May the Sun Shine Warm Upon Your Face :)

We woke up today (Friday) in order to get onto our coach by 8:00 am.  We scheduled a 3-day Paddywagon tour of Southern Ireland (pretty much the only chance we had at seeing all the cool stuff outside of Dublin).  It was a little frustrating to see that like 30 other people from Harlaxton had the same idea so our bus was full of Americans.  We left and headed onto the motorway.  As we drove the beautiful countryside became more and more and we finally made a stop in Cong.  Cong is a quaint little village that has a little stream that flows through it and it is also famous because it was the site that they filmed "The Quiet Man" with John Wayne.  I've seen this movie so it was really cool to get to see some of the famous sites of the film.  While in Cong, we followed the river around had fun exploring and then we went out to the ruins of the Cong Abbey.  This was absolutely gorgeous and everything was sooo green :)  It was just like you would picture Ireland to be!  Christina, Amanda, and I even picked out houses there so we can live by each other ;) We loaded back up and then headed towards Galway and into the Connemara are of Ireland.  Here we saw many lakes, rivers, and mountains.  We even stopped at a waterfall where the Erriff river flows into the Atlantic Ocean.  It was really cool.  The next stop on our tour was at Kylemore Abbey.  This was a beautiful building that looked like a castle and it was nestled perfectly at the base of a mountain.  It was neat because if you looked closely, up the side of the mountain there was a statue of Jesus.  Here we ate lunch (I had a Limmerick Ham and Brie Sandwich which was great).  From this point we loaded back up and followed the fjord all the way to Galway, Ireland (Song Galway Girl from P.S. I Love You).  This town was unique and really fun.  We checked into our hostel and then headed to eat.  I ate a wonderful seafood chowder and then we walked around and experienced some of the unique nightlife in Galway.  Live music was awesome there and we had a good time hanging out in the city.  We even met some people from our home away from home (England)!