This week in Ireland was an okay week. We got back from our trip to Dublin and had plenty of work to do for class. While the homework wasn’t really intense, I did catch the cold that has been circling the group like a hungry vulture. Classes this week were interesting and we assigned a debate for our history class. The debate is going to be over Oliver Cromwell and whether or not he deserves the bad press associated with him. I think it will be an interesting experience since it will be done in a pub in Galway. This week we also learned how to play the tin whistle which was kind of fun. I sound terrible but it was really fun. We have a couple of tunes that we are suppose to practice before our next class with her.
This week we also went to Croagh Patrick. On our way there we made a stop at Pearse Cottage. Patrick Pearse was a Irish rebel leader during the Easter Week rising in 1916. He had built this cottage on the other side of the country from Dublin and was there to teach the people in this area in the people’s own tongue of Irish. He feared that the English teaching was drowning out the Irish way of learning so he started his own school to help keep the culture.
This isn’t the original cottage though because the British had burned it down during the rebellion and was restored in the 1920’s by some of the local villagers. Others have lived in the cottage but now it is empty and operated by the OPW. The inside was fairly small and was a two room building. One room was where Pearse had slept and the other room across the way was his children’s room containing two beds.
We didn’t spend a lot of time at the cottage because we were in a hurry to get to Croagh Patrick before a storm blew in. We were racing time to climb the mountain. We had been watching the news all week to see how bad the storm was going to be and decided that Friday was our only chance to climb. The rush of getting there was well wroth it. We got to our hostel a little after twelve. We dropped our stuff off and got ready to climb Croagh Patrick. Everyone had been telling us that the climb was a difficult one. The hostel had some sticks that we could use for the climb, and I was so thankful for that because it really helped with coming down. The start of the climb was a little misleading to me because it started with a thing of stairs and I thought, okay so this won’t be as bad as everyone says because there are stairs. Well the stairs were in fact just a few to get you closer to the “trail”. The stairs ended near a statue of Saint Patrick.
After this the climb was no longer going to be easy. There really wasn’t a trail to follow. The path that was there has had so many people walk over it that the dirt has all been stomped away. It was very rocky and you had to pick which side you were going to go up. The first part I found was the most difficult for me because of how the water was rushing down and the rock formations were a little interesting to climb. I really enjoyed climbing though. There were some sections were you had to physically climb a rock to get to the makeshift path to go future up.
Our group really didn’t stick together because everyone was climbing at their own pace. For a while there was a small section of us together but eventually it was just Marta and I climbing together. I had a pretty good time climbing and talking with Marta and it was nice because we went about the same pace. There higher we got, the more beautiful the view got. The really sad thing though was that the clouds were coming in fast and it was making it hard to see anything below you.
Marta and I climbed to the shoulder which was about half way and the view from there was really hard to see where we had climbed from. It was also really wet and I couldn’t see out of my glasses so we decided that it was time to climb back down. The climb down was really hard on our knees and was a little scary. At some spots I slid down and in my head thought, this is it, this is how I go. But as started to come down the view was clearing up. We stopped a couple of times to rest a little then the last little bit I just kept going until I was at the bottom.
That night everyone was a little sore and really tired. On top of that we all were starving. We walked five minutes to a nearby restaurant to have dinner. The meals were a little pricey but it tasted so good. I got a hamburger with fries and a small salad. I paid about 16 euros but it was well wroth it.
The next morning we got up and went down to have breakfast. The hostel had packed lunches for us that we ordered. We grabbed those then our things from our room and walked out to the bus to go home. We didn’t really stop anywhere on the way back to Spiddal because of the huge storm that was blowing in. We did go look at the John Wayne statue in Kong and look at the river near by there. We stopped for groceries and returned back to Park Lodge around four o’clock or so. That night John Paul opened the hotel bar at 8:30. We went for a few hours and had really good time. There was a live band there and everyone was kind of sitting around talking.
While we didn’t really do a whole lot this weekend, I had a lot of fun. I am excited for the next couple of weeks and can’t wait to see what we do next.
Journey To Ireland 2020 