#corcomroe

Ireland was pretty fantastic. This trip was just me and a friend from CSU, Erin. We arrived in Dublin late Thursday night and tapped out in our hostel at a decent time. It was my first time sleeping in such a big room at a hostel -- 16 people. It was like a sleep over, except I only knew the person underneath my bunk, and the room was hot and stuffy and people switched on lights at 2 a.m. and burped and were loud and were inconsiderate but I'm not mad, nope. Just kidding, it wasn't that bad. I mean, they did do all those things, but it could've been worse I guess.

Early Friday morning we left for our day trip around Ireland. We booked with Extreme Ireland (SO EXTREME) to take a bus tour out to the west coast, stopping in a few towns and fishing villages. It was definitely extreme. We stopped in Limerick to see St. James's Castle, and then made our way out to the coast. The west coast of Ireland has one of the seven beauties of the country -- the Cliffs of Moher. This is where scenes from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and The Princess Bride were filmed. The coast was beyond awesome. 700 feet from the edge to the water, with a layered few of staggering cliffs on the left and right. It was a pretty windy, but the weather was sunny. Erin and I weren't as extreme as the people venturing out on past the barriers to the edge of the cliffs, but we took some pretty extreme photos.

From the Cliffs we headed up the coast a ways, checking out the Burren -- which is a big area of land that is covered with limestone. It was kind of erie, but really cool too. We stopped along the way to get out and run around.

Our next stop was Corcomroe Abbey -- a Catholic monastery dating back to the 1200s. The building had no roof, and was one of the cooler ancient buidlings I've got to poke around in. It's set in a little valley between hills of stone, since it's technically in the Burren.

We stopped for lunch in Doolin, a small fishing village. We had some pretty extreme seafood chowder and a nice pint. Along the way we saw tons of mid-sized rock walls dividing land, called dry-rock walls. The land around the area is so full of rock that people would pick the large stones out of the earth and stack them to form walls, with no cement, so that their land was a bit more farmable without the rock. There were everywhere. Miles and miles and miles of rock walls. It was pretty neat.

After lunch we stopped in Kinvara, another small fishing village, and then headed back to Dublin. At the start of the day we were convinced we'd head out and go crazy in Dublin, but we still hadn't seen it in the daylight, and were too exhausted to go out.

On Saturday we spent the day exploring the city of Dublin. It really wasn't quite big as we thought it would be -- you could walk halfway across the main parts of Dublin in about 20 minutes. We saw a ton of sweet things -- like the Dublin Castle, Christ Church, and Trinity College. We took a walking tour and got a good idea of the city, and then headed down to the Guinness Factory and learned a bit about beer. Did you know Guinness signed their lease on their plot of land at St. James's Gate for 9,000 years back in the 1700s? Yeah, me neither. But that was weird.