This is the way owners of Irish B&Bs greet you on arrival: You’re welcome, they tell you. It’s utterly disarming, charming…and you believe them. Below is a slideshow summary of a frantic five days along Ireland’s dramatic west coast, touring both popular and some lesser-known sites (Cliffs of Moher, Aran Islands’ Inisheer, the Burren, along the coast to Galway), then across to Dublin on our final day where we departed for Venice at 6a.

Glorious, it was, and relatively economical. Beef, chowders, stews, and chips (that now have my vote for best fries on the planet), Smith’icks (which we preferred to Guinness) and whiskey, teas and Talisker, live music wherever you turned. Daily, the classic Irish breakfast, weighty in comparison to the normal Italian caffè and brioche. Buono, però…

We could keep time by the frequency of the rain showers. Before we headed out from the museum to visit to an ancient ring fort, I asked an attendent if it was raining. “Bit of a rhetorical question, isn’t it?” he grinned. That constant moisture also nourishes the seemingly endless variety of tiny wildflowers that make their homes in the grassy carpet and stoney crags; and to produce a color palatte, once the showers dissipate, that will blind you. (The only full rainbow I’d ever seen glowed over the ocean after one set of showers had completed their cycle.) It was easy to understand what had inspired both the famous and everyday Irish poets for centuries…and still does.

That, and for five days, I didn’t have to tell anybody how to spell “McElroy.” Grand…