"Climb a mountain today" -- Hah! Today was the day Tamara got up feeling none-too-well and I woke up feeling very tired. So today the fast walkers (Maggie and Jill) went up the mountain. Stacy went into Killarney, and Tamara and I recuperated by walking around Killorglin, following the written tour by Sean O'Sullivan, or, as he spells his name, "Sean O'Suilleabhain".

[Good thing we didn't go, as the mountain they climbed had really narrow paths along steep dropoffs, tons of midges (evil little biting bugs), and lots of boggy bits.]

As noticed earlier in this travelogue, Killorglin comes from the Gaelic for "church over the glen". Cill means either "church" or "hermit's cell", depending on who you talk to. Catherine, our guide, says that the origin part comes from the Gaelic version of Lawrence. Hence, Killorglin probably means "the hermitage of a guy named Larry".

It was a quiet day. We walked around Killorglin, which isn't too hard to do. For as much as I make of the town, it is only about two blocks wide by three blocks long. Today we saw King Puck.

King Puck is a puck goat (or a wild mountain goat), that is captured around early August and is crowned King of the Puck Fair for the three festival days of August 10th, 11th, and 12th. The fair's origins are unknown. Some believe it came when the town was warned of an impending attack from Cromwellians by spying a puck goat herd his flock rather rapidly across a field. However, it probably goes back to a pagan religious festival.

I'm not certain who the Cromwellians are, he typed, shocking the UK and other European readers. All I really know about them is they came over from Great Britain and blew up a lot of Irish castles and towns.

Anyway, back to King Puck. They put this goat up on a ten-meter high platform for three days (for our American readers, that's a thirty-foot platform. It's still three days.) and people come all over County Kerry to get drunk. Not that they can't do so at home, it's just now they have an excuse. At the end of the three days, they let the goat go.

So there's this bronze statue of a goat wearing a crown just across the bridge at the entrance of town. They just opened it up at the beginning of the month. Like tourists, we took several pictures of the bronze goat. There's one of me standing by the goat. There's one of the goat itself. There's one of the goat and the entrance to the bridge. There's me on the goat. Theres me standing on the goat. There's me getting pulled off the goat by a local police officer. You do things like this when you're on vacation.

For dinner, we went to Kate Kearney's Cottage. Kate was a woman who distilled her own moonshine way back when, and gave a glass to people going through the Gap of Dunloe. The story they tell about her is she died in childbirth at the age of one hundred and two. They tell lots of stories in Ireland.

Tomorrow, we fly home from Shannon airport. I'll probably freak on the way to the airport and think we're going to be late for the flight. I'm like that. If it were up to me, we'd just get off the plane and stay in the airport for eleven days, looking out the windows of the coffee shop. "Look honey: Ireland. Isn't it neat?" I'd say. "Don't stray too far from our departure gate."

So we'll see how it goes.

-FP