I’d never imagined taking one of those pack-up-and-go trips—until it happened. A close friend came to visit me in Ireland, rented a car, and really wanted to drive somewhere a bit farther out. His first proposal was Galway. It’s only about a two-hour drive, but winter weather here is always a gamble, and no one really knows what conditions will be like once you get there. In the end, I suggested hiking in Wicklow Mountains National Park instead.
The plan was made with the help of Gemini. It suggested heading straight to Glendalough early in the morning, parking there, and hiking for two to three hours. After lunch, we’d drive on to Lough Tay, also known as the Guinness Lake, to check out the view. It sounded reasonable enough, so we followed it.
On the day we left, the weather was surprisingly good. I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw sunshine in Dublin, but that day was bright and clear. Driving along the small country roads in Wicklow, sheep kept appearing by the roadside, which was a brand-new experience for me.
After maybe thirty or forty minutes on the road, we arrived at the visitor center parking lot. Parking cost 4 euros per car and was valid until eight in the evening.
As a well-developed national park, Wicklow has a huge number of hiking routes, all with different levels of difficulty. Some are flat walks along the lakes, some run along ridges with lake views, and others are straight-up mountain climbs. Since we were aiming to finish before lunchtime, we initially thought about taking a shorter route, like the Green Road Walk. The tricky part is that many of the routes don’t overlap, and once you’re on a longer one, there’s no easy way to cut it short. The long routes are really long, and the short ones don’t always offer much in terms of scenery. Somehow, in the middle of all this indecision, we ended up on a relatively long and quite challenging route: Spinc and Glenealo Valley.
Thankfully, the weather stayed perfect. The climb was steep in places, but the views were absolutely worth it. Along the way, we could see the lakes and valleys of Glendalough, and from the higher points on the Spinc, the entire Glenealo Valley spread out below us. It was genuinely overwhelming in the best possible way.
In the end, the hike took nearly four and a half hours, covering about 14 kilometers with close to 500 meters of elevation gain. By the time we made it back to the visitor center, it was already after two in the afternoon.
We chose Wicklow Heather Restaurant for lunch. By the time we finished what could loosely be called “lunch,” it was already past four. Then we drove on to Lough Tay.
We arrived in the early evening. There wasn’t a dramatic sunset, but the wind was unbelievably strong. We stepped onto a patch of grass marked with danger and no-entry signs to take photos, feeling like we might be blown away at any second. That was where I took my favorite photo of the whole trip. The colors, the texture of the ground, the ripples on the lake, and the clouds in the sky all came together perfectly.
