Where the heck is the Dromber Stone Circle?

I must apologize to all my devoted readers, but I haven't really had too much to blog about the past few days. I've just been working and relaxing in the apartment this week, mentally preparing for last week here in Ireland with Morgan. On Thursday night, for some reason I decided that I would volunteer to pick Morgan up from the airport in Shannon (about a 2 hour drive), even if his flight arrived in Ireland shortly after 6 A.M. When it comes to Saturday night however, I begin to have some second thoughts about this, as it means I will have to wake up at about 4 A.M. on a Sunday...something I don't think I've done more than once or twice in my entire life.

Anyways...I ended up waking up really early and heading up to Shannon and it didn't end up being too bad. I'm a little tired right now, but I can't really say anything when Morgan has been up for about 20 hours or something. After picking him up at the airport, I was going to try to cruise around Limerick a bit and check out the town, but then I realized it was 7 in the morning and nothing in Ireland is open till at least 1 P.M on Sundays, so we just headed back to the apartment. After a quick regroup session, we made plans to head out to Clonakilty and that's where our adventure began.

For a little background, Ireland generally has two styles of roads. There's the main roads that you can clearly see on the maps, which are generally pretty comparable to American highways. Then there are the rest of the roads, which can be compared most closely to American driveways to houses tucked way back in the woods. While attempting to get to Clonakilty, we had to make a few turns on to these "other" roads and I was forced to make a few driving manuevers that I wouldn't recommend at any other time of the day (when there are actually other drivers on the road). After making it to Clonakilty (it was still really early), we decided that we didn't really want to wander around town, so we looked at the map and saw this thing called the Dromberg Stone Circle that looked interesting...sort of like Ireland's version of Stonehenge. Now the road to this landmark made the "other" roads look like major interstates. If there was another car coming out of the road, one of us was going to have to reverse all the way to the other end, which definitely wouldn't have been a good time. When we got to the Circle, the parking lot was empty and the gift shop was an abandoned camper type thing. I assumed it would be a pretty quite day there, but I was wrong and immediately two other cars pulled in, probably tripling the attendance to this current landmark for the last month.

The Dromberg Stone Circle was pretty cool I guess, but we decided to continue exploring and wanted to find the beach near Clonakilty. After about a half hour of driving Ireland's back roads, we finally found the beach and did some exploring. The beach probably would have been a lot nicer if the weather wasn't so bad, but I guess it could have been worse if it was really raining or something. After leaving the beach, we were on the homestretch of our adventure when we came through the town Bandon (there's actually another town in Ireland named "Brandon" in case you were interested). On the way through Bandon while on to Clonakilty, we had seen signs for some race, but now while we were passing back through, we were actually able to see what all the fuss was about. We parked the car and wandered over to a road that had temporarily been closed off and watched some motorcycle drag racing for a bit...which was pretty awesome. Finally, after we had seen enough racing, we headed back home to call it a day for exploring. Hopefully we'll be heading out to the pubs in a bit...something I haven't done in about two months as I've had no one here to go out with.