November 5: Westport

I love Ireland! It makes me grin like an idiot being here. We left on the Shamrocker tour today and there are 16-ish people on it, so it is a pretty small group relative to Topdeck and Clusterfuck Contiki.

Our first stop was the hill of Tara, which was the ancient Gaelic capital when Ireland was four kingdoms and then there was a fifth head kingdom or something at Tara. Not much is left of it but it used to be where the high King of Ireland would rule over the other four kingdoms. There are a couple of little hilly things, a big stone called the stone of destiny, and if it screams when you touch it and all of the country hears you, you get to be the king or queen of Ireland! We didn't get to touch it though because there was a security guard patrolling the area and it's from before the 6th Century anyway. Dammit, I might have gotten to rule Ireland and now I'll never know.

After that we went to Kilbeggan and the whiskey distillery (aptly named "John Locke Distillery", which, being a philosopher, I found highly amusing) where we tasted "first shot" which was 78% alcohol! It was basically moonshine. There was actual whiskey there as well, but that was after the whole distillation process had brought down the alchol content. We had lunch at the distillery and got to know the people on the tour and whatnot and yeah.

Then it was onto Knock where the whole town is super religious on accord of some virgin Mary sightings in the 1970s. Not much was there except a church, a big cross, another churchy room with marble statues (apparently on the site where Mary was seen) and these "holy water" drinking fountain things. Personally, I didn't care but it was nice to get a bathroom break.

Then we went into Westport for the night where we hung out at a pub called Matt Molloy (because it was owned by the guy from the Chieftains) and were entertained by an old Irishman called Mick who would burst into song (and he knew a song for every place that people were from) or tell us some awesome stories. However, there was also a tour of old American people who were at the pub as well and this lady looked slightly inconvenienced because she wanted to hear Bruce Springsteen and Mick said "I don't know who that is." HAHA. I love Ireland.