Ireland Day 16: Kinvara to An Spideal | 37 Miles, 1,227 Feet Elevation

Riding Stats (Link to Tom’s Strava)

Accommodations (daily mileage, elevation, etc.)

Route Tracker (track our northbound ride on a Google Map)

We all know everything tastes better with butter. I’m here to tell you, no butter is better than Irish butter.

And yes it’s the soda bread for me, with Irish butter. 💯 Now… on to cycling.

When we got up this morning we thought we were in a different country. The sun was shining and there was absolutely NO wind.

We decided to cycle through Galway to get to An Spideal which would set us up nicely to catch a ferry to Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands, the following day.

An Spideal is a small coastal village just west of Galway known for its traditional music and strong connection to Irish culture. It’s also a Gaeltacht, meaning Irish is spoken there as an everyday language.

Irish is a very different sounding language and it’s not easy to infer meaning from the printed word. We’ve been looking at Irish words above English on most every road sign since we’ve been in Ireland and still can’t make sense of it.

Although we can’t speak or understand a lick of Irish it was fun hearing it spoken around town—and of course, we found a welcoming pub and plenty of craic for our Pint Size Review’s Pub of the Day.

Meet Peter. He was sitting at the end of the bar down from a few rugby players that we overheard speaking Irish. May I say it sounds a little like German?

Peter befriended “Tommy” (as he called him) as soon as we walked in. He’s a roofer and shared about his near death experience years ago when we got hit in the back of the head.

Then Peter kept pointing to the 94 year old retired school teacher I was talking to, telling Tom she was always terribly mean to her students. All this was happening while Peter’s wife, Mary, kept signaling to Tom the “he’s nuts” sign. It was all happening so fast we weren’t sure what to make of it but luckily all of this dialogue was in English.☘️

So for Peter who keeps the bar stool warm and knows how to embellish stories that kept us in stitches, we tip our hats to An Nead, our Pub of the Day.