From Sligo to Westport in County Mayo

We left Sligo yesterday morning ready for the relatively short (one and a half hours) drive south west to Westport in County Mayo. We decided that our favourite thing in Sligo was its very pretty river. We had great views of it from our hotel window.
 

Once on the road we took a detour first up and headed west instead of SW - to Strandhill on Sligo Bay - a well known surfing "beach" in this neck of the woods.

This is the Strandhill esplanade - complete with cannon (ready to fire at the invading French and Spanish apparently).

And there were surfers out on this cold damp morning (12oC max type day). They look like minute black specks in the water in this photo - but they're there - brave souls.

We had a beautiful whole food breakfast with very good coffee at Honestly Farm Kitchens in Strandhill before we set out again towards Westport, via Knocknahur, Tobercurry and Castlebar. It started pouring rain soon after we left and didn't let up for the rest of the day. It was so wet we didn't stop anywhere on the road before finding our little Airbnb cottage just outside Westport, on Clew Bay, in the early afternoon.

Ros and Pete arrived in London yesterday. We're excited about meeting them there in a week's time at the end of our Ireland adventures. We'd booked (and paid for) an apartment together in Hammersmith for 2 weeks through Booking.com and they were due to move in yesterday on their arrival in London. We'd all been feeling increasingly uneasy about the lack of communication from the owner about final details, access codes etc. Yesterday we found out, to our horror, after contacting booking.com directly (which is a difficult thing to do on its own) that the apartment was "unavailable".

To cut a long story short, booking.com will refund us the considerable amount owing to us - and dear Joelly and Kay, keeping clear heads and with good online skills (and strong WiFi) found an alternative Airbnb that looked ok and between us we were able to come up with the couple of extra thousands of dollars at short notice to nail the new booking in time.

Needless to say it took hours yesterday with all the cross country communication (swearing and stress included) and transfers of money, upping limits on credit cards, etc etc to achieve that result. We are now waiting on our promised refund from booking.com + some recompense for the extra costs involved in getting alternative accommodation at such short notice. We really hate booking.com at the moment!

When it was all mostly sorted we drove back into Westport Town Centre and during a break in the rain managed to pick up a few supplies for our 4 night stay here. We were in no mood to go out last night - instead it felt nice staying in the cottage enjoying a bottle of Australian red wine gifted by our hosts - with the heating on, and eventually feeling calmer about things.

This is what the Westport Town Centre looks like after a day of heavy rain....

The Clock Tower where four main roads meet.

and the Glendenning Monument in front of the Wyatt Hotel in Westport.