After landing in the Shannon airport, we set out for the small town of Kilrush. The second we stepped outside we met our first bone fide Irish experience: sixty degree weather in the middle of summer which for me at least was a welcome relief from California sun. On the shuttle the first sound we heard was a DJ making George W. Bush impressions on the radio since the president visited a week prior to our arrival; indeed traveling abroad is always a barometer of international politics. The ride from Shannon to Kilrush took about two hours which gave us time to acclimate to the accents we would be hearing for the next week. The area surrounding Shannon is not particularly attractive—imagine a colder and wetter Sacramento Valley. When we arrived at the hostel we dropped off our bags in the “cozy” but clean building and set off by shoe leather-express to explore the town. Kilrush is a small fishing village of about five hundred people and at least five times as many sheep. A pleasant respite from a day and a half of non-stop travel, but otherwise an uneventful destination the town its self is quiet and quant. About the only point of interest to mark Kilrush on the map is the original stained-glass artwork of famed Irish artist, Harry Clarke (illustrator for Edgar Allen Poe and one of my very favorite artists) which for me made the entire visit worthwhile, but not enough to mark it on the map for non-art enthusiasts. Like most other Irish cities, the buildings are painted in bright pastels and just about every other building is a pub. Given the reputation for alcohol consumption, Ireland has recently cracked down on teenage drinking, but even the stricter laws didn’t stop a couple of my group members from downing many a pint—recovering alcoholics might do best to just steer clear entirely of the island. And immediately following the first of our group’s many international drinking infractions, we met the town hooligans: a group of bored teenagers with nothing better to do than harass our jet-lagged crowd. We went about pub crawling which delightfully turned out to be smoke-free (though the smell still lingers form decades of smoking patrons) since Eire recently banned smoking in pubs. At sunset which began about ten pm, we headed back to the hostel. Once satisfied that the town was sufficiently explored (which took only about a half an hour given the size), we crashed from exhaustion from staying awake for almost two days in a row.
Map and Photos for Across Ireland 
