The way to Innishfree

We left Sligo today and headed for the first primary goal of the trip, to make our pilgrimage to Innishfree, also known as Cong. The small town in western Ireland where the Nelson Boys favorite movie was shot – John Wayne’s immortal THE QUIET MAN.

Sligo is a wild area of bare mountains that pop up out of nowhere, and at the ocean’s edge, a pounding surf that was quite impressive.  We stopped, further south, in a town called Castlebar for some lunch.  What a bloody mistake! I had a simple vegetable soup that they seemed to have to puree for some reason and add some crazy Indian spices.  I ate just a bit before almost throwing up. Jim had about the same reaction to his lunch.  We cornered the chef and he said they puree all their soups. I asked him what if a man wanted a simple bowl of chicken noodle soup?  All I got was a scowl.  So, we stood outside and took a picture of us giving the thumbs down and posted it Wiki-travel, saying…don’t eat Here!

We ran into a little rain on and off all day but for the most part the weather was good for the drive. We were making good time until we hit Balinrobe about 10 miles away where the terrible street signs had us circling for about 40 minutes. We stopped for directions twice and I had the time to feed a stray dog two of the cookies that Sandy had packed.

Finally Cong!. The first thing we saw upon entering the small town was Pat Cohan’s bar, right out of the movie.

The town is setup as a series of one-way streets that form a circle around town and almost every store or restaurant had a Quiet Man theme to it..

We passed the ruins of the Cong Abby also from the movie.

On to the B&B that was about three miles out of town along twisting 1 ½ car roads, which made for some rather interesting driving as we met other cars along the way likely driven by bloody tourists.

The B&B is lovely and newly built. Again the view was breathtaking.

Our hostess was much more accommodating than our first and the rooms better. The breakfast was quite good and very filling. Again we seemed to be the only guests in this ‘low’ season.  We headed back into town with the idea of finding a great meal but as we stopped by each possible place to eat we found that only one of us could find something we wanted to eat. We settled for a few pints

 and our hunger waned eventually so we bought some wine a cheese and went back to our beautiful room for the night.

We headed out in the morning to see the Connemara peninsula and then it’s on to the Galway and then the Cliffs of Moher for the night.