API's got a mascot!

The entire weekend was actually full of birthdays coincidentally, and we celebrated each and every one! Mine came first on the 28th with Kelly's following the very next day. We decided to go to Captain America's which is a restaurant in Cork city centre. Unsurprisingly, they serve food that one might find at an American restaurant right down to calling them fries instead of chips and having re-donk-ulously large portion sizes:

 They also have these beauties:

I don't know whether they're snarky or lazy (my vote) but they call them towers. It's about 15-18 drinks worth in one convenient plastic tube. They're actually a pretty good bang for your buck and you can get most mixed drinks on the menu this way. It good for, ya know, if you have a lot fo people going out to celebrate a birthday for example.

Next up came JaJai's birthday on Sunday, but being on a roll with the whole birthday thing, we celebrated on Saturday instead. She was very insistant on making her wish:

So to all that had a birthday that weekend, hope you had a wonderful time...because I know I did.

Anyways, that Saturday before Jajai's birthday dinner, we had an API excursion to Guagane Barra. There are lots of ways to spell it which is terribly confusing to people who have horrific spelling abilities a.k.a. me. Whenever I asked people what Guagane Barra was, I nearly always got different answers: "It's the place where the River Lee starts!" "There's a lake!" "It's where St. Finbarr built something!" "It's a national park!" "There's a church and some ruins there!" I never knew what to tell people then when I was asked what was at Guagane Barra. I usually just mumbled an answer about the River Lee and how I was excited (excited for what I still didn't quite know) until I changed the subject.

Turns out, Guagane Barra is all of the above. There's a church:

 and some ruins:

 set on a lake:

a fairly big lake:

 and if you walk down the road:

without Christine photo-bombing your picture (honestly I'm starting to rub off on her):

you get to a national park:

 where there's hiking trails:

lots of hiking trails:

 and the origin of the River Lee (it's just a bunch of little stream things so I'll do you the favor and not put a picture of all of them).

It's quite pretty and supposedly there's a 5 year waiting list to get married at the church there. Honestly, the size would deter me more than the waiting list:

That's it. That the whoooole church. Probably fit about, what, 45? maybe 50 people at the most? Yeah no, that wouldn't fly for my wedding with how big my family is.

When we were looking at the ruins they had pictures of the death of Christ, which seeing as it's a Catholic establishment, I wasn't all that surprised. I was slightly surprised at first that not everyone knew what they were depicting. Even though I'm not quite the good litte Catholic girl, I did have my Sunday morning CCD classes flying back into my head as I explained to someone what it was. Watching me explain religion must have been like watching a dog juggle, just, kinda really weird.

There also was this cool tree behind the church:

which reminded me of a banyan tree. Being the good Girl Scout that I am the first thing out of my mouth was "This would be a GREAT tree to build a shelter under!" Go figure. I'm halfway across the globe and the first thing I still do is scope out the best trees for shelters.

We had a lot of time there so we decided to actually go hiking on one of the trails. A lot fo them are flat and road like, but we decided on the extremely rocky one that was basically all uphill. Along the way we ran into this adorable creature:

She started to follow us as we passed the gates for the park and boy could we smell her before we saw her. She had a collar indicating her name was Blackie so she obviously had an owner around somewhere. I'm guessing the owner's small child bestowed the name upon her since it's such a genius idea. Just like the genius idea Erika and I had to call our three fish Goldilocks, Black Tail, and Whitey when we got them for Christmas when I was five. I bet you'll never guess what color they each were.

Anyway, she followed us the entire time while we were there hiking. She even made it all the way up to the look out point with us, which by the way, was incredible:

Doesn't seem like much in the picture, but it was really cool. It also was weird to actually be in a forest here. Most of the outdoors are large fields of grass and rocks (as you can see in part of the picture) but here was mostly forest. It was truly the first time I had been somewhere outdoorsy in Ireland that reminded me of outdoorsy places at home in the US.

Once we were done taking lots of photos:

we made the precarious trek back down. Along the way, taking some interesting photos on Max's part:

It started out as her trying to get a cool picture and ended in her planking the stream.

We still had some time before heading off to Bantry for the afternoon, so we decided to eat our picnic lunches there instead of on the bus. Our new mascot was quite taken with the smell of our sandwiches and being helpless to her cute puppy dog eyes, a number of us decided to share:

We started telling her to sit before giving her food but it didn't seem to get across to her. Then, someone suggested trying it in Irish. So, after asking Deborah how to say sit in Irish, we tried, and to our pleasant surprise it worked. I guess it did make sense since we were in the gealtacht, which is just the world for the areas of Ireland that predominantly speak Irish. It's basically western Ireland, especially near the coastal regions, and West Cork where we were.

Deborah also got cupcakes for everyone who's birthday it was that weekend. I was incredibly excited because they were from this really really really good cupcake place in town that I had gone to on my actually birthday as well. It's kind of like the Irish version of Crumbs only the cupcakes aren't gargantuan in size. I don't know how wide-spread Crumbs is, but for those who have not been introduced to the wonder that is Crumbs, they're cupcake bakeries throughout NYC that serves really cool flavors of cupcakes that are so big, they're a meal unto themselves.

When we finally had to leave, we all felt bad for leaving our beloved Blackie behind, but as we were getting into the bus, another family was rolling up to go hiking. We figured she would still have some company and could tag along with them instead.

We then were on our way to Bantry, which is a cute little port town about 30 mins away. We walked around for a bit, went into a bookshop, ate some really good veg soup, walked around some more, and then headed home. So it was basically like most of the times we've visited other small port towns. They're fun to people watch and walk around and are definitely a good time killer if you ever need one.

On the bus ride home our driver informed us he would take the scenic route and could tell us some cool things about the towns we passed. It ended up being mostly for naught though, as all but 2 or 3 of us slept the entire way back. I woke up maybe for the last half hour and he was still going on. He had some pretty cool things to say though, passing the hometown of Henry Ford's father, a town where Jeff Bridges has a house, and other stuff most people would never really know about.

It was a good trip, and one I definitely wouldn't have known about or even considered going on if it hadn't been an API event. At least now if someone asks what's at Guagane Barra, I'll be able to tell them.