If so, I'm totally getting married to the deep-woods forest in the Killarney National Park. Beautiful!
Well, on Thursday I got up bright and (disgustingly) early, strapped my belongings to my person, and headed to the bus in Dublin. I took the bus for 4 hours to Limerick, and then took another bus 2 hours to Killarney. It was a long, long day filled with way too much bussing, but I still got here early enough to have a proper evening in the town. I first checked in at the Neptune Hostel, dropped off all of my (very, very heavy) stuff and wandered about the town for some exploring. Killarney is a super adorable touristy town (not unlike Gravenhurst, but cuter and more Irish) and I enjoyed taking in the local sights. Then I came back to the Hostel for dinner and met my roommates for the night. There were two cool Irish kids (Patsy and Mike) and a girl from Halifax (Nicki) who have been doing a little cross-Ireland tour together for the past week.
I decided that they were worthy of my presence, so I spent the night hanging with them. We went and got food (garlic mushrooms, so freaking good and my new vice), then went to a delightful Irish pub where they had a band playing traditional Irish music! It was grand. The band was brilliant and I even did some very clumsy Irish dancing with one of the locals.
After the band finished we moved to a bar that was recommended to us by one of the waitresses from dinner. They had a band playing a bunch of classic rock (Bon jovi, ACDC, Van Halen, etc.). They were really great, and we completely rocked out to the tunes! The band finished at about midnight and we decided that we had drank enough to do a lot more dancing, so we moved to the other room of the bar which was a disco-club. They played really awful house, but it was good enough to dance to, and we crawled back to the hostel just before 3am.
Then today I woke up around 9am, cursed the daylight, and stumbled downstairs to make breakfast. In the kitchen I met these really cool guys from Spain; Javiar, Javiar (seriously) and Alejandro. They were planning on also visiting the National Park today, so we decided to all go together. First we went to Lough Leane lake to check out Castle Ross. It's a really neat old castle built by the O'Donoghue clan. Then after wandering around the castle for awhile, we rented a row-boat to row around the lake. The boat-man pointed us to this great island with a super ancient, dilapidated monastery and chapel. We rowed over there in shifts (rowing is hard work!) and then spent the better part of an hour climbing all over the ruins and wandering the island. The ruins were pretty tall but with lots of low, wide walls and were perfect for climbing! It was like a giant, ancient Irish playground for adults! Woo! After that we rowed back to land, and drove over to the Killarney National Park.
Words will fail me to describe the beauty of the enormous, ivy-coated trees, the moss-covered earth, scatterings of ancient ruins, and jutting rocks. Let's just say that it's one bitching National Park! We found this giant tree with about 6 main boughs and had a picnic lunch in the tree! It was so cool! Then we walked around the park for a few hours and took a bevy of photos. I can't wait to get to a computer where I can upload photos, because they're so amazing. Now after that long day of excercise, I think I'm going to make it an early night because I'm exhausted. I met my new roommates, two guys from Germany, and I'm hoping they won't make too much noise because I intend to be boring tonight.
Tomorrow I get up early and head to Cork, which is where I'll be flying out of the next day. So much adventuring!
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