After my first night of 8 hours of sleep, I lay in bed watching the cows walk right past our window, mooing loudly. We then went down to the adorable dining area for the best breakfast of the entire trip! Although Dingle was a close second. Conor tried very hard to get me duck eggs, even traveling to two different farmers markets, but no one was laying because of the extreme weather. I was worried I wouldn't have enough food... the first course was an enormous bowl of the best porridge we've ever had. It was so creamy! Our main course was a full Irish for Dan and a fruit/cheese plate for me. It was SO much food. The fruits were watermelon, kiwi, grapes, apple, blueberries, pineapple, and the cheeses were different cheddars and brie, which I spread on still-warm fresh baked brown bread. It amazed me how decadent it felt to eat fruit! I hadn't had anything more than occasional apples and mangoes for years! Trying a kiwi slice and blueberries made my heart sing. It was amazing. And somehow, I felt great afterwards!
I was sad to leave Ballyvaughan, but knew we'd be back. We stopped at the farmer's market on our way out, to buy some produce and soda bread.
Then was the half hour drive to Ballinderreen (pronounced Bal-lin-DEER-en), and checked into our super cute cottage for the week. It turns out there's actually nothing to do in Ballinderreen itself. You can walk through town in about 5 minutes. There's one bar but it doesn't serve food, there are no restaurants and no stores. Luckily Kinvarra and Kilcolgan are each a few minutes away and have plenty of fun things to do.
After getting settled in, we drove 25 km to Galway, walked to the market (which was smaller and less exciting than I remembered, and had no doughnut guy!) and got my favorite falafel for lunch. I love listening to the musicians on Shop Street, but for some reason two of them, at different times on our short walk through town, were playing Toxic by Britney Spears??? Very strange. We ate in Eyre Square and then Dan found a pub to watch the World Cup while I went off to find my favorite mall in the whole world. It took a few tries, but eventually I remembered where it was and was flooded once more with nostalgia!
After the match we were both too pooped to enjoy the city, so we got groceries in Oranmore on our way home, cooked some dinner and ate while watching the 7:00 match from our couch. There was a sign for 10pm music at Jordan's, the pub next to our cottage, but the music was terrible, the bar was overcrowded, and there was an overly friendly drunk man, so we went home.