Hi everyone,

This will be the first of a handful of posts from my Irish road trip 🇮🇪🚗 There can’t be a better Irish place to start it off than the Cliffs of Moher! ⛰ When you first catch a glimpse of the breathtaking cliffs, it is truly an awe-inspiring view! It’s one that makes it worth the long drive up. Up, because my friend and I drove in from Clonmel instead of Dublin.

I had arrived in Dublin the night before and was absolutely starving despite having had dinner before heading to Gatwick. There’s just something about flying on a plane that just makes you hungry, it seems. So we headed to the Temple Bar area in Dublin City Center to get our supper on a Thursday night. Turns out Thursday night is the week night where everyone goes out till really late so almost every restaurant is open till late. We ended up in Eddie Rocket’s, an Irish chain that serves American city diner food in a 1950s setting, plus they had the right type of music playing in the background too. Music from the swinging sixties, seventies and eighties, the kind I appreciate the most. From ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” to Kenny Loggins “Footloose”, it’s like they stole my iPod! 😜 Almost couldn’t bear to leave because of the good music but we had to because it was still a 3-hour drive down to Clonmel (where my friend’s home was) to get some hours of sleep at least before the drive up (another 2 and half hours) to the Cliffs of Moher.

After taking forty winks in Clonmel, we were on our way! It’s €6 per person to gain access to the whole area which includes parking as well as going into the conservation of the cliffs. The visitor centre is right in the middle of the whole stretch of the cliffs so you’ll have to choose either moving up North or South first and come back to cover the other later. Here’s the starting point (sort of):

We decided to begin by heading North towards O’Brien’s Tower first since that’s the highest point of the Cliffs:

This one was taken close by to the tower looking out to the South of the Cliffs.

Once past O’Brien’s Tower, the view keeps getting better! (Plus, we were blessed with incredibly good weather because we were praying very hard for that all along our drive).

Another significant stand-out of the North side of the Cliffs is the Branaunmore sea stack which reminds me of the famous limestone stacks in Australia known as the Twelve Apostles. I can’t be the only one who thinks that the Branaunmore sea stack seems to resemble “Judas” (which collapsed in 2005).

As I’ve said earlier, the view just keeps getting better and better as you walk up North. The vertical cliffs are just so incredibly defined, you have to wonder how much precision it needs for us ordinary beings to recreate something like this!

Staring down into the sea from near the edges makes for a pretty nice photo! 😉

And once again, staring down into the sea but this one with the view of the Atlantic. You can’t see the end of it but you know that at the other end, it’s the US. Makes you feel really small and insignificant in this vast expanse of the world created!

The point of this trip was for me to take a break from staring at my computer all day so that I could free… like this seagull! There’s got to be at least tens of thousands of them living around the Cliffs.

This is further down North, looking to the South, when O’Brien’s Tower now looks like a bottle cap!

We decided not to venture any further North after this point and start heading back to the center again to cover the South side because we had to bear in mind that the entire stretch was 8km! This is how the North side looks like (after walking more than half the South stretch) when viewed from the South. Once again, O’Brien’s Tower looks puny here!

This is the same photo but with me in front of the camera pretending to be bigger than everything in the background.

Just another one of the same shot…

It still wasn’t the point where I remember the iconic pictures of the Cliffs so we kept walking, where I caught a view of another fellow traveller who just looked really cool with his hood and stylish bag on.

This here, is the iconic Cliffs of Moher shot I was referring to! The steepness and the well-defined edges are just stunning!

I have to admit first that I played with the colour on this one because I wanted the “sunlight on the sea” effect while still keeping the colour of the cliffs.

This was on the way back to the centre again, as you can probably tell from the slightly bigger “bottle cap”.

Guess who decided to learn from my looking out into the Atlantic?

The Cliffs of Moher are a thing of beauty and to have a clear day to see this all just made it all the more enjoyable. Listening to the waves crashing into the cliffs below was music to my ears! The strong winds aren’t to be fooled around with though. My sunglasses fell victim to it as it got blown off into the Atlantic! I’m quite sad that it got blown away and I really do miss it but maybe one of the seagulls can make good use of it now.

The next stop was Galway, but only for dinner and just to walk through the streets of Galway like Ed Sheeran did in his “Galway Girl” MV before another 3 hour drive up to Mountcharles, near Donegal, so that’s a long trip ahead! That will be for the next post.

Until then, have a blessed weekend! God bless you! 🌈

Ben