On our second night in Cork we went out for dinner with our French hostel-mate, Steve and had awesome conversation with him. We then joined two of his friends (both French girls) at the same pub we'd gone to the previous night. One of them, Alicia, didn't speak a word of English, but the other girl did and we had a great convo. I tried my first Irish car bomb (you drop a shot of Bailey's into a Guinness and chug), and found my new favorite cider, a Swedish kind c...

Just so you know, I'm using the website pictures, and so they are unrelated for the most part to my actual entries. My pictures won't be up until I get to Austria, which is Monday. Yesterday morning we took an early bus to Cork, making friends with some people we had to sit with. I played travel-battleship with the kid I sat next to, but I think 4 loud Americans was a little much for him that early in the morning. Once we found our guys and checked into the h...

Yesterday after updating our journal we hopped on the bus for our longest trek - a five hour trip to get us down to Killarney. We saw some unbelieveable countryside, so beautiful that I took almost a whole roll of film of pictures of our drive. The bus even went on one of those huge ferry's to cross the Shannon River, and we passed through Tralee to catch the bus the rest of the way. We stayed at Neptune's hostel, our first hostel that's in the middle of all the ...

Yesterday morning we meet Ronin (one of our two Galway friends) in Eyre Square for breakfast and goodbyes. Then we took a bus to Doolin, which brought us through the Burren and Lisdoonvarna - both beautiful towns. Once we arrived and checked into our hostel in Doolin, Karley and I tried to walk the 4 miles back to Lisdoonvarna (the location of the nearest pharmacy) and made it just in time to catch our bus out to the Cliffs of Moher (and so really just took a lon...

Today we took a bus up to Knock for the feast of Our Lady. For the morning the four of us wandered around the shrine on our own (it's much more out in the country with priests and nuns everywhere), then met up for noon Mass. They had a separate building where confessions were heard all day long, and the priest said some things that really pierced my heart, things he somehow knew I needed to hear. The coolest part, though, was that at Mass we realized there were o...