This is me updating regularly*

Quite a bit has happened in this first month of my adventures. I'll just give you the highlights...

Part one: Ireland (already long, long, ago)
I met Connie in the Seattle airport, after staying up all night writing emails and wishing I had a garbage compactor to fit everything in my pack. Fast forward three airports, three busrides, and THREE DAYS later, and we finally arrived in Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland, our first (and only) planned stop, which was well worth the incredible hassle and stress it took to travel there. From here, we started walking. Our first day took us over pastoral, stone-walled hills, through lanes buttressed by high fuschia hedges (still in bloom), along gently curving sandy beaches, past ancient monastic beehive-shaped huts and postcard-perfect views of the Blasket islands. Thirteen miles later...we arrived at our B&B, absolutely thrilled (I promise, the thrill was somewhere under all that weary soreness). As far as I was concerned, everything else our walking tour would take us through would be icing on the cake.

The company we hired to organize the tour for us took care of everything from providing transport for our (35 pound) packs to trail notes (follow the low stone wall until you reach another stone wall, whereupon you turn left into a field...). Our first day in Dingle, we arranged with the company to organize a post-Dingle extension to the Burren in County Clare, and then transportation back to Dublin for our flight to London. Basically, this company took care of all the stressful planning and thinking bits, and we were allowed to wander freely to our next destination.

After a day-long trip to the Blasket Islands, we set off again for our next B and B, a further 9 miles away. So the days passed, with beach walks bleating sheep, sunburns and sugary tea. We were extremely lucky to only receive one morning of rain, the rest of the days being mostly sunny, making the several pounds of rain pants, jackets, umbrellas, long johns, hats, gloves, and emergency ponchos we brought seem happily superfluous. After another day in Dingle town, spent poking around their shops and eating a ridiculous amount of delicious vegetarian food, we set off for Doolin, County Clare, a few miles from the Cliffs of Moher. Bypassing the national matchmaking festival in Lisdoonvarna, we were dropped off right in front of our B and B, Riverfield House, which looked great...from the outside. To make a long story short, Riverfield was quite a disappointment, and we left the next morning for a private room in a hostel instead. Doolin was much the same: sounded great in theory, looked alright at first glance, but quickly disenchanting, no matter how many second chances we gave it. We did enjoy a nice long walk down to the Cliffs of Moher and leisurely teas in the only nice cafe in the entire town.

Soon we were on our way to Galway, which quickly rose in my estimation to my second favorite city (after Seattle, of course), where we enjoyed deeeeeelicious fresh baked scones and jam, among other unforgetable meals. The next day we were off again to our airport hotel in Dublin, where we would spend the night packing our extra bits into a new duffle bag which Connie graciously took back, in order to save my back. We said our tearful goodbyes in London the next morning, and she saw me off onto the Tube to find my hostel. Bye, Connie! I love you and miss you and wish we were still Dingle-ing together!

Part two: London

I'd been to London before, so I skipped the main sights and just went for the free ones...my first afternoon I lost myself in the Victoria and Albert museum, possibly the best museum in the world. One room has these huge plaster casts of famous destroyed buildings and monuments--giant cathedral walls stretching up 50 feet at least, tombs of forgotten knights and lords, Roman pillars so tall that they are displayed in three segments...

I stayed the first four nights in O'Callaghan's hostel, which was very expensive at £18/night, but still the best hostel I've ever stayed in. Maya came the next day and we proceeded to madly search for a WWOOF host, knowing that there was very little possibility of finding one on Friday that would let us come on Monday. Laura came the day after that, and it was a joyous reunion...but all too soon, she was away again. Laura, I can't believe you went to Africa!

Maya and I decided to leave O'Callaghan's when our booking ran out, as it was just too expensive. We found the cheapest hostel we could...which is something I'll never do again. As soon as we arrived at The 8, I knew we'd made a mistake. Not only was it an expensive 30 minute tube ride outside of city center, it was over a nightclub. After waiting for 45 minutes to be allowed to check in, we were shown to our room...our fly-infested, never-been-vacuumed, WTF-am-I-doing-here room. I'll skip the rest of the details and just say that we high-tailed it out of there the next morning, spending our last night in London down South in a far nicer district.

My favorite part of London: going to see Phantom of the Opera. Maya and I were so enthralled (and so downcast after The 8) that we went to see Les Miserables, too, even if I had already seen it.

But pretty soon, a mere £220 later, we were outta there! And as much as I enjoyed it, I was pretty excited to leave.

Part three: Tinker's Bubble

As our first WWOOF host, Tinker's Bubble was a bit of a shock. We knew when we arrived that we were going to a community attempting to be sustainable, but we didn't know that this meant no hot water or heat. We borrowed a pile of blankets, thankful that we'd brought along our sleep sheets, and crawled into our long johns, not to remove them for a week. When showing us around, Mike casually mentioned, "And this is the bathhouse...if you're here for a week or so you can have a bath..." Ah. A week of farmwork and sweating with no bath? OK. Good. (Just for you, Leanne--they had some pretty sweet composting toilets.)

Mike also took us on a tour of the village, Norton-sub-Hamdon, a picturesque hamlet of honey-colored stone cottages. He drove us to the top of Ham hill at sunset, pointing across the pink-glazed hills and fields to two mountains on the horizon that were Wales. Oh, and did he mention that Ham hill was not only an ancient stone quarry, but also a ruined Roman fort?

Work at Tinker's Bubble was mainly gardening, weeding, apple-picking, scything away fields of nettle, and occasionally milking Millie the cow or Ruby the goat. It wasn't difficult, yet still was very satisfying, as we were able to spend all day in the sun (still no rain!) eating the windfallen apples or large chunks of organic cheese or bread.

Fun fact: did you know that a marijuana plant the size of a small house is required to supply 5 people with twenty joints a day? Neither did we, until we sat down right next to it. No wonder they aren't certified organic.

Part four: West Lynch Stables

We left Tinker's Bubble after about 8 days for a new place in Somerset, near Minehead and Porlock in the midst of beautiful Exmoor national park. Guy and Mo's main project was restoring the Victorian water wheel they had searched for in order to provide all their own energy. Therefore, my main occupation was to muck out the bottom of the wheel pit, which had accumulated 150 years of gravel, bricks, compost, garbage, pottery, and rocks rocks rocks, all sitting in about half a foot of muddy water. After shoveling out a bucketful, the bucket had to be hauled up 20 feet to be dumped into giant bags which were later hauled away. Therefore, each pound of muck had to be lifted three times, and in four days, I participated in moving about eight tons of the stuff. If you listened closely, you could actually hear my muscles growing. Other projects at West Lynch included egg collecting and puppy-minding, weeding and wall repair.

Part five: Ireland (version 2.0)

I was quite sad to leave as I'd found a comfortable niche, with my own bed and hot showers, a lot of company from the three other WWOOFers staying there, and as much sarcasm as I could handle. However, I did leave last Thursday to do a few Servas visits in Northern Ireland, something I'd been hoping to do since I studied Irish history two years ago. At the moment, I'm sitting in my hostel in Derry, realizing that nothing is open in super-religious Northern Ireland on a Sunday morning, and therefor whiling away the hours writing to you lot. N.I. is much much poorer than the Republic (though far more expensive), and this is obvious in the grafitti and disregarded buildings. Most of the towns I've been through remind me of Spokane in their concrete buildings, empty streets, and lifeless, cookie-cutter suburbs. It's not a nice place to be, but it's good to see what happens to a place after hundreds of years of neighbor-vs-neighbor conflict and constant fear of violence at the hands of either British soldiers or IRA militia. I've had a fantastic opportunity to discuss the violence with Bert and Donna Weir, my Servas hosts. Though he never directly said it, I'm pretty sure Bert was a former IRA fighter, now turned peacemaker, and it was fascinating to hear his rendition of events and stories of the bad old days. Donna and Bert were incredibly hospitable, picking me up in Belfast so I didn't have to take the 45minute long busride, and the next day helping me catch the bus to seaside Newcastle so that I could climb Sleive Donard, the tallest "mountain" in the area at 860 meters. Needless to say, the view from the top was gorgeous. I could just make out Scotland and Wales through the clouds hanging at eye height, and I couldn't have been happier as I ate the goat and sheep's cheese sandwich and drank the flask of tea Donna prepared for me.

I'm planning on meeting Kate, another WWOOFer I met at Guy and Mo's, in Belfast on Monday, which we will explore for a few days before heading off into the Republic for another week. We will then spend some time at a farm in County Clare, before I meet Maya again to continue our travels together.

I hope I'll be able to write again...eventually.

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Beds I've slept in since September 5th: 19

*To be fair, once a month is still regular...