Today, Sunday, it was raining hard so I got some help from the hotel receptionist and she called a taxi to take me to Kylemore Abbey and take me back after 3 hours. Danny Ryan was a friendly reliable man my age, born in Hoboken and having lived 14 years in San Francisco where he met his wife in an Irish pub! But being Irish and married to a woman from Co. Galway who wanted to raise their children in Ireland, they returned home.
(Taken on the day of my Connemara tour when it was sunny)
The Kylemore Abbey was full of wet tourists with their ponchos from Kylemore (were they free? Did they not bring a raincoat to Ireland?). I walked the mile to the gardens after the Abbey, church and mausoleum.
Construction of the castle began in 1867 and took four years to complete. There were 33 bedrooms!
On 1920 the Irish Benedictine nuns bought the castle and land after having to flee to Ypres, Belgium, due to persecution for being Catholic where they lived for 200 years. It is still a monastery.
During a vacation to Egypt, Mitchell Henry's wife, Margaret, got dysentery and died
The gardens which used to employ 40 gardeners in the time of the Henry family
It got sunny after Danny dropped me off so out I went to feed the local horses I met the other day but they were far away from the street. I ran into a friendly cat and after letting him or her I bought some cat food and talked to 3 local high school girls while the cat ate the whole packet.
Then I had fish and chips at a nice restaurant with a great view. The sun was nice and the town looked swell!
You can see the monument to the town's founder that I visited
Danish (perhaps) couple eating next to me
Statue in center of town to British aviators Alcock & Brown who made the first transatlantic flight in 1919 and landed near Clifden when they couldn't make it to London. The story is that they were able to find Clifden because of the two church spires fairly close together.
The statue was
formerly located at London Heathrow Airport. Relocated to Clifden, County Galway, Ireland to celebrate centenary in 2019. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_flight_of_Alcock_and_Brown
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