At Last!

Hello from Ireland at last.  We have switched hotels for the remainder of our stay, and this one (Meyrick, Galway) is more reasonable and provides free internet in the rooms.  It is one of the grand old hotels in the city, and they know how to do it right.  Lovely accomodations.  we couldn't book for the duration as the Oyster folk pretty well tied up the place.  As I may have mentioned in FaceBook, our initial hotel, while comfortable and close to everything felt compelled to charge five Euros for one hour of access.  And that one hour was just that, one hour.  Connect, click, and you got 60 minutes, start NOW.  For ten Euros, you get twenty four hours.   Usually a spendthrift this kind of galled me and i didn't do it, hence the switch to short sporadic facebook posts..

Anyway, as you know the Festival is complete, Michael Moran won his second world championship, and our contestant Mike Martin (not Miller as erroneously hastily posted by a Guinness sated poster) came in 11th, which is not bad in our recent history.

The festival pretty much took up Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday (including the All Ireland Hurling Championship match between Galway and the victorious Kilkenny), so we've only branched out starting yesterday.  Despite our rocky beginning (the first real post that will hit later today (?)) the trip has proved just great.  Galway and it's people and even the other attendees at the Festival make you feel right at home.  We were concerned we would be sitting in a corner alone, watching the goings on.  Not SO!  Hi, where' ya from?  How do you like it here?  Easy to talk to, so we didn't feel isolated at all.  As North American Representative, I was able to be with the judges

"We" have much to catch up on, both in food (which has been very good) and travel (Aran Islands) and general walking around (pubs).  Not sure how to condense all that into a few posts but we will try... today to Clonmacnoise which we visited last time but would like to experience again..  and yes, we do maintain standards by being sure to

DFD (which in this case means consistent with venue)