DUBLIN -- Day 4

Hold onto your hats, ladies and gents, this was an impressive day. READY?! Okay!!

Another sunshine-y morning!!

A random church tucked behind the highway. I like studies in contrast like this :)

The Irish hangover cure -- which I kind of needed after getting pleasantly drunk Friday night :D

A cool labyrinth stone in the visitor center of Glendalough Abbey :)

The tower of the Abbey (I think the roof has been restored on the tower)

Fia, Katie M, and Calla

Cool tree next to the Abbey graveyard

Taking shelter from the crazy wind in a roofless building = it's still cold out

I was in a climbing mood, so I hopped up on top of the walls and nearly got blown off :P

A bunch of leaning gravestones and Colleen

Yay for lakes whose names I don't know!

We took a very long walk on a path through the woods to the upper lake -- very nice after being on a bus for a long time...

Some friends decided to climb up hills and be dangerous, but I decided to stay on the beaten path for once

More trees :)

We had to stay at this stream for at least 10 minutes while I took different shots from different angles -- I'm a sucker for sunlight on water

See? Sunlight and water.

SUNSHINE!!!!

The lone tree on the high ridge... ARTSY

The upper lake, I believe.

I didn't use the zoom on my camera -- these ducks were actually this close to us.

Again, no zoom. Calla and I were seriously considering climbing down from the path onto the river bank to pet them or something. We tried whistling them over like dogs but, predictably, that didn't work out for us. Le sigh.

We saw a guy kneeling on the path ahead of us taking pictures of something, which we found to be at least 10 frogs and a bunch of eggs!! We would've walked right past if he hadn't been there (photo credit goes to Calla on this one)

Calla and Colleen taking the pictures of frogs

BLUE SHEEP!!!!

We weren't really sure who these sheep belonged to, since they were just chilling on the riverbank here, and there was a moment when Calla and I considered jumping the fence to go pet them... but we didn't. :(

Somebody carved the labyrinth design into the grass outside the visitor center...

Hills!! Note that the weather is good in this picture...

A cool gap in the mountains -- the clouds are starting to gray up here...

Rain/mist in the distance

Sun breaking through the clouds, and rain on the bus window

... and here it decides to hail.

Fortunately, Kyle is a viking and doesn't care.

This was not my favorite part of the day -- there are over 600 steps down into the Dunmore Caves, and they're tiny steps for the most part. It had stopped snowing here, but it was still pretty frigid out.

The mouth of the caves! This cave system is famous for having a lot of human remains in it -- there may have been a viking battle where the Irish were bottled up in these caves (especially women and children) and they died from suffocation or burning. There are lots of theories and no good evidence, but lots of artifacts have been found in here.

The view out from the inside

Our somewhat grumpy tour guide

Limestone!

This was a really interesting stalagmite, because some cave 'researcher' back in the day who tried blasting the thing off the wall and only succeeded in splitting it in half. Hence, we get to see a cross-section of it.

The Buffalo stalagmite!! After our guide told us it looked like a buffalo, I couldn't stop looking at it that way. Talk about forced perception.

Photo credits here go to Calla and Eric -- my camera didn't like how little light was down here and refused to take a good picture. Guess what this fused column is said to look like? A hand holding a pint of Guinness. WIN.

One of the scarier spiral staircases I've tried to scale in my life, since the entire thing shakes when anyone else is on it. It felt like climbing a tuning fork, and was giving me some serious vertigo.

Just like being back in Tower Hall :P SO MANY STAIRS

And, of course, this is what we see when leaving the cave not an hour later. Love the weather here...

A very pretty sunset on our way to Kilkenny :D

My dessert in Kilkenny -- DELICIOUS ice cream!!

The Katies sharing their ice cream :)

 Instead of drinking this evening, a bunch of us stumbled upon a bowling alley and played for an hour and a half. It was excellent, but I didn't bring my camera. It was so nice to sleep in a hotel instead of the hostel this night... Last day coming up next!!

-S