September 16th, continued...

Sophie, Elle and I continued to walk. I was falling behind and looking at every little thing that caught my attention. This is fairly typical of me when I walk - if I'm not running late somewhere, chances are I'm not moving very quickly because I'm stopping to examine whatever has caught my attention. Anyways, I guess I fell into an unconscious pattern because I started humming and then found myself singing - at which point Elle turned around to ask if I was in fact singing. She seemed rather bemused, but I always sing when I walk - particularly if I'm alone. Walking around campus in Bloomington or to temple at home, I'm almost always found with my iPod on, singing along. Like talking with my hands, it's something I don't really notice when I'm doing it.

Eventually, our little train ended up by the shore. We found a pseudo staircase to take us down to the beach and descended. Sophie waded into the water, since she was wearing her rainboots. I hung back. The ocean and I, well, we're not exactly best buddies. I think it's a combination of being knocked over by waves too many times as a child and unpleasant memories of being covered in sand after a day at the beach. I was perfectly content to just take pictures of Sophie playing in the little waves and Elle looking for seashells. It was a beautiful beach: all rocks, but smooth, not jagged like back home, just shelves of limestone, I think. The water was clear and genuinely blue, the sun was shining, and I don't think any of us could quite believe that we were in Ireland, land of rain and clouds.

After hanging out there for a while, we continued to meander on the coast, drawing ever closer to the illusive windmills. We clambered over rocks and boulders for what felt like forever - though we ALL agreed that we'd rather climb over rocks than have to avoid the rather giant piles of manure we'd dealt with on the paths earlier that day. Once we reached the windmills, we all agreed that we wanted to head back. We'd walked all day and were just wiped out. The problem was, since we were no longer on a path, we didn't have an obvious route to get back to town. The windmills were in a pasture of their own, but we were reluctant to walk through it, since we weren't sure how safe that would be. We just had to keep on walking 'til we found a path.

About 15 minutes later, we saw a man playing with his dog - and the road where he'd parked his car! Surely the road the car had taken would get us back to a place we'd recognize enough to find our way home. We set off. After a while, we heard voices behind us. Sound on the island travels really far - if a dog barked, we had no way of knowing if it was the dog down the street or clear across the island. There was just no noise - too few cars to produce much sound pollution and nothing else that would. Ever the sucker and too curious for my own good, I turned around. Two girls were behind us, waving. Naturally, I couldn't tell who they were, but Elle could. The girls were from our class, but they weren't exactly our favorite people. It would have been rude to keep walking and ignore them, so we stopped and waited for them to catch up with us. As our enlarged group continued to walk, they told us about their experience so far and we told them how much we were enjoying ourselves - how Moira was so sweet and the house was lovely, etc.

Eventually, we came to a fork in the road. A hill stood between us and a clear view of the rest of the island, so we didn't know which way to go. My contribution to the decision making consisted solely of a rather lame allusion along the lines of, two roads diverged, and I took the one less traveled. Unfortunately, as Sophie said, neither looked particularly well-traveled. After all, it's not like there's a lot of traffic there! Sophie wanted to go the smaller pathway and the other girls wanted to go on the paved road. I was feeling pretty well-oriented and thought that the paved road would take us closer to where we wanted to be - and I was tired enough by then to just want to get back and take a little nap before dinner - but I didn't like the idea of Sophie going on the other way alone. Clearly Minnesinger trips had instilled in me the value of traveling with a buddy. She insisted she'd be fine, though, and told me I should go the other way, if I wanted, so I gave her my cell phone to have so that she could call Elle when she got back or if she needed to reach us or anything and then we split up.

We walked for maybe another 20 minutes before coming to the main road, at which point Elle and I left the other two girls to make their way to the house they were staying at while we went back to Moira's. Once back, I made use of the slightly sketchy shower downstairs and promptly pulled on pjs and fell asleep after only reading a few pages of Tarry Flynn.

Dinner that night was roast lamb with boiled potatoes and steamed carrots and soup, plus the ever-present brown bread, butter and jam. Knowing what I knew about the chickens, I couldn't help but think about the sheep we'd seen earlier, but oddly enough, this didn't disturb me as much as I thought it would. The sheep I had seen were outdoors in their pastures, soaking in the sunshine and generally living a pretty good life. It seemed to me that it was a more honorable way to eat meat than simply to buy it at the supermarket, without giving a thought to how it got there or where it came from.

After dinner, we all departed for the pub. Our last night on the island, we were determined to go out and meet locals - but that just didn't happen. Instead, our class showed up in bits and pieces and mixed and mingled with each other, to the consternation of everyone else at the pub who was trying to watch the soccer game on tv. Oh well. I think we all had a good time - we played random drinking games and card games and eventually we all went home and fell asleep. After walking all day, I don't think there was a single one of us who wasn't exhausted.

The next morning, there seemed to be a feeling of some urgency among the seven of us in our house. We had to see everything - we were leaving that afternoon, so we were running out of time. Straightaway after breakfast, we headed over to the knitwear factory, but the shop wasn't closed. Inis Meaín, we had heard, was famous for it's woven products and we all wanted a souvenir. Since it wouldn't open for several hours, we decided to go see the fort. The other four girls had been told at the general store that the only way to get there was to go through the pastures so over the fence we went.

When we got to the fort, we encountered a small problem. We couldn't see anyway in, besides the rather scary looking almost-staircase. We tried walking around the fort, but we couldn't get all the way around before the path dropped off. Up the staircase appeared to be the only way in from where we were. We went up carefully one by one. At the top of the stairs, we had to climb a small wall to get to the top of the fort. It wasn't exactly safe (not exactly dangerous either, don't worry, anyone), but we didn't have any problems and we did manage to get in the fort, which was all that really mattered to us at the time. Once inside, we could see the actual entrance on the opposite side of the fort. We just sat around in the sun (the weather was beautiful that day) and explored the fort (which looked more like an amphitheater than anything else). When we decided to head back, we went out the real exit in the company of an older Irish gentleman who had arrived at the fort some time after us. He too was visiting Inis Meaín for the first time. We wandered back to Moira's.

At that point, the 7 of us split back up again, This time, Sophie stayed at the house to hang out, Elle, Margaret and I went back to the factory, and the other three girls wandered off. We got there a few minutes too early, but shortly afterwards, a woman arrived and opened the shop. Everything there was beautiful, but very expensive (if you want to look for yourselves, this is their website: http://www.inismeain.ie/en/knitting/products.html ). Everything was soft and warm. The fabric colors were all rich and earthy. We wandered around, finally noticing three boxes on the floor. The boxes contained the mistakes: articles of clothing that were in some way defective. I have enough shoppers in my family to know what that means - discounts. Sure enough, I found two hats that were perfectly fine for my purposes, one of which I bought (green) and the other, Margaret bought (grey). A bargain to be proud of: €5 instead of €25!

We got back in time for lunch. Egg salad, jam and butter, brown bread and white bread, leftover chicken... I don't even remember all that was on the lunch table that day! Our last chocolate tea cake was carefully cut into seven pieces and eaten. We lingered over our last cup of tea. No one really wanted to leave - although i'm sure I wasn't alone in feeling that if we had stayed much longer, I would have gone stir crazy from lack of activities. We packed up our stuff and walked back to the pier, caught the ferry and got back on the bus. After dropping off some of the class, who had decided to spend the weekend in Galway, the bus continued, stopping only for a brief dinner in Dublin before finally dropping us off back in Cork late that night. I was tired, but glad to be home.