Saturday . . . in Ireland

We woke up to . . . sunny blue skies . . . in Ireland. It was so exquisite. The hostel owner told us it was never-ever like this, and that we should bike up to the top of the mountain to see the view, we weren't too keen on that idea (sore seats remember?) So he offered to drive us, all of us, all six in his little car. We were riding pretty low. We cruised to the top of the mountain.

So beautiful. Friends, I really can't describe how great it was. I have never been so peaceful and tranquil in my life. You're so close to heaven, and there's no worldly distractions, except the sheep of course. Wow. I'm still so at peace with my life just thinking about it. We got there and sat for quite a while. oh man.
We walked down the mountain to get back to Dingle. It was a beautiful walk. So we'd seen Ireland from bus, car, bike, and now on foot. It was still morning and the sun was shining and the hills were green. If only you could have been there.
About 20 bugs/VWs drove by. This is one photo of about 10 I took. I don't know the story on that.
Then we spent the day in Dingle. Oh dingle. This sign explains a lot.
We went to this bakery and asked the old lady what was the best, and she said "i make it all, i think it's all good, but, these (see above) are so good. i'm a diabetic and i'm not supposed to eat these, but i do." So we got the above, with unsweetened cream. It was so so good.
This was the quaint sign. I adore Dingle.
I took a picture of this little cutie to paint later, but I thought I'd show you how cute Dingle is.
Dingle is close to a wharf. Here it is.
Here is down town Dingle. So so lovely.

We hopped on another bus and decided to go all the way back to Limmerick for the night (we were going to stay in a smaller town along the way, but we were concerned about making it back etc.) The bus ride was an interesting one.

It was dark for most of the trip, and unfortunately Emma and I landed a great spot in front of these two little girls from the UK I think who thought they were pretty funny = annoying. They played with Emma's hair and other dumb things. There was also a wasted man on the bus. He got on and was headed toward Limmerick; he smelled like booze, and he was loud, and the bus driver had to go back to make sure everything was alright. Suffice it to say, we were missing Dingle immensely.

We made it to Limmerick. Now we'd been there before and frankly, it's a little ghetto. We got off the bus with no accomodations lined up, so we asked the bus driver about a hostel, who directed us to ask some other guys who were no help, so we asked a cashier at a cheapy concession stand who had no idea where we could find one.

We ended up ringing the buzzer on a good ol' B&B and were greeted by this tiny little Catholic lady with glasses. She asked us how much we'd like to pay for our rooms . . . okay. We told her we'd paid 17 and 19 the nights previous - which included breakfast. She said she'd give it to us for 25. Blast. Well, this was my shining moment of the trip. I didn't really want to pay 25, pas du tout, so I told her we'd have to go look around about (which i also didn't want to do) and we'd have to see if there was anything else. That got her attention I think. There were six of us, so even if she only charged us a buck a piece, that's more money than she would have made otherwise. So then she asked if we'd stay is she brought it down to 20. Why sure, yes please, but I told her we'd only do it if her breakfast was reeeaally good, at which point she laughed and groped me a little. Then she asked us to pay before we went out and got too drunk . . . if she only knew how sober we would be when we returned.

She gestured us up to our room (we got a little lost) and when she told one of the girls she was the boss, we took to calling her boss, and it kind of stuck. Well we were hungry so we went out to eat and ended up at some dive-of-a-fast-food-place. Bleh. I got the cod and peas + beans (i thought they were combined, but nope, i got a separate order of peas and a separate order of beans) and we found that their method of re-heating was . . . frying it . . . again. We ate in the TV room of the B&B where we trespassed upon who we believe to be the family of the owner of the B&B. It was weird.

We were kind of hating Limmerick. Kinda a lot. We had a bus for the next morning and we decided we wouldn't leave our rooms until then. I was so tired and ready to go home that um, I maybe didn't change out of my jeans and tee-shirt to go to sleep, and I shared a bed with Emma. We fell asleep watching an episode of The Office on Emma's computer because it was only 9:45.