Killarney, Our Wedding Anniversary and some Hiking

sorry it's taken me so long to update - 10 days in Mexico interrupted my blogging
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We drove from Dingle the short distance to Kilarney, which is a fairly good sized city in Ireland. For the most part, Kilarney was our fav city that we visited, with maybe the exception of Dublin. The drive wasn't terribly exciting - after the first 3 days, You're almost overwhelmed with the countryside. The whole country is rolling, green and breezy. Lots of ruined castles on the way.

This is one of the western most points of Ireland. Not THE, although you can sail to the western most point in Ireland from here. It was phenomenal. There's a celtic cross that stands out on one of hte Islands as a way of blessing those who have left Ireland (and there are many) to go to the rest of the world. You know an area is phenomenal when you can use a crappy camera and still have amazing pictures.



From there, we navigated the horse cart path the Irish call a road (and shared it with tour buses which i could have put the car in the luggage compartment) and made it to Kilarney. The city was crazy busy. here we got our first real taste of what "big city" life is like in Ireland. And I use big city pretty loosely - it was still probably only 8 city blocks, maybe 12, big. But there was a LOT going on. Lots of music and people and such. Kim and I found new wedding rings at a jewelers' shop in Ireland. We didn't have much money when we got married (both of us still in school) and so we cheaped out on the rings. in Kilarney we found them. They look a lot like This, but the knot in the middle is tighter (smaller) and they were custom made for us by the dude in Kilarney. I'll get a picture of them up here soon.

In Killarney, we also found the Pipe that I was looking for. I didn't buy it till we got to Dublin, though, cause it's actually made in dublin. fear not, though, for it has gotten much good use!!!

in the middle of the afternoon, Kim and I went hiking in a National Park just outside of Killarney. It was gorgeous, and kim has a reputation. See, she has lead us on multiple trips where she promised my friends easy hikes and turns out it was quite the arduous journey. We damn near died on our honeymoon b/c of that. ;) This hike was easy though. This is the waterfall we found. Kim does love her some waterfalls.



That night, we headed back to town, went to a movie ("Mr and Mrs. Smith" - was actually better than i'd expected), and then out to celebrate our anniversary. Here, Kim started drinking Hard Cider. There are a lot of brands of hard cider, but in Ireland EVERYONE was drinking Bulmer's hard cider. even more than people drinking Guinness (rest assured though, there was no shortage of stout drinkers), most people we met, esp young Irish people, were drinking Bulmer's. Kim doesn't like beer at all, but liked the Cider. Nice thing about goin out with Kim is that after one, she was pretty much done.