go walking!

That's what I did today. After a gloriously long, cosy lie-in, dad and I headed down to the Mournes to test out my new gear. It was windy and misty, and therefore not at all perfect for climbing anything, so we went on about a 7mile round trip to a lake. It was up and down a little bit, and with the mist, and the boggy, granitey landscape, it was very banshee-like. When we got to the lake, we couldn't even see the other side or anything - incredibly eerie.

I got a cool last minute invite last night. The Belfast Festival is currently on, which is a mixture of music, film, classes, and lectures. A friend of mine called me at 6 last night asking if I had plans. Like the true loser that I am, I said I didn't, and so she said she had a spare ticket to a lecture entitled "The Adventurers". The adventurers included Dawson Stelfox, who was the first Irish man to climb Everest, a very English BBC chap who had biked from Algiers to Cape Town, a girl who went caving, a guy who sailed around the Arctic, and a very pushy girl who had raced to the North Pole. Everyone was awesome - funny, encouraging, yet humble, apart from the North Pole girl, who spoke completely in management powerspeak that we couldn't take her seriously. Still, everyone else spoke so wonderfully and with such enthusiasm, that it was definitely a fun night. There was some Q&A (we heard a BBC chick using the lingo, so we decided to pick it up) at the end, and all the questions were funny, so I didn't feel like asking my serious, vaguely cynical question about whether issues of political stability providing more contentious issues than that of environmental ones. Oh well.