Lahinch, County Clare, Ireland, Wednesday, July 31, 2013 – The sound of rain and the comforting voices of my parents quietly murmuring in the room above us woke me this morning in this beautiful spot by the sea. We all slept well, feeling much more clear-headed than yesterday, almost like it was really our first day in Ireland.

We ate a delicious Irish breakfast around a big oval table in the dining room – pancakes and berries, a bagel with coils of locally smoked salmon from Lisdoonvarna, fresh pastries, eggs benedict, lots of hot coffee – just what we needed to steel ourself for Rick’s first day as our tour guide. His description of the day ahead: “We are going to see some old stuff, and then some really old stuff.” Thank you, Tour Guide Rick.

We boarded our cars, one with a brand new 140 Euro front tire, thanks to an amazing mechanic in Ennis named Brian (M&M auto shop in case you are ever in need), and set off for the Burren, an expansive landscape of rock  that is an ecological and archaeological treasure in Ireland. The limestone, from the Irish word “borieann” for big rock, is an example of (for you geologists out there) a glaciated karst with underground caves and rivers.

We walked through Kilfenora Cathedral, which has roots back to 560 AD, just after St. Patrick legendarily entered Ireland to bring Christianity to the island Some locals in Kilfenora recently spent eight months researching the tiny town’s history and have documented 1,500 years of trauma and drama in what looks like a very sleepy town today. A volunteer guide (and one of the researchers), whose pale but bright blue eyes and shock of white hair looked quintessentially Irish, told us the legend of a local woman warrior who married a succession of men, who quietly disappeared, leaving her with all their lands. The cathedral itself dates to the 10^th century, and there are beautiful, weathered Celtic crosses from the same era. It was raining hard the whole time we were there.

We then visited a 10^th-century ring fort built of stone, of which 45,000 are found in Ireland. They were not really forts but places for families and livestock to live. Apparently, the bigger the ring fort the higher the status of the family. By this time, the rain had really taken hold. All of us were soaked. Will, who wore shorts that we had warned him not to wear, was the only one who didn’t have pants soaked from the knee down for the rest of the day!

We then visited Poulnabourne, an amazing neolithic burial dolmen dating to around 3,800 years BC. Thirty-three children and adults were entombed there, under a tripod of stone holding a massive capstone. Almost 6,000 years old, earlier than the pyramids and Stonehenge, they are oriented toward the rising sun. Other dolmen in the Burren are oriented to the setting sun. It was lovely, but the rain was so hard that it was almost comical as we slipped across the deeply cracked limestone. It was once a spiritual place, and I could see that, but for the tour buses disgorging the umbrella-sheltered tourists. I think the time to see it is perhaps in dead winter, with no one else around.

We then drove to the lovely town of Ballyvaughan, the most picturesque village we have seen so far. We wished we could have spent time there, but we had a lunch reservation (thanks to Tour Guide Rick) at the Tea and Garden Rooms, which was the perfect shelter from the storm. The food was delicious, and we realized we were the wettest people there – except for the poor couple in bike gear who were truly soaked. After driving these roads, I can’t imagine biking them. There are signs that say “Speed limit 100 kph, Drive safely” right before the road narrows to basically bike-path width and stone walls close in on you from both sides just before a sign announding “Severe Bends Ahead.” And you’re like, really? 100 kph, drive safely on a hot wheels track? And don’t even talk to me about the tour buses. Dad keeps screaming at me that I’m getting too close to the rock walls, and I’m like, well, it’s better than hitting the oncoming traffic.

On to the highlight of the day. We were discussing at lunch whether to go to some 50-degree caves in our wet clothes and shoes or whether to go to the B&B and get dry clothes or whether to go to the Cliffs of Moher – the most iconic sight perhaps in all Ireland, and one which Mitchell declared he would not leave Ireland without seeing – and Will declared in his turn, “Let’s do it now and get it over with.”

We drove through a lovely green landscape dotted with unnamed (to us) stone ruins and cottages and destroyed castles to the Cliffs of Moher, which hundreds of thousands of people visit a year. We all walked up to the O’Brien Tower, which I thought looked like a cheesy recent construction for tourists but turns out to be an early 19^th century attempt for a local landowner to impress his friends. Will and Grandma climbed the tower to view the 600-foot high cliffs, which curved away to a dramatic drop to the ocean below. Rick and the kids then walked a two-mile loop south to see other dramatic view of the “angry sea,” as Tour Guide Rick descibes it. By the way, he broke his toe yesterday on a chair in the B&B, and he didn’t even complain all day until we got home, and we could see that the blue contusion is reaching up his foot like gangrene. “Angry gangrene,” as Tour Guide Rick describes it.

To be serious, the Cliffs of Moher were one of the more beautiful natural sites we’ve ever seen, despite the tour buses. It was great to hear all the different languages of the visitors, and to know that this was not crowded by Beijing standards. By those standards, it was a ghost town.