After another poor night's sleep (although nothing could compete with the previous one) and another enormous breakfast, we got back in the car for the ride to County Galway. We mostly stuck to the larger roads, since it takes longer to get from place to place than you think it will on this island. This was compounded by the fact that we stopped a lot--to look at crumbling ruins, to step into charmed prehistoric circles of standing stones while sheep watched warily from the next field over, and to visit the town of Donegal, which is much more attractive than its namesake in PA.Donegal was our lunch destination.
We strolled past the obligatory castle, around the market square, which was bustling with the buying and selling of cheap food and merchandise, and then walked right out of town in an effort to get some hunger going. The town was small enough that this wasn't particularly difficult. We saw another graveyard on the grounds of a ruined abbey and stopped in to survey the inhabitants. There was a good range of headstone styles and ages, which made for some interesting looking. Some overlooked the water, a pleasant place for a final repose if there ever was one (although decaying bodies may negatively impact water quality when placed in a location with so little buffer).The lunch places recommended in the book were all closed, so we selected a big barn of a place nearby that seemed popular with the locals. We got sandwiches in the pub part, opting not to sit in the wee snug for fear of being overlooked by the wait staff. (Turns out that they know to look in there--go figure.) The food was pretty standard, but the scene was lively, with a bustle not unlike the typical American after-church meal.
With our appetites satisfied, we navigated the narrow roads out of town and continued heading southwest. We passed Ballyshannon, Sligo, and the outskirts of Galway. Listening to the radio is one of our pastimes of driving vacations, and Ireland's stations were a mixed bag of dreck and entertainment. Some stations were in Gaelic, and at first I thought we were picking up a signal from the Netherlands, as the guttural sound of some letters tricked me. Given that we were driving in and out of An Ghaeltacht, as the Gaelic-speaking regions of Ireland are called, it should have come as no surprise. (What was surprising was the fact that, in spite of the warnings in guidebooks that one might have problems with signage in this area, everything was in both Gaelic and English so it was fine.) As afternoon wore on, the announcer on a station playing traditional music came on to recite the obituaries. This went on for about 10 minutes and covered several recently-departed individuals. We eventually switched to another station and discovered that they, too, were reading the obits. While passing through Galway around rush hour, we listened to a broadcast were the young DJ had an old man on the phone, clearly trying to get a rise out of him with an eye towards getting him to say something non-P.C. The old guy had that throaty Irish chuckle you hear Lucky the Leprechaun do on sugared cereal commercials. After staring at each other in disbelief that people actually did that here, we couldn't help but laugh ourselves.
We arrived in Kinvara about 6 p.m., parking our car in the small gravel lot by the house and converted barn owned by our host. She came out to greet us and took us into her place to get the keys, where she was knitting a spectacularly colorful array of baby clothes.
She asked us if we had heard about her place on NPR, as one of their reporters comes there every summer and did a piece on it. She also said that John Prine summered in town with his family, sometimes jamming at the musical evenings that crop up so frequently around there. She then showed us to the barn where we'd be sleeping. It was thatched, with uneven whitewashed walls a foot or more thick, and filled with books and art. I thought to myself, I'll have no problems sleeping HERE, even though the barn is practically sitting in the road. Although the barn was supposed to be self-catering, she had stocked the fridge with breakfast supplies, earning our eternal gratitude. 
After puttering around a bit in our cozy space, we made our way out to explore the Dunguaire castle across the street. This place has tours and medieval-style banquets in the more temperate months, so we just skirted around the outside on a slim, muddy track that gave way to the bay below. After a fashion it was time to decide about dinner, so we walked into the town proper and scoped things out. Let's see, should we go to the one nice restaurant with pricey food that was recommended? Or the self-dubbed "best food and music in town"? Or the other best food in town place, with free music nightly? It was awful difficult to discern between one place and the next there, and all of them seemed pretty quiet at that hour. We ended up at Keogh's, which had some stickers of various travel publications on the door, and sat in the pub area. Another so-so meal passed, as we listened to two very authentic looking old guys chatting at the bar and drinking endless cups of coffee. There was an acoustic guitar case propped up against the bar, a good sign, and a guy who would alternate between checking on it and having a shouted conversation with another person in the restaurant area. Eventually he left with his possessions, and after dawdling as much as we thought humanly possible, we exited as well and took another slow cruise around town, listening carefully for any distant strains of a violin or crooning, but all was still. We entered another bar, this one nearly barren of ornament and seemingly populated exclusively by locals. I got a couple beers at the bar and we had a sit at one of the tables, ignored by the rather boisterous group of varying ages (although women were heavily outnumbered). We sipped our way through the beers, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did so we went back to our place. We researched the next day's activities and called it a night.(The title of the post references the fact that I fervently believe that stopping in Donegal somehow created the karmic connection that allowed us to find the elusive Maggie's on the Pike in Donegal, PA, last time we drove the PA turnpike. I've wanted to go there for years, and we actually tried one time but failed to find it. I referred to the place as the Brigadoon of Donegal, appearing every so often out of the mists so that mortals can visit it and sup on its vegetarian cuisine, and then disappearing again without a trace. Now the curse is broken. But given the fact that it's a ways off the turnpike and that it was a bit pricey, I doubt we'll be dropping in with any regularity.)
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