As we were approaching the tiny town of Tarbert with the ferry port, we realized that we were beginning to be surrounded by fog. Lots of fog. As the sun was coming out, the fog was not lifting. And as we pulled into the port town and followed the directions to the ferry, we realized that we could hardly see the river Shannon, that’s how foggy it was.
We arrived to the ferry terminal, but there were no signs, no ferry, no person at the ticket counter to find out what was going on.  There were two buses waiting for the ferry, and, luckily for us, one of them was on the phone with the terminal on the other side. He found out that the ferry was not coming at 10:30 (that’s the one we wanted) as it was too foggy. And they were not sure when the next one would be. Most people were just pulling up to the terminal, seeing the fog and turning around.
Sadly, that’s exactly what we had to do…and then we had to drive all the way pass Limerick to cross the river and get back on track. So our great plan to be most efficient did not work after all-haha. We added an extra hour to our driving time that morning. We quickly modified our plans and decided to go to Burren National Park first since it was on the way to the cliffs coming from Limerick.
As we drove up to County Claire, pass Enis and all the cute villages, the weather started to clear up. The sun was shining, it was WARM! We followed Rick Steve’s book’s instructions for exploring Burren area, but we were not really sure if we were making progress in getting to Burren National Park.

We needed a place to eat our sandwiches (that we had pre-packed. See? We have to be prepared here)…and this old church looked like the perfect place.

Honestly, it was cool. It was weird and spooky to me, but the kids thought it was awesome.

They were not scared to go inside the ruined building…but I chose to stay near the graves.

Next, we stopped at the visitors’ center for Burren, and then everything started to make sense. The area is called Burren, and it’s vast—it includes a lot of villages and wild terrain. But Burren as we know it from pictures was a specific area to which you had to drive and then hike to. So the guide gave us good directions to Kilnaboy village where we could park and hike.

And let me tell you, Burren is STRANGE! It’s so odd and so magnificent at the same time. It’s desolate and amazing, barren but so unique.  This was the first stop the kids wanted to make to play hide-and-seek. Another great place!

As I sat there listening to the kids squeal with delight, I thought to myself, “This is a perfect relaxing vacation”. I sat and listened to buzzing of bees around me, fluttering of butterflies and birds. Otherwise, the air was just still and quiet. I couldn’t believe that this was the place that people on Tripadvisor describe as eerie and windy and “out of this world”. My experience was completely different, and we loved it!

We drove a bit further into the barren lands, then stopped and explored a bit more. We could have gone way higher up the mountain if we wanted, but we were short on time (due to the ferry plan falling through).

Here is a close up of these weird rocks that look like they are one big cracked massive rocky surface, but for real they are movable rocks.

Yes, Burren was a success.

Another thirty minutes towards the coast and we made it to the cliffs. As we were gearing up for super windy conditions, we realized Alex left his Loch Ness sweatshirt at the place in Burren where they played hide-and-seek. Argh!!! Well, we thought, we’d make a decision later whether or not to drive back for it. For now, I grabbed some gloves and jackets and we headed up to the walking trail along the cliffside.

Do you recognize this view? It’s truly majestic!

This was a busy place, although you can’t see it on this picture. Hundreds and hundreds of people walking along the trail that goes up to the top of one of the cliffs and then loops around to go back along the side of the cliff that just..goes down. There was a lot of walking involved, everyone got HOT! What? Wasn’t it supposed to be windy and called? I was over prepared.

And then…the two older kids decided to be stinkers. They thought that there is no point of walking even further to the top of the cliff if they already saw plenty. So instead of dealing with dragging them with us, we left them to sit by the side of the road, like two lost puppies. Mark was our determined child who didn’t mind a few extra meters to climb.

We could see the kids from the top, but I was still nervous (although knowing they were not going to go jump of the cliff or anything).

We took our time to enjoy this glorious view in this sunny weather. AMAZING!

Well done, Mark! You’ve jumped up for pictures in so many countries now!

My super cool awesome husband who decided he liked Ireland quite a bit.

And, of course, my baby and I.

Finally, we started walking down the trail walking along the edge of the cliff. Not for the faint in heart. I was quite nervous as well, so I walked fast to just get it over with. Katya loved it!

This place and the Burren are definitely two places to not miss in Ireland. The cliffs are free to explore but you have to pay 6 euros for adults. No one checked our tickets, but you have to buy them to get into the parking lot. Give yourself an hour to walk around as it’s not just walk out of the car and get to the cliffs kind of thing.

After the cliffs, it was getting late…we had to catch the last ferry back to Tarbert at 7:30 and we were still two hours away from the port of Killmer. Our plan originally was to drive down this beautiful western coast to see some rock pools near Kill but after much thought we realized that even if we forgot about Alex’s sweatshirt and drove down to see the rock pools, we wouldn’t have much time at all. And then we thought about how much Alex loves his Scottish sweatshirt and decided to make our boy happy. We drove back half an hour to the Burren, found the sweatshirt almost immediately and then drove to Killmer via an inland route.

We arrived to Killmer ferry port with twenty minutes to spare, just enough for the kids to play near the water again with a homeless dog.

Although we didn’t take many pictures of it, the sunset that day near the river was just gorgeous. We felt like we had a fantastic day in County Claire.

Kids bundled up (Alex in his favorite sweatshirt) and rode the ferry on the top. In fact, at the end of this day, Mark said this was his favorite part of the whole day—sitting outside on the ferry.

We came home quite late, got last minute Chinese again and…watched a bit of the X Factor (seriously, we’d never watched this show before, but it’s been really fun! This season is quite good in the UK).

And thus we have one one-way ferry ticket left to give to someone to use within a year…I’ll be looking for friends who might be able to use it. It’s good for either Tarbert-Killmer or the opposite direction route.

Our trip has been fabulous so far (despite a ferry mishap), and we still had one more day left!

Lyana.