Our Journey in the Wicklow Mountains

The first trip of the semester with the InterCultural Society from my school was a hike in the Wicklow National Park. The Society organized a bus to take roughly 50 students up for the hike. This time of year there is some snow and ice up in the mountains so some paths were fairly icy, but luckily few actually slipped! Near the start of the trail is an old graveyard that had an old church as well as one of the many round towers found across Ireland. There was the ruins of a Cathedral that were stunning. Once we walked up to the Upper Lake and admired the views for a few minutes we split off into two groups - the group that wanted to go hike more forest and the group that wanted to walk to the ruins of the miners village. I decided to go to the Miners Village since that seemed the most interesting. It was definitely worth the walk. The whole thing to and from the bus to the Miners Village was roughly 9km but there was so much to see you don't even notice. When we were at the Miners Village we ate our lunches in one of the ruins since you could walk around and through them. When we returned from our hike we went to the pub to wait for the other group to return. Once they returned we made our way back to school.

That evening was the rugby match between Ireland and England. My host family had invited me to dinner that evening and we all went to a local pub to watch the match. Ireland lost unfortunately but it was lots of fun, the pub was completely packed and was a similar atmosphere to any sports bar during the playoffs when the local team is playing. Following the match we returned to the house where Jason served an amazing dinner. It was a great day full with wonderful people, good food and spectacular views.

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