We were staying at the Menlo Park Hotel outside of Galway for a few days. Since we had already spent several days in the city we opted to take a drive up to Clifden to see it’s spectacular Sky Road. We started early in the morning on an absolutely beautiful, sunny day. We chose to get there via the Spiddal coast road. This is a wonderful option as you can take many side roads down to beaches right on the water. The beaches were deserted the day we went and we had them to ourselves. I was surprised that the beaches were sandy although you had to enjoy many of them at low tide as they were covered when the high tide came in.
The beaches have lots of rock formations that make them interesting. This day the sea was very calm and we enjoyed the emptiness with only the sound of the waves for company.
We visited Casla and from there ventured into some of the small islands. These are connected by causeways and allow you to visit many more beaches. From Casual we went up to Maam Cross then west to Clifden.
We stopped to see some of the great small waterfalls visible from the road. These rushing waters were just a few feet off the road.
We decided to have lunch at Mitchell’s and were not disappointed. This is a small restaurant with great reviews and the food was delicious.
My fish dish was absolutely delicious with a mix of white fish, salmon, mussels in cream sauce over pasta. We passed on the wine as we were driving the Sky Road next.
Clifden is a cute town with lots of little shops to explore.
This is a view of the Sky Road and you can see it’s not very wide. In fact it’s really, really, narrow and right on the edge of the cliff. You had to pull into a lay by at some points, if you met another car. Flowers were in bloom along the edge of the road so it was very colorful.
The views became more encompassing the higher you climbed. You had the sea and the mountains before you as you climbed the really narrow road. We took the Upper Sky Road which gave us the highest elevation and the most encompassing views.
We took a scenic road back from Clifden. Photo to the right is taken between Toombeola and Caskel. There were some beautiful stretches on this road and we stopped more than once to snap a photo.
Beautiful scenery and few tourists made this a great day in Ireland.