#i think i should go on a nice long bike ride tomorrow. to decompress and work some of the steam out.

[orcelito]

ok i am actually so very angry and there's literally nothing i can do to fix it. life keeps going on. she might even be happy. and fuck dude, i'll make sure im happy too, i was a fully developed person before she was in my life and i'll continue to be one without her. but God Damn, the fact that she can just do something so blatantly awful and unfair to me and then run off without any actual repercussions is just so fucking rankling to me.

like perhaps she feels guilty. she said she did when it was all going down. but it was just something she "needed to do". so obviously she didn't feel guilty enough or she wouldnt have done it like that lmaoooo

i really did deserve to have a good solid yell at her. but unfortunately, by the time i did see her in person i just wanted her out of my fucking life. so. no yelling was done, unfortunately.

[oonandhergoons-blog]

June 28-29, 2017

Strap in for a long post because these last few days have been BUSY. (This reminder is as much for me writing this post as it is for you reading this post.)

Yesterday (Wednesday the 28th) began with an early morning bike ride down to a local lighthouse with Cuchulain and Claire. Well, I should probably rephrase that: the original goal was to get to the lighthouse, which Google Maps insisted would only be a twenty-minute bike ride. However, it started raining fairly aggressively shortly after we began biking through the streets of Dublin, causing our sense of direction to get way off and resulting in a number of wrong turns that severely diminished our confidence. In fact, we did end up seeing the lighthouse, but it was off in the distance mostly hidden by the iconic Irish fog. After seeing this faint red outline of the lighthouse so far away from us, we decided to turn and head back to the apartment in order to finish getting ready for our road trip (woot woot) to Blarney! I ended up taking a bit longer than everyone else because I was a dummy and hadn’t packed the night before, but by ten thirty, all of our luggage for the weekend was packed in our rental car and we were off!

The car ride there was fairly uneventful, although the scenery next to the highway is much different from what you’d find next to I-77. Following about three hours in the car, we arrived at Blarney Castle with plenty of time to spare for lunch, which we ended up enjoying at the Blarney Café right outside the gates (a lovely establishment, by the way). It was a really nice way to be able to decompress and relax after such a long time in a confined space.

But enough about the small details, let’s talk Blarney!

Blarney Castle itself actually ended up being a very small part of the whole Blarney experience. The grounds seem to stretch on forever and I spent a lot of my time in the Rock Close, which contained a bunch of old Druid sites from times way before Blarney Castle was even built. A lot of it was clearly done up for tourists, but it still passed off as really magical, especially when walking through it on my own.

And yes, I did kiss the Blarney Stone. How could I not when Mom and Dad have been talking about their experience kissing it for the last fifteen years?

In all seriousness, despite the nearly-hour-long wait to get up to the stone, it was definitely worth it, primarily because I felt very proud of myself for kissing the stone despite my fear of heights.

The seven of us met back up in the Blarney gift shop at about five p.m. and hopped back into the car to make the hour-and-a-half drive to Bunratty, which would be the finale to what Dad excitedly called “castle day.” We were able to relax in our newest Air B&B, an adorable house in a suburb near the castle, for about an hour once we got there, a welcome break to our busy day. But, because relaxation is for dweebs, we quickly whisked ourselves out the door once more around eight p.m. and piled into the car for the short ride to Bunratty Castle.

We were actually going to have a medieval dinner in the castle, which sounded really awesome and ended up being REALLY awesome. There were several actors dressed in medieval-style clothing there to greet us and hand us mugs of mead as we walked in the door, the latter of which proceeded to make Mom squeal with excitement because she has literally been waiting to taste Bunratty mead again for the last fifteen years. We were guided into a sort of waiting room with the other groups that were there that night, which was gorgeously decorated. There were really detailed fifteenth-century tapestries on each wall, as well as a gorgeous “dowry wardrobe” that was leaning against the right wall as we walked in. A dowry wardrobe was apparently a piece of furniture that a rich family would begin constructing when a daughter was born into the family, which would then be continuously added onto until the girl was married off. The final piece carved into the wardrobe would be the crest of the husband’s family.

After a about twenty minutes in the waiting room, we were directed into the main dining room. This room ended up being packed wall-to-wall with people, a fact that no one seemed to mind because at least seventy-five percent of the room’s population was slightly tipsy or just about there. The atmosphere was warm and energetic and everyone was super into it once the actors started announcing the various skits of the evening. The food was delicious as well and the madrigal singing that the actors performed throughout the night was beautiful. Special shoutout to the harpist, who absolutely killed all of her solos.

We left Bunratty in incredibly high spirits with a lot of quality spirits. (Get it? Because we took some mead with us.)

Today (Thursday the 29th) was quite possibly one of my favorite days of this entire trip. We didn’t get out of the house until about eleven-thirty when we headed into Limerick for a nice family brunch. We wound up at this restaurant called Hook & Ladder near City Centre. When I say this place was adorable, I mean that this place was so cute, you’d want to wrap it up and take it home with you to look at when you’re feeling sad. There were these two booths along the back wall of the bottom floor that were separated by a wall of very realistic tree branches stretching up to the ceiling and connecting with these strings of old-fashioned spiral lightbulbs. It was altogether very homey and the food was amazing as well.

During brunch, Claire came up with the idea to go on a boat tour around the Killary Fjord, which was around an hour and a half away from our final destination for the day. A boat tour sounded like a new and exciting experience to us all, so we eagerly agreed and planned to make it to the four-p.m. tour. Our original plan was then to find something to do as we drove through Galway, but due to a bunch of delays on the roads in Galway, we ended up having to just drive straight through in order to get to Killary on time.

I then fell asleep for about an hour, only to open my eyes to the most beautiful countryside view I had ever seen. Travel guides are not kidding when they say Ireland has the most scenic road trips in the world. Several of us gasped when we saw the mountains, including Cuchulain, who seemed to be unable to stop saying, “Oh wow.” In all honesty, he was just saying what we were all thinking.

(Complete side note: About twenty minutes from our tour meetup point, our path got blocked by a bunch of escaped sheep, who paid absolutely no mind to us. We all found that really amusing.)

The crazy thing is that those views weren’t even the best part of the day.

We made in to the boat tour office about ten minutes before we needed to be there and got a taste of what we were going to see over the next hour and a half. It was breathtaking, to say the least.

About ten minutes after four, the seven of us walked onto the boat and our journey began.

I cannot even begin to express all the different ways that this place was beautiful.

It was super windy and cold, but it really didn’t bother any of us at all because the air felt awesome running through our hair as we stood at the front of the boat. There was one moment when the majority of us were standing at the front, clearly starting to feel the effects of the cold, and Dad walked out with a bunch of hot chocolates from the boat’s built-in bar. I can definitely say that there was nothing else that could have made those next few minutes anymore perfect. Hot chocolate, a perfect view, family around me: it was, in a word, fantastic.

The entire hour and a half was filled with amazing views. The only way to properly describe them is to show them to you.

See what I mean?

We also got a lovely man on the boat with us to snap this picture of us, which I think is absolutely precious.

At the end of the tour, we were all thoroughly exhilarated and exhausted at the same time, which didn’t end up being a very good thing for our nerves as we drove through the narrow roads of the Irish countryside. However, we ended up making it safely to Westport, a popular tourist/vacation spot along the west coast, where we decided to have dinner. We settled on a lovely Italian place, which gave us another chance to decompress before getting back in the car for another hour-long drive.

On this last leg of the journey before reaching Achill Island, which is the destination of the half marathon that Dad, Cuchulain, and Claire are running this weekend, Cuchulain decided to start up some car games. These didn’t end up going in his favor, much to his frustration as time went on with no wins to his name. However, he couldn’t be too upset because the views outside our windows started looking unreal again.

I am now typing this post from a delightfully cozy cottage a little way up the mountains in Dooagh, one of the towns on Achill Island. As a conclusion, I’ll leave you with this high quality picture of some sheep that blocked our way as we drove into town.

Prospective plans for tomorrow: exploring???