We started our day with coffees in the hotel lobby waiting for our driver, Ian, to swing by for a cross-island road trip.

The experience was advertised as “a luxury car tour”, so we were a little thrown off when he arrived and led us to a decidedly non-luxury Ford van (think “ridesharey” rather than “kidnappy”) with the word “Uber” on the hood and “Taxi” on both sides.

The thing is, I booked the trip a few months ago on a travel experience app, having very little exposure in my life to anything luxury…so we imagined a Mercedes sedan with privacy glass and a bottle of champagne chilling in the backseat…you know, how fancy people do it. But then it was canceled and rebooked for the next day through the same site last minute, and we had to wonder if maybe the tour company was a one-man operation and the one man with the fancy car in the photos was unavailable due to personal emergency and got a buddy to pick it up so as not to lose business.

Not that it mattered much. A personal tour guide for the day still seemed pretty luxurious, regardless of the vehicle. And he would take us all the the way across to the west coast and back…from Dublin to The Rock of Cashel, the Cliffs of Moher, Galway, and back.

Our first stop was a magical place called Barak Obama Plaza in a small rural town where apparently B.O’s grandfather was born. I think Ian figured we’d fangirl some American connections…we found it kind of funny that Obama is celebrated here in Ireland with an honorary statue at a truck stop.

Ian said our next stop would be to a monastic site called The Rock of Cashel. We’d never heard of it, so we googled as we drove…but we’re both pretty enthusiastic about visiting ancient places steeped in mystery. We asked him to pull over at a churchyard on the way…even though the place looked kinda creepy and abandoned, the headstones, weathered and looking old, were relatively recent.

The walk up to the Rock of Cashel was pretty steep and we opted for a self-guided tour. The vibe of the place suggested that there used to be a lot of stuff happening here…it had a decidedly Pagan vibrancy for a place that is crumbling and doesn’t have a roof anymore. I expect that places where sacred things happened at one point would feel reverent, but I can’t say that this place felt calm or restorative. The energy here felt like a lot of shit went down. It felt defensive. It was up on a hill because it originally was a fortress…and everything about it breathed “come at me bro”.

Before we got to the cliffs, Ian made a stop for fuel and came back with Irish strawberries. The most noticeable difference between Irish and store-bought California strawberries is the absence of the bitterish white part in the middle. Every Irish strawberry we tried was perfectly red all the way through…like the ones we buy from the farm stand at home.

The weather was clear once we got to the cliffs of Moher …which is not always the case apparently. It was a downpour the day before, when we’d originally planned to go (thanks universe!). My sweetie and I heard stories from her parents that they had to take a photo of a postcard from the gift shop because it was so cloudy and fogged in when they went. So, we got an ice cream called a “99”, which is vanilla soft serve with a stick of chocolate punched into the top, then took a photo of a postcard for them and went off to the left for a little hike.

I’m not gonna get into the exact reason, but I was being a real pain in the butt hiking at the cliffs…trust me. So I want to offer big love for my sweetie who puts up with me when sometimes I’m impossible. The cliffs were still a really magical part of our journey and we snapped some great pictures.

We passed by a bunch of “famine walls” which were kind of haunting, considering how many hundreds of them there were through the western countryside…they were built by people who were starving during the famine in exchange for food from churches and wealthy landowners. On a road known as Corkscew Hill, we pulled over to snap a few photos of an area known as The Burren, rock-scabbed mountains which apparently inspired JRR Tolkien for his imaginings of Middle Earth.

Our final stop was to Galway at a place where Ed Sheeran filmed a music video. We had an Irish pizza and some chips (fries)…and wondered if we should ask our driver on the way back to Dublin about the “luxury car” part of the tour, deciding ultimately to give the company a call at another point…no photos from the car, as the windows in the van were very small. Ian was awesome and far exceeded our expectations, even if the vehicle wasn’t exactly what we’d paid for.

All in all, a bunch of great stops on our continued adventure through this very cool country.