Day Two: Emerald Isle

 After eating a hearty Irish breakfast, we checked out of the fabulous Trinity Capital Hotel in Dublin to began our two week journey around Ireland. First up was driving to County Wicklow to see Glendalough and the Wicklow Mountain National Park. I was still the driver/navigator/chauffer so I got us there in a little over an hour without getting lost or hitting anything with the car. Hurray! Our luck was improving...we thought.

Glendalough was absolutely picturesque. 

 

The grass and trees were so green that our eyes could barely register the color of it all. It was just so vibrant. And cold. The wind was blowing and the rain was coming down...all for about ten minutes. Then the sun came out, the wind died down a little, and the air warmed up considerably. Glendalough is in a valley that was carved by glaciers during the ice age. The two lakes that are in the valley were formed when the ice melted. Just up the road from the lake is a monastery and graveyard that dates back to the 6th century, when it was founded by St.Kevin. 

We had a picnic by the lake and took a walk up to a waterfall. There are also sites by the lake that are some of the oldest things in Ireland. We spent most of the day walking around and taking pictures here before attempting to find our Bed & Breakfast for the night. There are too many amazing photos to put them all up on here...We stayed at the Lough Dan House that night.

The drive to the B&B turned into a three hour game of "find a needle in a haystack" and the directions the owners gave us were mostly along the lines of, "Turn left at the big tree about 4km down. Go over a bridge and turn right then turn left again at a white house. Then when the road splits into four, go on the nicest looking one, though they all look pretty bad I know. Keep driving till you see the house with a funny roof." Their town wasn't even on the GPS. Other guests were amazed that we (by we, I mean me) had found it by ourselves, since they had come on a tour bus.

After getting there we realized it wasn't really that hard to go back into town (about 20 minutes away) for dinner now that we knew where we were going. I had a delicious Guinness and Beef Stew for dinner. I liked that the rooms in the restaurant had quotes painted on the walls. This one for instance is from Oscar Wilde, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." One thing I have learned is that no one here uses full addresses to find places. They just explain it to you by landmarks or trees, or rocks, or sheep, or whatever. Once I accepted that fact and stopped trying to make sense of the roads or signs, things were much easier to find.

 Back at the house, we were getting ready for bed and I was lucky enough to have my own room downstairs. Everything was fine until I saw them. Spiders. Huge brown ugly ones. Everywhere. I guess they had come out from wherever they were to go to the warmest place downstairs...my room. I don't mind spiders really, I actually like daddy long legs', I just don't want to sleep with them. Especially not ones that look like brown recluses. After informing the owner of the house that my room was infested with what could possibly be venomous spiders, she flatly said "Welcome to the country. What do you want me to do about it?" Finally, after explaining how uncomfortable I was sleeping in the room, she got a dirt devil, handed it to me along with a newspaper for swatting, and went to bed. Ugh. I'm sorry, I know I'm in the country but I've lived in the country before and my house was not infested with huge spiders. At least not in my room. Mind you, they had an entire group of people from Germany there that they had just gone to the pub with, so they were all a little 'lit' from the no doubt copious amounts of whatever they had just finished drinking. 

We seemed to be the only ones not amused. Oh well. 

We just kept telling ourselves "it's just one night, it's just one night."

I'll upload more photos of Glendalough and the Wicklow National Park later...it's 12pm and my eyes are closing after driving around for 12 hours today. Goodnight all!

(I'm taking my friend, Buck's suggestion and using a map to track our travels around the country. Keep in mind that the red line is simply the route that was taken to get from place to place. We traveled all around the areas surrounding the line and many of the roads we took are not shown on this map...or even on GPS, hah!)