Hooked on Craic: Galway Round Deux: The Tour, The cliffs, and The Vodka

Saturday afternoon Alisha, Megan and Dave and I packed our bags and left for our second trip to Galway. For those of you who don’t know, our first trip was... well, it needed to be redeemed. In a nutshell, organized trips where you take a nauseating mini bus where the driver thinks he's in Fast and Furious and you only get an hour at the main destination while you’re supposed to “sight see” in the Irish countryside is NOT ideal-- especially when the wind and rain make you wonder why you ever got out of bed in the first place.

However, in our one hour in Galway, we all realized it was a really cool town and we wanted to go back, especially because the Cliffs of Moher were only a short ways away. If you’re unfamiliar with the cliffs, they were also in Harry Potter as you can see here:

Our trip started off on a bus... we know, we didn’t want to take a bus either, but it was only €10 each way, it had wifi and was non-stop. It was actually pretty comfortable, and before we knew it, we were back in Galway! People from all over Ireland and Europe come together in Galway for the nightlife with drinking, dancing and trad music, which we were very much looking forward to. After checking into our hostel, we went straight to the off-license liquor store to get some drinks and mixers to start off our night.

We started off our night at Monroe's, a bar we were assured would be great for the traditional Irish scene. However, as soon as we got there, we realized it was all old people and we wanted to leave immediately since it appeared we got there too early. I was already about 7 shots of Smirnoff deep from our drinks at the hostel, and I needed to finish my beer. I didn't hesitate to channel my inner college freshman, and proceeded to chug my entire pint of Hoegaarden and then some of Alisha's beer since she's gluten intolerant and couldn't finish it.

And that’s about all I clearly remember from the night.

But here's what I vaguely remember/know went down:

We moved onto this pub called The Spanish Arch where we went the first time we were in Galway
As the band on stage was singing “Sweet Home Alabama” I vehemently tried to get the singer and everyone else around to say “Roll Tide Roll!”
I don’t even like Bama.
We moved on to another pub called the Skeff, where I concluded that I should not drink anymore for the rest of the night
I sobered up a bit through ~~excessive~~ some dancing at Karma, the main club in Galway.
I may have thought kung fu was ok for a little bit
Supermac's is God's gift to mankind and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's basically a food court of every good drunk food chain known to man, and it may have saved my life.

As you can imagine, I felt like the charter bus we had taken to Galway had somehow found me again and ran me over 12 times by the next morning. Shit. How am I supposed to climb a fucking cliff when I can’t even climb out of bed?

Super excited for the cliffs!!! Guess who's jumping first?!

However, after a latte, a muffin, and some extra greasy fries from McDonald’s, I was good to go. I always have to swallow my pride before getting on a tour bus and acting like a total tourist because it reminds me all too much of Key West where people would arrive in droves off cruise ships, busses and the like, and completely tear through the town. Luckily, it was a beautiful day out and the tour was very well-done. We only burdened one small town with their one open pub on a Sunday for lunch, but the food was delicious, everyone was polite, and I think the pub owners get excited when they get business in their one stoplight town.

As we were on our tour, we stopped at Poulnabrone, a site from the neolithic era, we saw a few castles, and eventually arrived at our destination at the Cliffs of Moher. And Holy Mary Mother of God, were they amazing. Photos don’t even do them justice: