Freakishly Happy

Where we last left off, we had just spent the morning talking to second Maura.  Shortly after, as you can guess, we stopped in to an internet cafe, wrote up a blog, and posted pictures.  Today was the day for the Dingle peninsula, one of the peninsulas just north of the Kerry peninsula.  After talking a while to pack up, shower, rest, talk to Maura and a couple of hours in the internet cafe we didn't have a whole lot of time left.  Such is the ways of vacationing (as opposed to traveling).  Brings me back to the days we visited Prague when we had literally half-day bed-ins then went out and explored the town during the evening.  Sometimes you just have to take that time you need to just relax and enjoy being with each other.  Luckily, the dingle peninsula is one of the smaller ones, which gave us plenty of time to explore.

We spent the day driving through small villages reminiscent of Vermont, almost everything independently and locally owned, and everyone was friendly and inviting.  In amazing contrast to Vermont, there are no property taxes in Ireland.  This is incredible in that the rich cannot move in, make the taxes go up, and force the poor out of an area.  Rather, in Ireland, you own your land forever, cost free.  Heavy restrictions on building also keep the countryside from flooding with houses.  Whether it is a way to preserve the nation’s identity, keep the rich out, or protect the way of life of the poor, it sustains these independent villages.

Between the villages were green-hill covered stone walled fields set against the deep blue of the ocean.  It was a gorgeous drive, especially relaxing while all of the tourists were driving the Kerry peninsula.  The drive takes you on a path up and over a mountain, called Connor’s Pass.  This particular path also has a pull off car park where you can get out and look over the glorious scenery below.  There were a couple of people up the other side of the road, up against the mountain.  In an effort to be able to see more of the landscape below, we began to climb up with them.  By climb, I don’t mean mountain climbing, but rather slightly steeper than stair climbing with a higher step.

As we climbed, there started to appear a gap where the mountainside seemed to level off, curious is to what this might be, we kept going.  Eventually, we were awestruck by a beautiful lake providing the source for the waterfall.  Good thing I told Joni not to drink from the ‘mountain spring’ as we don’t know the source.  We were on top of the world, and not just any world, but the green limestone covered mountainside of Ireland, by a pristine calming lake, protected by a circular shaped mountainside.

At once, we knew that we couldn’t just keep driving, but had to stop and camp.  What a place to spend the evening!  We climbed around the rock there and tried to find a site that was protected from the wind, the tourists, and the possibility of water running down the mountainside in the event of rain.  A lot of the grass was a marsh where a wrong step could send your entire foot into cold mud.  Nevertheless, we found a spot, partially sloped (15 declination) that would suit our needs.  We were excited!  Our camping adventure, worthy of forcing Juli to bring us our tent all the way from Vermont and us trekking it back from Italy; A night worthy of christening our previously unused tent.

We headed back to the last village with the grocery store and picked up a bag of kindling, some potatoes, butter, an onion, and some tin foil.  Then we headed back to the car park to pack our bags.  We were a little bit worried of leaving our brand-new rental car by the side of the road abandoned for the evening.  Nevertheless, we grabbed our laptops and camping gear and shoved everything else in the back behind the rear seats.  It took a while to climb the mountainside with our gear, but not long to set up the tent.  We then started to build a small fire by stripping the kindling with a knife and doing a lot of blowing.  Joni wrapped up several potatoes in tin foil independently while I built the fire and we started these cooking.  We then cut up the rest of the potatoes and onion; threw in a bunch of butter and wrapped the whole bundle in more foil.  We threw this on the fire, rotated it a couple of times and headed back to view the sunset.

Now, you should understand something about Joni and campfire food.  Joni doesn’t have a good track record.  To her defense, she only cooked over a campfire for me once before.  When we first met, she tried to make something similar while we camped around New England.  However, the tinfoil was punctured and it didn’t cook long enough, and was never rotated; so half of the potatoes were raw-inedible, half were burned inedible and the little bit that was edible contained a quite a bit of sand.  So she tried extra hard to make up for that experience, and the results paid off.  We had the most delicious campfire food I have ever eaten.  We sliced the little potatoes part way through and stashed in some butter and garlic cream cheese.  Once we were through those, we put the rest of the cream cheese in the big package and stirred.  Everything was deliciously well cooked with the perfect consistency.  Well done!

After we were done cooking and eating, it was starting to get cold and darker so we headed inside the tent.  We watched as the fog came down from the tips of the mountains so that more and more of the mountain was removed from view.  This made us realize that climbing down to the car was going to be difficult to near impossible until morning.  We snuggled up and went to bed.  The ground was a big lumpy in spots, but I did ok.  Unfortunately, Joni had some trouble as her sleeping bag kept sliding down the declination, but I will let her tell you about that, perhaps in a rant.  It got cold during the evening, but we just tucked ourselves into our sleeping bags and faired well. 

It took us a while to get going in the morning.  It took about an hour to pack up camp and head down the mountainside.  To our relief the car was still there and untouched.  There were some tourists that saw us come down but they didn’t’ seem to react to us at all.  Once all the stuff was in the car and we had eaten a little bit of snacks, we were ready to go.

Friends from Doolin