Hey, look! Life isn't all bad. I got to go to Ireland a while ago.

(Days 1 and 2 of our trip are here)

Here are pictures from Day 3 of our voyage. This was by far the rockiest day. In fact, the day was pretty awful. It's the kind of day that proves you can have a bad experience and laugh about it later and kind of even be glad you went through it because it makes such a good story.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

So on the third day of our trip, we procured a rental car and decided to visit the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren.

Not long after beginning our drive, however, we soon realized we might not be cut out for driving in Ireland. It probably didn't help that the first place we decided to drive was along some of the more treacherous roads we encountered during our trip (but we didn't know that at the time).

The super narrow roads (mostly with stone walls coming right up to the edge of the pavement -- no shoulders like we're used to here in the US) plus the high speeds with which the Irish tend to cruise along them, were bad enough. Driving on the left side was sort of the last straw. We were both pretty terrified. I kept thinking Brad was going to run us into a wall trying to stay away from the oncoming traffic. We both kept imagining the terrible car crash we'd get into. We remembered signs we'd seen on the bus ride from Dublin to Galway, about the high rate of fatal car crashes in Ireland.

We got partway to the Cliffs of Moher and decided to stop at Dunguaire Castle. The giddy looks on our faces in these pictures are mainly the result of all the adrenaline coursing through our veins and our sheer relief at being out of the car. It was fun to explore the outside of the castle, though it was closed so we couldn't go inside. But it was my first experience visiting a castle, so I was pretty excited.

We steeled our nerves and got back in the car to continue on our way. I kept thinking we were going to get used to the terrifying driving conditions, but our nerves just got more and more frayed. It finally culminated in a crisis - a flat tire. There was some debris on the road that we couldn't really avoid and before we knew it, the tire was flat.

So we pulled off into a side road, on a little hilltop. There was no real evidence of civilization as far as the eye could see except two farmers in the distance attending to some cattle. Brad was still nursing a partially-healed broken collarbone, but I wasn't strong enough to remove the tire bolts myself, so he struggled with it (and ended up with a sore shoulder) while we watched some really nasty storm clouds start to roll in and began to get nervous that we'd be stuck there in the middle of nowhere indefinitely.

The flat tire was almost a relief. Once the tire was changed, we both decided we'd had enough of this and that we should turn around and bring the rental car back and rely on public transportation through the rest of our trip. We missed both the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren, but we did get to stop for lunch in the scenic little town of Ballyvaughan. And when we finally got the rental car returned and took a cab back from the airport (where we'd rented the car) to Galway city, we ate a lovely Indian meal.

The worst part of the experience, really, was that we ended up wasting a lot of money on that rental car - the terms of the rental were pretty ridiculous, and we ended up having to pay a lot more than we should have for a morning of car rental (even taking the flat tire into account).

Strangely enough, in retrospect, I wouldn't have had it happen any other way. It's a great story and it's sort of character-building to go through something that terrifying. And, seriously, if you're used to American roads, DON'T ever try to rent a car in Ireland.