glendalough - day 7

july 21, 2007

after breakfast, big jake and i set off for glendalough, a national park a bit south of dublin, while luise went wedding dress shopping with a friend. on the way, we made a few stops: one, to get a view of dublin, two, a valley on r115, and three, the glenmacnass waterfall, which was more of a water slide, really.

glendalough was beautiful--it reminded me of yosemite, but on a much smaller scale, except for the amount of tourists. the italian school kids were EVERYWHERE. walking through the monastic settlement was somewhat painful because you couldn't get a photo of anything without 4 other groups of people posing for the same photo, but the ruins were very interesting. enough that i bought an 80 cent pamphlet on them.

to get away from the crowd, big jake and i decided to do a hike up the spinc trail to get a view from the top of lugduff mountain of the upper and lower lakes and of lugduff valley below. the trail was interesting--it was defined by wooden planks all the way up the mountain. a wooden path with stairs to walk up. the hike was nice, 5km in all, up about 280m. jake was a little concerned that we didn't bring water and food with us and didn't know how long he could go without it. he claimed that if we weren't back down at the lakes eating ice cream in three hours, he would consider eating me. me, i didn't care that we were without food and water. i'm a freakin' camel.

the view from the top of lugduff mountain to the lakes was extraordinary, except that you could see one of the main car parks for the park between the lakes. that was disappointing, but only minimally so. the view was well worth the trip. on our way, down, we stopped and took photos of the main waterfall in the park--the poulanass waterfall. i snuck off the path to get a better photo. i'm such a rule breaker.

on our way back to dublin, we decided to head to the coast. we stopped at a quaint little town called bray and walked along the boardwalk. there was a carnie going on. small hands. smell like cabbage. apparently the irish love carnies.

back in dublin, jake, luise and i went to dinner at a nice lebanese restaurant and walked around the temple bar area. temple bar is an area in dublin with a bunch of pubs and night clubs where the foreigners (mostly british) come for stag and hen parties. you could visually see which groups were which just by walking down the street. the stag boys are generally in a pack of 6-8, dressed to the nines and the hens have matching necklaces or sashes and are all over the stag boys. temple bar is a mad meat market. most irish tend to stay away from the place.