Castles, Hiking, Shopping and Fog

First off, thank you everyone for your thoughts and perspectives on my last post, you're all amazing.

I figured I'd share with you what we've been up to the last few days.  So if you're bored with my trip diary summaries, you should go ahead and skip this because MORE IRELAND.

The day after our Frodo-hike we decided to take a mellow day to chill out.  We drove to Killarney (in Irish "Cill Airne," neat eh?) to check out Ross Castle, because you can't come to this part of the world without seeing some fucking castles.  It was pretty neat but we didn't tour the inside because it cost money (like 4 or 5 euro bro!) and also you couldn't take photos inside.

As a side note, did you know that the spiral staircases in castle turrets were designed specifically to give advantage to right-handed sword-wielders in the event that a swordfight happened to be take place down the stairs?  I didn't even know that kind of elegant fighting down the stairs was a thing.

After that we walked around the town and did a little bit of our Christmas shopping.  Killarney is a good-sized town with lots of neato stores and things, so we had a good time exploring. I tried to find an Irish wool sweater but they all made me look boxy and weird. Sad times. We ate lunch back here (Irish lamb stew again, what what?) and had a late dinner at a lovely bar where we thought we'd find live music but didn't. Instead we found hot chocolate with Bailey's, which totally made up for the disappointment.  Then, like most nights on vacation or otherwise, we watched 30 Rock on Netflix and fell quickly asleep. Well, I stayed up and worked on my new blog to see how I like it before publicizing it, but then fell asleep.

On Friday we did our longest hike yet up a mountain whose name in Irish Gaelic (Mangerton) means "The Deceiver," which was appropriate because every time we thought we'd reached the summit there was yet ANOTHER summit to climb.  It was exhausting.  It was also a little sad because when we got to the summit, the view looked like this:

FOG. FOG FOG FOGGY FOG. In Ireland's defense, it wasn't rain (that came later), but it was so thick that we could not see any of the (surely gorgeous) scenery below.  I know hiking isn't all about the end result, but still, it was a bummer.  I was pretty excited, therefore, when the fog started to lift on our way down and we saw some pretty Ireland scenery.  We also got some pretty fabulous photos of us and we're pretty cute.

We're gearing up for our last few days in Ireland and as of now we don't really have anything planned until we drive to Dublin on Monday. Though I love Ireland and could easily see moving here (for realsies guys) I'm ready to be home with our beast in our own bed with our own brands of jelly and juice and bread.