I have just recently returned from a cool little weekend trip to Whales. We hiked a little, visited some pubs, and went horseback riding. We left early Saturday morning; Luke fell asleep on both trains on the way to the pickup point for the trip, where we found (much to our satisfaction) that there would be a two hour bus ride. I passed out for the entire ride and got some much needed sleep. At the first stop, we ended up wasting a whole hour trying to find an old witches’ church on the top of a little mountain; we never did find it, but according to the locals, it’s there.
Last night, we visited a few pubs in the small town where we spent the night. For an hour, the majority of the tour group sat in a little dance club / pub, and watched the local girls who seemed to be more interested in one another than in any members of the male sex. I tried to talk to a couple of them, but they would simply go back to dancing with their female partners and completely ignore me after about a minute of conversation. I guess I have no game, or maybe poor dance skills. However, I also reached a startling conclusion last night: Contrary to one of Luke’s earlier journal entries, in which he criticized English dancing and said that it made him look like a somewhat decent dancer, I have realized that he was entirely wrong. He IS STILL the worst dancer out there, and any earlier claims contrary to my own sweeping judgments and those of others in our tour group are rather biased.
After a night at the pubs, our group went out for a nice day of horseback riding, the only problem being that it poured for a greater part of the morning. Anyway, we only got to really “run” with the horses for brief spurts, and in each spurt, I managed to come extremely close to falling off. Going fast was really cool, but the horses were also forced to move slowly for a greater part of the trip. After my first ten minutes on the horse, I began to sympathize with the American Indian and question how he managed to maintain the ability to reproduce while riding these uncomfortable things; when the horses ran, I felt like my reproductive organs were in a vise. Anyway, it was really neat to see the countryside the real way; not by bus or even by walking, but the way the true men do it.