PARADISE: VENTRY BEACH

Ahh the water. The very COLD water. Hilarity ensued after some amusing (and I should say very "European") pictures were taken.
And for all you prudes out there, that means that several (male) friends decided to show their respective rear ends to the camera!

After the beach we treked through a laberynth of foliage, and then came across the first vertical choice..either take a shorter route or take a longer path and climb into the clouds of a mountain option.

Melissa, Pam, Sarah, and I all elected to take the shorter route, while the boys and Jenn (yeah Jenn!) decided that no incline would be too great, no climb on-top of a climb would be too steep for them. So, we parted ways, and the former group took a rather gradual incline while the latter group took on a big grade of land.

Now I should insert the scenic asthetics, just so you, the reader, can get a sense of the crazy beauty. First off, we were hiking on the most soft green, green grass, (you know, the emerald color that people living in suburbs spend like $500 a month pumping god-knows what kind of toxic fertilizers to keep up with the Jones') and my was it soft! I would have totally taken off my hiking boots if there had not been tons of shit...literally, sheep shit was everywhere. Oh well....

A glance to the left revealed nothing but miles and miles of sapphire Atlantic waters that were a probably a good quarter mile below us. Seaward, jagged boulders casually lay in the ocean, as though they were pebbles dropped in a dark shallow puddle. (Only you know the water was a wee bit deeper.)
Seriously incredible. Audibly, it all was quiet, and if you were the first person in the single-file line in which we were hiking, you had to strain to hear the person who was (loudly) speaking either directly in front of in back of you.

At one point, we hiked around the half-perimeter of a land mass that can best be described as a crater (and appropriatly so, because Ireland was indeed formed by volcanic activity some millenia ago) and saw a hodge-podge of little stone masses on the side of the hill. According to our tour literature, they were the remains of an (8th?) (7th?) (old as hell?) monk territory that demarked their properties.

I was feeling pretty zen-like when suddenly my allergies decided to flare up. Now, normally I don't necessarily worry too much about a little sneeze here and there, but suddently my nose went from a little sniffle to a full-fledged faucet. Now I know that some of you that know me know that I can talk about my nasal excrements for hours, but I'll spare you the full details-let me just summarize by saying it was BAD. And then, to add insult to injury, my eyes started watering up and itching, and I ran out of water a little too early.

The four of us finally decended a VERY STEEP hill to a road way, and found ourselves coming into a little town of a handful of colorful buildings built into the afformentioned part of the crater we had just hiked down. Ah!! I thought, we must be nearing our lodging, and we pushed on.

Soon though, the little village was sinking smaller behind us, and rather in front was...a road. A rather long road, with not a whole heck of a lot of room to hike on the edge of. So, we pressed on. And according to our tour literature, we had 5K to go. 5k! No biggie! 3.1 miles, cool deal.

Then....we crossed the ocean.
Well, okay, not literally, but this is where my travel journal has a crude drawling of what I can only describe as some sort of tide eddy, (sp?) or something like that. So, we crossed. And then, a hill lie ahead of us. So we followed the little hiking man upwards. (okay, editorial note: I was NOT hallucinating, yet anyway. All along the self-guided tour we took, there were posts every few miles of so, detailing where our next twist or turn was. The symbol was a little hiking man with hiking polls, below an arrow).

Then, we really just kinda bottomed out. I'm not trying to sound dramatic here, but this was by far, in my opinion the most extreme day for moi. Running out of water sucks, being attacked by a 5-hour perpetual allergy attack is worse, but being at the foot of one, final, steep hill just plain old SUCKED at this particular moment. But what are you going to do besides keep going? And that's what we did, until we hiked up the mountain about a mile and realized that we were lost. So we did what any normal hiking caravan would do when lost in another country...we knocked, okay, pounded, alright, seriously prayed with everything left in us that someone would be home to guide us in the right direction back to our bed and breakfast.

A half an hour later I was in the shower, and taking lots and lots of anti-histomines.
We went to dinner.
And then bed.