Irish Cob, Dingle Harbor, and One Hundred Thousand Welcomes

Most of our entire last day in Dingle was occupied with riding something.  First we met for a brief but interesting meet with the craftsman for Dingle Crystal.  Sean Daley was formerly a Waterford Crystal employee, before the layoffs in the nineties, when he moved to Dingle and started his own business.  He now has other craftsmen in Scotland I think or Turkey, who blow his glass, and he does all the carving and things from his workshop in Dingle.  He is a really cool guy, with tattoos and piercings and rings, and I think someone said that the patch on his jacket was for a biker gang.  He said that business is booming, and part of that is the increased popularity of Irish whiskey, and so he has been making special whiskey tasting glasses that are extremely popular.  In the scheme of spillover positive effects, the better business for Jameson is probably helping him out immensely.  I didn't get a chance to go in his shop, and I'm not sure that anyone in my house would really want any crystal anyway, but maybe one day when I'm super rich I'll get some.  If you get Dingle Crystal over Waterford, you'll get a product certainly made in Ireland.  So that's cool.

From there, we headed out to Long's farm for some horse riding.  We had a couple more experienced riders, but I was certainly the most familiar with English style.  It made me feel very confident, and after the years I spent working at camp (and hearing the horse related horror stories), and having a fear of horses, I've come back around to my former confidence.  I used to ride competitively in jumps and dressage, after all.  Five of the boys were going golfing, so that left 21 of us to go riding, so we split into two groups.  I was in the first group.  While we were riding, Gabriel took the boys to the golf course, and the other half of the group to the beach while we were riding.

We ambled down the road to the beach, attempted a trot on the beach, but the horses wanted to break free of the line and run in a herd, so we walked some more.  We got behind the dunes and did a little more trotting.  I didn't have any hands with which to take pictures, and besides, my horse Larry required quite a bit of babying to stay focused.  He was the largest horse, and Irish Cob or Gypsy horse, and I was quite honored to have him.  I always get the biggest horse when I go on these kinds of rides.  You wouldn't be much interested in my pictures from the beach ride, because we walked slowly and it was a typical beach ride, and I have pictures of this same beach from our Slea Head tour on Monday anyway.

We moseyed back to the farm, and just as it was looking like we would have a fairly uneventful pony ride, the male guide asked if any of us wanted to go for a gallop.  I most definitely did want to go for a gallop.  Five of us followed him to a pasture, and took a good long gallop uphill.  It was a very good finish to the ride, and I was glad to get to go.  The farm area was grassy and beautiful, and on the walk back, we saw a mare and her two day old colt.  It was really exciting to get back on a horse, and I definitely feel that English riding is my favorite.  You get the sensation that you are controlling a beast when riding English, while Western trained horses have too much independence.  A Western horse is at least as smart as you are.  I'm sure English horses are smart as well, but they are a contained force of nature.  You feel like the human when you are riding English.  I don't know, I like it a lot.  I'll have to see if Andrea Schroeder still needs horses to be exercised, because it would be good for me to ride again.

After riding, the other half of the group got their turn.  Tanner, who is tallest, also rode Larry, and he looked like he was riding a pony.  It was honestly pretty cute.  I did what I always do, which is act like an expert now that I've done something once, so I told him how to hold the reins and kick and post and all that sort of thing.  Admittedly, I have prior experience doing those things, but it was kind of silly that I was speaking so confidently.  I haven't done it in years.

Our first group of riders were primarily girls, so we took off to look at the little foal and it's mother.  There was also a tiny squat pony that wanted some of our attention.  I have plenty of pictures of its spindly legs, and I discovered that mares have two teats in the back of their bellies.  You learn something new every day!  After much attempting to tease the foal away from it's mother, we proceeded down the driveway to the main road, where Gabriel would meet us with the bus.  There was a little cafe on the main road, and we went there for coffee and scones.  The shop was cute, and had a pottery section as well, and a bought a welcome sign that says "One Hundred Thousand Welcomes" but in Irish.  I can't remember how to spell it.  I also bought Liz a coffee mug that says "The Boss", which I think will suit her well.

We sat on the street corner and waited for our bus to arrive, and happily, Gabriel appeared almost immediately.  He is a fantastic driver, and knows Leta and the program very well, so he does a really good job of doing the most efficient thing for our group.  He calls us his little chickens ("Heeeeelllooooo, my little chickeeeeens!  No, shlepping, on, da bus!  Wakey wakey at the zoooooo!"  Gabriel is hilarious.  I am trying to record him talking so that you can hear how wonderful his voice is, and I can remember all of his mannerisms.).

He took us back to town, and Dale was spearheading the bike tour of Dingle.  After getting our head count estimate, a few of us baled off the bus in town, and ended up at The Diner for lunch, which is silly because we were also going to The Diner for dinner that night with Leta.  The people who own the place were really nice, and knew us quite well by the end of the day.  After lunch, I took my library book back to the library, and headed back to the B&B to grab my laundry.  This became an exercise in unnecessary walking, as I ended up walking all my dirty laundry down the streets of Dingle to find the launderette, only to find out that a giant tour (I smell Rick Steves on this one) had dropped off their laundry that day.  Thus, I would be unable to get my laundry before I left in the morning.  So, I toted my bag of socks and underwear and horse-y jeans back to the B&B and met the group for bike riding.

We had fewer people than we expected, which, honestly, was to be expected.  We lost two more along the way, who went to Dingle Crystal to buy a gift for Leta instead of bike riding.  We were all fitted with bikes at this cute shop, and the guy was very nice.  He had enough girly bikes for all of the girls, but the amusing thing was that Kelly wanted a boy bike, and Dale ended up riding a girly bike.  But he can't be fazed, so he was unashamed.  After rolling around a bit and all of us considering the factuality of the phrase "It's like riding a bike...", we began our trek.  Riding through Dingle was pleasant and uneventful, if very beautiful.  It was a gorgeous sweetlight time of night.  We rode on the correct (wrong) side of the road, and even made it through the roundabout ok.

There was some minor confusion over the directions, but after Dale made friends with yet another Irish person, we found the route to the tower that we were supposed to be visiting.  This route involved several areas of incline, and several areas of imperceptible incline, which is, in my opinion, the worst kind of incline because you can never coast.  My legs were burning, but I tried to be a good sport, and I was blessedly not the last person to pull up to the tower trail.  What was unclear from the paper map we had been given was the topography of the terrain.  Upon arrival, it became clear that the "trail" to the tower on top of the hill was a 15% grade climb over the heather and grass of some poor man's sheep fields.  Indeed, we had to jump fences and avoid being rammed by Scottish blackface sheep to get to our destination.

Just as we were attempting to cross the grass horizontally toward what looked like a trail (but ended up being another of those infernal stone fences), the farmer appeared on his quad.  Toto especially became convinced that we would be shot by this farmer.  Dale, always the hero, ran back to meet him, and made an instant friend.  He directed us further up the hill along the trail, and told us how to open his gates (and asked that we please don't let the sheep comingle.).  This was all fine and good, for now we had a designated path by which to continue.  However, my legs had decided that we would go no further, and Toto was feeling the same way.  I don't know how athletic he is, or once was in Cambodia, so I can't confirm whether he was once athletic. 

But I was once athletic.  I was once very fit, and even a year or two ago I would have been to the top of the hill in a heartbeat.  Luckily Toto didn't want to continue either, so we could both sit on a rock and try not to startle the sheep, but I am thoroughly ashamed of my performance.  If you were proud of me for putting my big butt on a bicycle seat, you can stop being proud now, it's ok.  The embarrassing part is that I have a body that still looks fairly fit, but is apparently this close to useless.  The desire to start horse riding again, and to get fit in general, is much stronger now.  I am very sad that I was too weak to make it to the top of that stupid hill.

Toto and I got sick of sitting on the hill, and made our way back down.  The tire tracks from the quad left giant ruts in the road, and we nearly broke our ankles.  It would have been twice as embarrassing to break an ankle while walking back down like a wimp.  We asked the farmer for a bit of water, and we drank from his hose.  He had two charming Border Collies, and they were both very playful and soft.  Then we got going on our bikes, and made our way home at a slower pace.

Thankfully the route was mostly downhill on the way back.  I honestly don't know if I would have made it back if there was no coasting.  Sadly, several of the other girls in the group caught up with us on our bikes as we were coming into Dingle.

Oh, oh the shame.

We turned in our bikes, and made it to The Diner with everyone else just on time.  It seemed like a milkshake kind of day, so nearly everyone got a milkshake.  It has been horrendously hot our entire time in Ireland, and it was around 75 degrees out while we were horsebackriding and biking.  Milkshake was totally perfect.  Mine was a Cadbury milkshake, which tasted a lot like cake batter ice cream at Cold Stone.  It was made for me by one of the owners' sons, and delivered by the other, younger one who had a cast because he broke his arm falling off his bike.  It was very cute to see both the boys helping out at the family restaurant.

After dinner, we headed back to the B&B, and I took a luxurious bath in the giant bathtub while listening to opera music on the tv music station.  Then I packed up my things and got ready to leave very early in the morning.