Friday friday in old Ireland

We waltzed around Tralee for awhile. We found a beautiful garden and went into this church and actually sat in for a little bit of a mass. Favorite parts: shaking hands and saying "peace be with you" to members of the congregation, and - the fact that the priest was wearing a bright green robe. Typical.

Finally, we got on the bus for Dingle and bid farewell to the nice little Tralee.

My photos are insignificant. They are pathetic attempts at trying to capture the spacious grandeur and greenness that is Ireland. My vocabulary failed me in Ireland. Abysmally. In my head there are different hierarchies regarding how expressive certain adjectives are. Words like nice, and great are the bottom tier. Moving up we've got lovely and beautiful, next tier we find marvelous and gorgeous. Going a little higher we find ourselves with exquisite and phenomenal or absolutely unbelievable. And then there's Ireland . . . No words.

Once we got to Dingle (hooray hooray hooray for this tiny town full of love and Irish pleasures) we checked into the Hideout Hostel, put down our bags and went to Paddy's bike shop to rent bikes. Emma had taken this bike ride when she was there earlier, and we were all excited to go. We didn't really know what we'd gotten ourselves into.
We rode up and down and I felt liberated.
I had dressed a little too heavily so I straped my coat sweater and scarf to the back of my bicycle.
Isn't it just . . . fill in the blank - I have no words.
There were a few hills. I was very very grateful that a.) I even knew how to ride a blasted bicycle and b.) that I'd had ample experience, because I needed it.
HHere are two pictures of pretty much the same thing for your enjoying pleasure.

We biked down to the coast.
So to break it down, the bicycle ride ended up lasting about 5 hours, and we tracked it to be about 50 km, which is a little over 30 miles of Irish countryside. But frankly, when you're staring at sights like these, who can really complain.
We did a little hiking on our breaks. So lovely.
We.were.exhausted. We went back to the hostel and just sat in the Common Room. We bought organic hot cocoa and read books and relaxed. We were so sore.

Then we got some food because we were so starving. Then we went and listened to some pub music. There were people singing along to Irish tunes. I loved it. We fell asleep really happy, and really really exhausted.