Walking Off Donuts

Tuesday, March 24 was our last day together in Portland. On Wednesday, Paul returned to Pittsburgh while I went on to attend the ACRL Conference. We wanted to get some more hiking in, so we took the advice of Nico again and explored the area of 21st and 23rd street in Portland's northwest quadrant before heading to the nearby park. We managed to snag our first (and only) Blue Star Donut: blueberry filling with a peanut butter powder coating. Mmm:

To work off that donut, we walked for a few hours in Forest Park and enjoyed the lush greenery while it alternated between rain and sun:

 

Forest Park is impressively large. We wandered along the Wildwood Trail which "meanders for 30.2 breathtaking miles" according to the Forest Park Conservancy website. It was lovely and wonderfully relaxing - just the way a vacation should be.

Giant's Causeway

To see Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, we took trains back to Dublin and then north to Portrush.  The trains in Ireland radiate out from Dublin, so you have to go back through Dublin to go northward.  There are buses but they take just as long as the trains and would have cost us money.  The trains were covered by our Eurail pass.

Portrush is a popular beach getaway town, so we spent a little time on the beach our first evening:

We also saw this huge cruise ship with sails - pretty crazy!

The next day, we went to Giant's Causeway.  The hexagonal rocks are neat!

It was hard to get pictures without other tourists - there were many:

After some time at this very touristy area, we started walking along a path along the edge of the cliff... and just kept going.  We walked 4.8 miles to the next bus stop, realized the next bus wasn't for an hour, and walked the 4.8 miles back.  It was a beautiful walk:

Paul claimed the cliff (I think he's really gotten confused about Carcassonne)

We brought a small picnic lunch and ate it while enjoying the beautiful view:

We were walking along farmland, and these cows were nice enough to pose for a picture:

 The sky cleared up a bit when we were just about finished with our walk:

I continued to try to conquer my fear of heights by standing far out on a promontory:

Okay, okay, to get out to the last little bit (which isn't actually represented in this photo), I had to put my hands on either side of my eyes like blinders for a horse.  But I made it, dangit!

And because I can't help myself, just one more photo (we took a bazillion, it's so hard to choose!)

And finally, on our way back to Portrush, we stopped by the very picturesque Dunluce castle:

Killarney and the Ring of Kerry

Ireland is beautiful.  I think Paul and I both have questioned whether book-ending our trip with Ireland was wise.  It was the cheapest round-trip flight but we ended up flying between Ireland and mainland Europe both times.  However, it has been the perfect way to end this trip, and we are both very glad we included it.

We flew from Amsterdam to Dublin, stayed the night in a hostel, and headed out to Killarney via train to visit the Killarney National Park and tour the Ring of Kerry.  It's obvious that Ireland is really best done by car, since so many sites are inaccessible or inconvenient by public transportation.  However, we wanted to use our rail pass and didn't want to drive.

Our first night, we wandered around Killarney National Park and saw some amazing views:

The second day, we took the Ring of Kerry bus tour.  Not my favorite way to see an area, but our only option without a car.  The first stop was a bog village for an extra fee, so we opted not to participate.  It didn't look very interesting.  Then, we stopped to take some pictures here:

We also stopped at a sheep-herding demonstration.  We both weren't super-excited about it, but it ended up being really neat.  There were three dogs who all knew the same commands but had different signals for them.  There was a full set of whistles and a full-set of spoken commands for each dog.  These included left, right, forward, back, and stop, I think.  A dog's hearing is incredible!  The shepherd spoke pretty quietly, and the dogs could hear him way up the hill.  Here's a movie of the dogs in action [visit the blog website to see the movie]:

More views:

Ireland makes up for its (usually) drab weather with colorful buildings.

Unfortunately, scenery photos with mountains in the distance just don't turn out well, so most of our other photos of the Ring of Kerry aren't super-exciting.

After the tour, we rented bikes and toured more of Killarney National Park.  We saw some deer:

And took more pretty photos:

Ross Castle

Munich, Beer, and Liz

[Note: This post contains videos.  For those following along by email, please visit the blog website.]

On Saturday, Kate and I went to Munich to meet up with our high school friend Liz. We had some time to waste before Liz arrived, so we decided to walk the mile and a half to our hotel. We were glad we did when we stopped for lunch at an outdoor fried seafood place. The system was great. There were a bunch of food and beer stalls. Each plate of food had an additional two Euro deposit for the dishware. Once we were finished eating, we returned the plate to get our deposit back. Benefits:

• People cleaned up after themselves
• Instead of using (and throwing away!) disposable plates, we got to use normal dishware.
• We could mix and match our meal from multiple stalls.

After a short train delay, Liz arrived. We had a yummy dinner. (Seeing a pattern? Don't worry. We walked around a bunch in between.)

The Englischer Garten (English Garden) is an old, huge, and famous green space in Munich. We spent quite a bit of time walking there, and Liz went for a run there one morning. There's a high-flow river loved by surfers. It's apparently against the rules to surf there, but we saw them there early in the morning, all day, and well into the night.

No tourist visit is complete without seeing the glockenspiel. The human-sized figures dance twice a day.

Photo by Liz

We took a long walk all the way to Nymphenburg. This former palace is open the public. Liz went inside. Kate and I decided we'd seen enough fancy old European buildings (that charge an entrance fee).

Photo by Liz

We were tired and hungry. We headed for the train that would take us back to town and along the way found Hirschgarten. This was a highlight of the trip. We had sausage, beer, and fries in in a beautiful park. The weather was perfect. It was clean and peaceful. I had a hard time imagining serving beer outside in the USA (in 1 liter mugs!) without the result being a huge mess and very loud.

We took a stroll around the park and decided we loved it so much that we'd go back and get a second round of food (and beer)!

Each night the Streetlife festival was going on. A two mile stretch of road was closed and lined with live music, food, and various organizations. The first night it was cold and rainy, but the second was perfect. We walked most of the distance twice.

Photo by Liz

In fact, we walked so much that we significantly beat our previous record number of steps in one day (27 thousand) with a 40 thousand step day.

Also, the Munich train station has a lego vending machine. We thought that was pretty cool.