Our flight back from Nice put us in Dublin around 4:30pm, and we caught the CityLink bus back to Galway, where Ciarán kindly picked us up from the bus station and took us by the house for a quick sandwich, tea, and some yummy banana bread and raspberry cake that Kathleen Caitlín had made. We are so blessed by these two! Once we got back to our room, we basically crashed out and started again on Monday.
This past week marked the start of our involvement with some organizations here in Galway. On Tuesday Tim began his first week of helping out with the St. Patrick’s School, teaching their 10- and 11-year-old boys’ PE class. He’ll be doing that two days a week until we leave for the States. This week also saw Tim working with the St. Mary’s basketball players and engaging with the Titans basketball club in Galway. I’ll let him tell you more about that work in the next post. Tim and I were able to interview roughly 15 boys at St. Mary’s for part-time work at the school. Boy, were we impressed with these young men! We were moved by the motivations many of them described for wanting the work…let’s just say that it has been many years since we encountered such altruistic motives. Nearly all of the candidates were 15, and it was their first time ever interviewing for work. We were able to do quick (8 minute) interviews with each of them and then share with them some insight for how to improve their interviewing experiences in the future. I began to work with St. Mary’s also as an organizational consultant, and am looking forward to learning more about the school and using my skills to help out during the next few weeks!
We managed to get a good deal from the local Enterprise rent-a-car office, so we now have a little 5-door, 5-speed Opel Corsa. It. Is. Tiny. 🙂 But we are happy to have wheels, and the day after we rented the car we took a circle drive up to Westport, thinking that we would follow my friend Karen Hindt’s recommendation of driving from Westport to Achill Island. However, we got a late start that day, so we modified the trip into a circle drive, going from Galway to Westport to Killadoon to Aasleagh to Oughterard and back to Galway. But it was a great drive, too! I no sooner told Tim that one of my fantasy photo opportunities for our time in Ireland was to encounter a flock of sheep on the road, than a few minutes later I was obliged! As our friend Gayle Grant remarked on Facebook, the sheep look like they had been playing with food coloring! The colorful stripes are the owners’ marks, and they make these cute sheep with their black faces and legs even cuter!
Saturday we barely left the room as Tim caught up on grading and I worked on blog posts, photos, and other things. Today (Sunday) we took another circle drive, this time south to Limerick and then around the Dingle Peninsula. We took Tim’s friend Brad Sullivan’s recommendation to explore this peninsula and we are so glad we did! We didn’t realize there were mountains like this in Ireland! We also took Tim’s new friend Paul Langan’s recommendation to drive Connor Pass to Dingle, and Wow! What great fun that was! The road was tiny, barely room for two small cars to pass most of the time, and sometimes not even that (Tim took two videos: one up and one down)! It was so much fun, and we are thrilled to have a car and to be able to take these incredible circle drives. Those of you who know us understand how much we like to roadtrip, and we are in our element for sure! I told Tim today that we could live here for a few years and not exhaust the circle drives!
Well, that brings us to the start of our third week in Galway. Time to make a new batch of soup (tortilla soup this time), see how the first batch of chicken bone broth turns out, and track down the amazing Lipton Herbal Infusions Temptations tea that we have fallen in love with but can’t seem to find in stores here. Hope your week is amazing!
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