Burr(en) It’s Cold Out Here (Ireland Day 3, Part 2)

           After the Cliffs of Moher Mist it was lunch time so we stopped at Fitzpatrick’s Bar, which is a pub with the most Irish name to ever be Irish. Here I had some amazing seafood chowder and had the chance to get out of the very traditional rainy weather for a while. The next stop was actually my favorite stop: Burren. This is an area by the Ireland coast against the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a huge limestone deposit that has crisscrossing cracks known as “grikes.” In these grikes it is possible to see arctic, Mediterranean, and alpine plants all growing together because of the odd environment. Since the area is full of cracks, walking around on the deposit is almost like playing hopscotch because you have to hop from stone to stone to avoid the cracks. It was amazing because the landscape was something so unlike anything I’d seen before, but, it was also the coldest stop we made. Rain was coming down and there was a chill that even my scarf and rain jacket couldn’t completely block out. We were all very happy to get back on the bus and get warm, however. I’ll include pictures at the bottom because it really was an amazing stop and it made the trip totally worth it.  
Once we raised our body temperatures back to their proper place, we went to an old monastery where we could see a skeleton in the altar box. Really. You read that correctly. It was an old Catholic monastery that had fallen into ruin because of the protestant movement in Ireland centuries ago and in addition to the graves outside the monastery, there is an altar in the ruins, where, if you get down on your hands and knees and look through a 10cm diameter hole, you can see a skull and some long bones. It was awesome. Our driver said that the story is that the King who commissioned the construction of the monastery was so impressed by the stone masons' work that he had them killed so they couldn’t build for anyone else, and then he put their bones in altar. So that’s nice.
When our grim curiosity was satisfied we headed to a chocolatier. Our driver said that usually he takes tours to a small town nearby for a break before the long drive home but, since our bus was primarily female, he gave us the option of going to the chocolatier instead.  Once there, of course I needed to buy some chocolate. It was delicious by the way. Then it was time for a 2.5 hour ride back to our home afloat. But, we were inside and warm so we were pretty content to listen to the tour guide and sporadically nap on the way.
This is where the dead people were at



Limestone deposit in Burren
Behold the fierce Irish beast I saw outside the chocolatier 

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