Donegal Part 1

Continued from Derry Part 2.

Bed and breakfast means I’ll need to wake up early enough to eat breakfast. Traditional Irish breakfast, cool. The girls who were staying in the room above us were talking and laughing pretty loud last night. Though, they did quiet it down after 11pm.

RL and JB had planned on going on a stroll around the old walled city of Derry this morning, but the moment they stepped outside, it started pouring rain so they abandoned that effort. Might as well get on the road a little bit earlier then at 10am.

Cars parked on both sides, narrow street.

Back through the site of Bloody Sunday.

Even today, there’s still controversy over The Troubles here in Derry. Some people call the town Derry, while others call it Londonderry, depending on your allegiance.

Since RL and JB couldn’t stroll around the old city, we figured that we’d drive through it.

And just like that, we are out of the old walled city. Nothing too special.

Out of Derry, the weather definitely isn’t as nice today as it was yesterday.

For the first time, we start turning down into small single lane country roads. Blind corners, bumps, no shoulder, tall hedges/walls. Every corner, I pray that there isn’t another car coming the other direction.

Spotted our first castle for the day. If the theme yesterday was the coastline, the theme today is castles. RL and JB both love castles…they are just ok to me.

We took a really small seldom traveled road to try to get to the keep in the photo above.

Yup, there’s grass and moss growing in the middle of the one lane road.

This is about as close as we got for a photo. We did manage to get closer by driving through some farmer’s barns, but the gates at the end were locked and we didn’t want to trespass…yet.

Audi fan over here. Coupe Quattro and Ur Quattro.

In Ireland, even if you stayed on the same road going from city to city, somehow you always end up going through tons of roundabouts. That kind of makes sense to me, but what really doesn’t make sense is that you never seem to just go straight through the roundabouts. You’d go straight straight, left, straight, straight, right, right, right, etc. Why can’t I just go straight between two points?

More small roads. These are a little stressful at first, but slowly I got used to them.

So beautiful.

Some random ruin along the road.

We are driving now in search of a lough(lake).

It’s cold, but fortunately, it’s stopped raining. Very shortly after leaving Derry, we came back to Ireland so I can just refer to the kmh speedo now.

Found the lough, and sheep!

Haha, that one on the left scratching itself with hind foot reminds me of my dog. I miss my terrible dog.

So many vibrant colors!! Never quite seen anything like this before.

Drinking water, eh.

Found an overlook parking lot. There are so few people on these back roads. Another car would come by maybe every 10 minutes or so.

Photos can’t do justice.

These pink flowers were all over these hills.

View point break means lunch break!!! I like our system of buying a sandwich in the morning and then eating it while we go sightseeing.

RL, me, and my sandwich!

Another one, different background this time.

Since this is their water source….let me make a contribution to it…Haha.

There’s a small hill across from our parking lot. Let’s go scale it!!

These hills are filled with sheep poop, so we are having to dodge them while climbing up.

I make my summit attempt!

Winning.

KL checks to see if camera lens has water on it.

This was one of two photos we were able to take at the summit. Right when we reached the top, it started raining big drops of rain. Don’t have our rain shells with us, better make our way back to the car quick.

The summit has some sort of bog where you’d step in and and sink down. Our shoes got wet over here.

Down down down.

Poop dotted everything. We were worried that we were going slip and fall into a pile of shit.

Mushrooms.

Back on the road…and this is scary. One lane road the width of one car, hedges and stone walls at the edges, two way traffic, blind corners, elevation changes, unmarked high speed turns, and the speed limit is 80kmh, which is 50mph. WTF!!!! It was super unsafe. This is the kind of road in the US where the speed limit would be something like 15mph!!