Ireland road trip in a week: Homebase in Letterkenny
(Comments in italics by Johanna and Daniel)
McGinley’s Pub, Letterkenny. We meet Paul. At least we call him Paul… This Irish accent is still not so easy. > The assumption is obvious, though, since John and Paul seem to be two of the most common male first names here … However, the Irish must have at least 12 first names – Paul has 11 siblings – since there are some rather large families up here. Another very popular male first name, and probably the undisputed number 1, is Patrick. Just the day before yesterday, we had the pleasure to see how the Irish go crazy on St. Patrick’s Day – more about this in another post.
We are in the north of Ireland. West of Northern Ireland’s northern border with Ireland. We met Paul just now, after a long day around the Irish peninsula Inishowen in this pub.
Jedi Bootcamp: Our day in a nutshell
We started on the east coast of Inishowen and headed for our first “tourist” attraction: A stone circle. After a short search we found the old hiking trail to the stone circle, at the end of which we were greeted by a barbed wire fence. With our athletic skills we overcame this first obstacle Jedi-like, to finally arrive at the stone circle. It was located on a normal pasture and was therefore not even signposted – after a few photos we continued up the east coast. Second stop was a beautiful sandy beach in Culdaff. There we climbed and jumped up the rocks (the force was with us…) – and of course took many, many photos. Since the weather also played along today and we had a whole 4°C, we could also stay there a little longer and even let stones flit across the water, although without much success.
Afterwards we went further to the north. The cliffs, where Luke Skywalker already stood, we also wanted to hike. So we drove on a (more or less name worthy) “road” as far as we could. The rest we had to do on foot. This would have been no problem with rubber boots – had we had any. Less the cliffs of Ahch-To expected us first Dagobah swamp. Since this is known to correspond to the brown, cheap roads on the Monopoly of the Stars, it was hardly surprising that a young padawan got wet feet for lack of adequate footwear. What else would you expect…
On the trail of Luke Skywalker in Ireland: Steep cliffs and bizarre rock formations
The view that awaited us was out of this world. Steep cliffs at some depth, bizarre rock formations and azure waters – ok, enough of the gibberish. After quite a bit of elevation gain, we had a gorgeous view from the northernmost point of Ireland, Malin Head, to the south of the north of Ireland. The galactic peninsula, which actually served as the filming location for the recent Star Wars movie and represented Luke’s home base (not Lars’), is marked even in Google Maps with the Millennium Falcon (not the Tie Fighter).
After another odyssey thanks to Siri, we were first able to fortify ourselves at the only restaurant far and wide. With freshly caught crab, local meat in proven burger form as well as Irish Stew we regained our strength. The day was already quite far advanced, but the next stage – Stone Circle, Vol. 2 – was already approaching. The stone circle, which was not a stone circle but a round fort, offered a beautiful view over Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle. Since the weather played along so well and the sun always accompanied us, we were able to take more photos and selfies of excellent quality here as well. Afterwards, however, we needed refreshment.
Live music in a pub as the cherry on the pie: Fantastic day
Good that we had already taken care of that – a small Tobana cake (or something like that… anyway, it was a combination of banana cake with extremely much toffee icing on top) we treated ourselves first in the car. We had brought it from Buncrana, as well as coffee to go, which Daniel and Johanna desperately tried to drink during the car ride. This proved to be rather difficult due to the nature of the Irish roads, as well as to a good extent due to Julia’s driving. What’s that supposed to mean? I drove totally fine. Except sometimes when I couldn’t find the shift knob, or the gear, or the road, or the car width, or or …
Well in sum, she did great and put up with all my comments too. That was the hardest part though! We agreed that our car would be an automatic, in blue – what else. The main thing was that the color was right. Afterwards we went to Letterkenny, where we finally met Paul and finished the evening with a beer or two.
Three Padawans, six beers, two ciders and the tiniest ginger ale of all times (125 ml you can inhale directly) later the live music finally started, for which I have been waiting since Saturday.
// Star Wars in Ireland: Wild Atlantic Way
// Filming location of Luke’s Pilgrimage: Malin Head
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