enniskillen

(i meant to post this yesterday evening, but the wireless internet at the hostel we're staying at does not work and by the time i realized that fact, all the cafes with internet access were closed. enniskillen kind of shuts down (other than the pubs) at about 5:30...i guess that's what you get in a small town...)

so this is from monday:

today we packed up from nick and jen's house in belfast - they were absolutely the best hosts ever - and took a cab to the rental car place, where we picked up our rental car and other claire drove the 90 miles to enniskillen, our next stop. now, that sounds easy. in fact, the company we'd made a rental car reservation through gave away our automatic car when we were 2 hours later than scheduled (we didn't really know what time nick and jen would need to leave for work, so we erred on the early side) and now they only had manual transmissions. apparently "reserving" a rental car is a loose term. sheesh. we paid a bit more for an automatic car at the next rental car counter over because the only automatic they had was in the "intermediate" class. aka a mercedes. you know, us teachers - we're high rollers. this is claire driving and the "sat nav" (satellite navigation - what they call GPS) helping. but only sort of helping. it didn't know this one road existed that we drove on for like 30 miles.

oops. thank goodness for road signs that said "enniskillen"...

and other claire is a rockstar driver. hooray!

we couldn't check into our room until 5pm, so we explored enniskillen until then. we bought and wrote postcards (and finally bought stamps), checked out the little shops, had a pub lunch (a veggie burger and chips for me - it was delish) at a pub called the linen hall, and during the pub lunch discovered a sign advertising a pub quiz (trivia night) THIS VERY NIGHT at THAT VERY PUB!! obviously we will be going. hooray again!

as part of our wasting time / exploring enniskillen, we went to enniskillen castle which was only barely worth the 4 pounds we paid to tour it. it was pretty small and this photo makes it look more glamorous than it actually is.

but, whatever - the sun came out and it was sort of interesting to look around. this is a view from the castle looking away from the town.

now, a little rest before dinner!

note from tuesday morning: turned out there WAS NO PUB QUIZ (boooooooo), but i had a really nice strawberry cider before we figured that out, and a 70 year old dude (who we initially thought was creepy) came up to talk to us - turns out he is just a lonely old local man and in fact very sweet. he became the second person since we got here to ask us if we are from the west coast of america once he learned we were american. thoughts on why this might be? we are confused. we're blonde? we don't have jersey shore accents? old guy liked to talk american politics; he told us all about how the economy of europe changed after "ronnie reagan" and the others ended the cold war, and he thinks obama is "very intelligent" and hopes he gets reelected. oh, old dude - you entertain us.


we're off to galway now!