Day 11: Adventuring!

Gosh, it's getting hard to remember details 5 days later!

We woke up around 8:00 and went down to seated breakfast which I loved. I had Rice Crispies, awesome Irish milk, and, of course, tea!

Load up on the bus at 9 and make the short drive to Croagh Patrick, St. Patrick's pilgrimage site which is still massively popular. It was beautiful, reminded me of Colorado a lot, and took loads of pictures. I wish we had taken a group shot though. I really wished I had brought my hiking boots at this point.

We walked back down and took a look at the National Famine Memorial at the base before loading up again and heading out to Achill Island. It was chilly, but as soon as I stepped off the bus I was blindsided by the beauty of it and took tons and tons of pictures, but I wish I'd taken more with other people instead of just the landscape.

Last stop was a village abandoned in the famine. It was super eerie, at this point we were getting pretty wet but I didn't mind. This is how Ireland is meant to be! It was such a beautiful place and I was so grateful to be there. My favorite stop of the day was lunch; at this point we were all pretty wet and tired and it was bonding, we ate really good sandwiches and soup and bread and just sat for an hour and I drank a ton of water.

We started making our way back to Westport now. Foster and I were in the back row and the bus went over some bumpy road often which started out as fun, but one particularly large bumped knocked us so hard out of our seats that we hit our heads rather hard on the ceiling. We wore our seatbelts from then on and were very paranoid about bumps (it hurt a lot)!

We got back to Westport in the afternoon but we were all so tired and wet that we all went to our rooms. I took a short nap (I wish I had taken a bath) and ended up talking to Emily for nearly 2 hours about everything! At that point, we went back down to dinner (just as good as the night before!).

After dinner, we all went out to this huge, 3 story, beautifully designed bar and listened to some live music. We found Martin and he joined us for quite a bit. At 12 the band was done and the place was gearing up for late night dancing, so I went home to bed. Such comfy beds! I miss it there.