Summer Holiday Day 3: Donegal

This is our Airbnb for the next two nights. 

From the audio recording we made:

Day 3 began with us packing up from 'The Dune' and heading to Derry, which was a fun and educational experience. “We went to the visitor centre first. I quite liked that. It was like a museum type place.” One of the highlights was watching a video on 'Amelia Earhart' and learning about her transatlantic flight, where she landed in Derry. "Yes, her swimming to fly across the Atlantic. Yes, and she landed in Derry."

Next, we visited 'The Guildhall', which had a small exhibit on the 'Plantation of Ulster'. “It was a complete failure really... the whole goal of colonising was to either drive all the native Irish people out or anglicise them. Which completely failed, obviously.” There was a lot of reflection on how Ireland had been repeatedly invaded over the centuries. This prompted a humorous callback to 'Derry Girls', where Michelle says to James that if the English hadn’t invaded so often, they wouldn’t have had so much history to learn for exams.

We walked around Derry’s famous city walls, taking in sights such as the 'Derry Girls' mural, where we stopped for photos. "We walked around the wall, saw 'Free Derry', and Mum told me about 'The Bogside', the site of the Bloody Sunday Massacre.” 

There was a moment of confusion during the walk when we returned to the same point we’d started. “You were just like, black magic? How are we back here? It was literally as if you genuinely thought we’d somehow broken the space-time continuum!” That sparked some good-natured laughter. 

Before leaving Derry, we went back to the visitor centre, where Orla picked up 'Erin’s Diary' from 'Derry Girls'. Afterward, we drove to 'Letterkenny' for a quick stop at Tesco and continued through Donegal. Along the way, we paused in a vast, silent valley: "It was so strange, like we were somewhere really, really remote." There was an otherworldly feeling to the quiet, prompting comparisons to fairy lands: "It felt quite 'fee'... like fairies."

We arrived at our next Airbnb—a shipping container perched on stilts. “It was so cool... the steps leading up to it were made of these giant boulders of quartzite, 3.8 billion years old.” There was art painted on the container, and every window framed a view of the landscape. "Every window was a picture frame," as someone had written in the guest book.

After dinner, we went for a walk down to the water, where we saw a fish jump out to catch midges. We read 'The Silky Seal' from the 'Anthology of Irish Myths' before calling it a night.