I really wish my raincoat, ya know, blocked the rain

The whole next day (Saturday) the weather got pretty crappy unfortunately. Also unfortunately, my raincoat seems to have been in so much use since I got here and needed to be washed so many times it's lost it's waterproofness. Thankfully, this is easily remedied by me actually getting off my lazy butt and buying waterproofing spray. However, I've had no such luck at the one store I went to and have yet to get off my lazy ass for a second trip. Therefore, when it started to rain and get wet on this trip, I got equally as wet. The only thing that really stayed dry, unsurprisingly, was my feet thanks to my handy-dandy hiking boots! If you couldn't have guessed from my past blogs post, they were possibly the best investment I've made while here.

Anyways, the pictures of the places we went to were still pretty good considering it's just so beautiful that it still looks good when it's wet. Like when someone looks good after working out...doncha just hate those kinds of people?

Not entirely sure, but I think this was our view either of Valentia Island or from Valentia Island of the mainland. There were lots of pretty views of ocean/islands/mountains so it's kind of hard to keep them all straight. 

After that short stop we headed to the property of the farmer who had spoken to us the night before. He mainly had a dairy farm but also paved a road up a mountain so that elderly and disabled people would still be able to get up there to see the views without having to slog through wet fields and sheep poop.

cows!

And to make this even better he had baby cows too!

One of them very clearly though Maggie's fingers were an udder and noisily sucked on them despite the fact that it wasn't going to be getting any milk from them anytime soon:

We finally were pulled away by Mary, the woman in charge of everything for the weekend, and we hikes our way up to the cliffs and the lookout point. As is typical in Ireland, there were lots of sheep about:

The view when we got to the top was well worth the gruelingly steep (yet short) hike upwards:

Gotta love dem panoramic shots.

I was also amazed at how very blue the water was. Either I had never thought about it, or I simply thought the Atlantic would look the same dull color it does in Jersey (granted that's not a good example of the Atlantic). I mean, I was also surprised by the palm trees so apparently I should just expect the unexpected here.

We also saw our only patch of blue sky that day!

It was super exciting for the few seconds it was there.

As is usual at this point, we took some nice photos:

aaaaand some funnier ones:

"I'll never let go Jack!"
LIAR. you dropped the stiff the second he was glacier status.

Once we trekked our way back down, we headed off to the famed Valentia slate quarries.

Apparently they have nice quality slate that's been shipped and used all over the world. They also have a grotto there which they turned into a religious site of sorts.

After this we headed right over to the "Skellig Experience" which is like a little museum of sorts about the Skellig Islands. The islands are basically all rock and out a few miles in the sea. Monks lived there a really really really long time ago basically being hermits on the rocks doing hermity things. We couldn't actually get a view of the Skelligs until the next day. The building where the "experience" was, was actually very cool:

I bet you had to do a double take to see it in this picture. I actually took this trying to get the town in the background not even realizing that there was a building covered in grass smack dab in the middle of it. It's supposed to be no destructive to the landscape so tourist can still take pretty pictures of landscape without having a gaudy building ruin the picture. At least that's my reasoning. Who knew you could learn so much from Hobbits!

Can we also please just appreciate how creepy this cat is:

It's tucked away behind a fake stone hut and actually took me by surprise when I first saw it. Seems like the kind of joke I would pull if I was building the place.

Another thing I'm not sure if I've mentioned before (doesn't matter you're gonna hear about it again) is that the Irish love their brightly colored houses:

Even if it's not the whole house, the doors at least are eye popping. I've been told various stories as to why, some of which I've actually experienced myself. One is that there's not really numbers on houses and it's easy to be like "walk past the cafe and I'm the green door on the right!" I have actually been given directions like this before so I guess it works. The other (funnier) story I heard was it makes it easier to find your way home when you're drunk late at night and aren't in a particularly right state of mind. Especially if you want to avoid startling someone by walking into the wrong home.

After lunch we took a short ride to some stone ring forts that were fairly close by:

There were steps going all up the sides of it and you could walk around the top. The step were super steep, super narrow, and because it was raining, super slippery. So that really does wonders for your nerves as you awkwardly clamber up 2 stories of rocks with no railing or any safety precaution. I didn't have a problem with it but there were more than a few people who understandably did not want to venture up.

There were 2 within walking distance so we did go to both. They were fairly similar and both had really good views of the surrounding area. At one point someone was like "Emily! Can we take a picture of us pushing you off?" And without any second thought or hesitation I was all "Sure! Why not?"

I could've at least put a leg in the air or actually looked frightened for my life as I was "plummeting" to the ground but we all know what wonderfully stupendous actress I am. BAHAHA jokes on jokes.

So on our way back to the hotel we chose to get dropped off in "town" to have a look around. There were a few shops open and we stopped into the only catholic church named for a lay person:

I think he was a politician or something, but he's known for promoting Catholics under British rule waaaaay back in the day. We were thankful just to get out of the rain for a bit, but it was pretty cool inside:

We made our way back to the hotel after a scare of not actually knowing our way back to the hotel. Thank god the "town" was basically one main street so getting lost would've actually been pretty hard. Especially considering we just needed to keep going the way the bus did when it dropped us off. We're some smart cookies right here! I pretty much collapsed on the bed when we got back before dinner. I was also too lazy to take off my boots, but I didn't want to put them on the bed either so this happened instead:

After dinner we had another guest speaker who was a well known gaelic football player. Gaelic football is, ah, unique, to say the least. The closest I can equate it to is a combination of American football, soccer, and basketball. And since this is how a lot of sports are described, I'll say it's closer to the soccer end than say, rugby, which is closer to the football end. Here's a video that actually does a pretty good job of explaining it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEAbWrdB9XU

He spoke to us more about the culture around the game rather than the game itself since he had a video of a game going on behind him the whole time (it was rather more distracting than what he was saying). But afterwards he and his son gave a display of certain aspects of the game and conned some people in the crowd into trying it themselves. Similarly to the ceili dance, the (forced) volunteers looked a bit more ridiculous than the guy and his son, but it was fun none the less.

To finish the night we had a trivia contest that quickly became a cut-throat competition between the group I was spending the weekend with. It was fun and ridiculous and I (and my team) was super glad I have a huge store of useless knowledge. Unfortunately, it wasn't big enough as we came in second, but I still got chocolate as a prize so my night was a win either way.