Ireland - Glendalough

In France they have a week and a half of vacation part of which is called La Toussaint (All Saints). So we took that opportunity to take a ferry to Ireland. We left from Cherbourg and took an 18 hour ferry ride to Rosslare, Ireland.

The idea was to drive north on the west coast toward Dublin, then to the west and down the west coast, then east along the south coast. This basically was a complete circle along the coasts (except the north coast which is the UK), starting and ending at Rosslare.

After waiting for about 30 minutes at the border patrol and listening to the agent talk to his friend's cousin about what she did for the weekend (not sure if that was really who he was talking to, but it sounded funny anyway) and watching a little Dukes of Hazzard we finally left to drive north.

The first stop was a little place called Glendalough (Gleann dá locha, literally meaning ‘Glen of the two lakes’) which is an early medieval monastic settlement founded in the 6th century by St Kevin, a hermit priest. The site had a nice welcome center which showed a 15 minute movie about the site. To summarize the site was basically ruins from the buildings along with a fully intact tower and a cemetary.

Then we hiked up past the first lake up to the second lake. In retrospect I wished we could have spent more time up at the lake because it was simply amazing. The wind comes down through the mountains to the lake at a crazy speed much like the winds that come down through the Columbia River gorge in the Northwest United States. You could literally lean into the wind and it would hold you up. This created huge waves the lake. I can imagine that this may have been what the Sea of Galilee is like (which is also a lake, though obviously much larger that this one).

Anyway, enough rambling. Here are the pictures...