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could take pictures of themselves there to prove they had been without actually climbing the damn thing. Two elderly people insisted on taking my picture a few times before they cheerfully sent me on my way-cheerfully because they weren't going any further.

After the first five minutes, I caught up with a very smart man from Long Island named Jim, who had brought along a walking stick, and he became my walking companion. We both naively thought that the first thirty minute stretch just had to be the hardest part-no trail to speak of-just a bunch of rocks, most of them loose, on the side of the mountain. We passed a stream, presumably the one the bus driver had told me to stick my feet in on the way down to heal them-and continued to make our way through the rocks. I did not notice much wildlife. I guess they were all smarter than we were.

After stopping for a couple of water breaks, Jim and I saw some fellow pilgrims in the distance. It seemed as though they had stopped to rest and were waiting for us to catch up as they kept yelling and waving in our direction. I waved back and soon we were sitting on makeshift stone seats with two Irish men climbing together-one man in his late 50s and the other in his 20s. They were Charlie and Cathal, respectively, and little did I know how these two men would give me one of the most interesting and somewhat scary days in my life.

After a few minutes of chatting, Jim decided to go on and I, being his constant
companion, followed him along with Charlie and Cathal, with Charlie beginning a
rhetoric that would continue until I left him later that day. Charlie, being a liar like Maureen, told Jim and I that we were "nearly there." After another thirty odd minutes of vertical climbing we thankfully came to a flat patch of rocks where the wind whipped around us and Clew Bay and its islands were visible in the distance.

According to Charlie, his friend George, a veteran (of which war I have no idea), lived on one of those islands with his wife and his boat, which none of us could see from there except Charlie.

After that flat stretch we could see the peak of the mountain right in front of us. I said, extremely prematurely, that it didn't look so bad! God obviously heard me and decided to teach me a lesson at this point. The last bit of mountain took another hour to climb-an hour of pure torture. An hour that made me pine for the easy little lanes we had been through before. This last hour consisted of a trail of loose rocks with nothing

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