Sometimes you own the mountain; sometimes the mountain owns you. We climbed Mangerton Mountain today in beautiful weather. Mangerton is known as The Deceiver -- you can climb and think you're almost at the summit then discover that there's yet another stretch to go. This happens about five times in the ascent.

Mangerton Mountain is about 2700 feet tall. Our guide, who looks like Tamara's grandmother, showed us the route the night before. "The first part is a steep ascent," she said, "but the second part is rather level." What she didn't say is the first part is the first seven-eighths of the climb. The very little last bit was rather level, but by then you're dead so you don't care that much.

I had a look at a contour map and saw that yes, it did look steep for the first few hundred feet. That morning I realized that we're in Europe, so that map probably was in meters. So we walked up, without end. I tried to bribe the driver to take us at least halfway up the mountain, but the others would have no part of that.

So Tamara and I staggered along after the others who went prancing and jumping from rock to rock, bleating at us so we'd hurry up. It's a good thing Ireland is very scenic as we decided to stop several times to take pictures (wink, wink). After taking fifty-seven pictures of the same scrub brush and drinking seven gallons of water, we waddled upslope.

Several miles later, we reached The Devil's Punchbowl, so named because of something our guide said in the gale-force winds we couldn't make out. They tell a story about the bottomless lake that is the Punchbowl. It seems that a young Irish lad took it in his head to go and dive to the bottom of the Punchbowl just to see how deep it really is. So in he went and he didn't come back and he didn't come back and one day, a week later, they received a telegram from Australia asking to mail his belongings over. Anyway, they tell that story.

I made it to The Devil's Punchbowl, which is about five miles above sea level, six miles above where we left the vehicle when our guide says we're to climb this sheer rock face up to the summit trail, where the lip of the mountain comes to a sharp point that you have to balance on as you walk about a mile around the top while hurricane-level winds try to knock you over. "No thanks," I said, but my wife, who is insane, decided to go. So there I sat, along a lakeshore in the stratosphere while my wife and four other crazy people decided to go do the summit trail (which is probably called "The Devil's Balance Beam" or some such nonsense). I watched as I could make out four dots appear on the upper ledge, but no fifth dot in the rear so I hoped that the wife didn't fall off or anything. She had the camera. But luck was with us that day as, far behind the lead four dots, was a little dot that was my wife, still alive.

We regrouped and headed downhill, where we could see the van awaiting us and we tumbled and rolled downhill (downmountain?) for about two hours with the van getting no closer. In the third hour of descent, we finally arrived and went back to the B&B to apply heating pads to our legs and fix up blisters and take long hot showers and generally try not to injure ourselves further by doing anything strenuous, such as moving.

The Irish call this "walking".

The Irish accent is nowhere as thick as it is in movies or on television. I feel a little bit cheated.

-FP