Sometimes, when you have a really busy day, and you might not have entirely slept off the jet lag from two days earlier, you sleep in a lot later than expected. We were an hour behind schedule getting going.
And I say “schedule” knowing that we were planning to do the Ring of Kerry, which is not a lengthy drive, just a timely one – it’s twisty with a million things to see. And we needed to “see” Blarney Castle along the way. And we needed a car to all of that.
We ate breakfast quickly.
Fortunately, the Europecar location was barely a block and a half away. I didn’t plan it that way, so I took it as amazingly fortuitous that it was there. Right-side drive. Stick shift. Diesel. Oh, this is was gonna be fun. [Insert dripping sarcasm here.] I hadn’t driven on the wrong side of the road (sorry, folks, but when 95% of the rest of the world drives on the right side of the road, you’re in the wrong) in a number of years. Nor had I driven manual transmission since we got rid of the Jetta.
To my credit, I only stalled the car three times.
The route to Blarney was not clear and I think Alex was following her geocaching map, not Google Maps, so we got turned around due to lack of warning (eg. take a right turn in 250 metres). That I was a bit paranoid about driving on the left didn’t help. Oh, and that there was nary a shoulder on the road, and frequent walls a few inches from the mirrors.
I’d forgotten how much those laneways made me nervous.
Then we had a debate about going into the Castle. In Alex’s defense, she wanted to do the Ring of Kerry. Which I totally understand. But why come all the way to the Castle if you weren’t going to go in? (That POV would come back to bite me, later.)
For the record, the grounds of Blarney Castle are gorgeous. They put a lot of effort into making that space not just attractive, but it feels natural despite also being landscaped. I believe it’s genuinely worth the price of admission just to walk about. Is it worth the price to wait the 90 minutes to get to the top of the Castle to kiss the stone? No, no it most decidedly is not. (Even if we got a couple of hilarious pictures in the ludicrously narrow steps.) That, and none of us wanted to kiss the stone.
The rest of the castle is unrestored from when the last round of wars (and I’m not even sure which one) left it in ruins. How it became the tourist attraction it is today has got to be one of those “this one famous person got a kick out of it” (probably in the Victorian era) and then everyone had to do it.
The Poison Garden (another one of the strange British Isles things; several castles have them) was interesting, but small. We found the Witch Rock and a cave rumoured to be home to a witch in the past. Alex went down the Wishing Stairs (with her eyes closed) and back up.
It was nearly 1pm, and we’d stayed easily an hour longer than Alex had expected, on top of our already delayed start to the day. Through the gift shop, then hit the road for the Ring of Kerry. But we ended up going most of the way back to Cork before realizing the route to the Ring of Kerry was going to be a slog from there. Off to Kilkenny, which was a longer drive, but on a major road that would theoretically save us time.
That was the theory. Then we found out that Irish drivers rarely seem to do the speed limit, usually 20 km/h under.
Killarney looked like one of those places that would be fun to stop in, look around. But when a few thousand other tourists think the same thing, it becomes a little difficult to find parking. We finally gave up after 20 minutes of fruitless searching and headed for the Ring.
The Ring of Kerry is a scenic drive. And by scenic, I mean “extremely twisty with highly variable changes in speed limits”. And frequented by tour busses.
Oh, a note on those tour busses: they do the Ring counter-clockwise. Don’t fool yourself into thinking the best thing to do is travel against them. The aforementioned “extremely twisty” roads are also “extremely narrow” and those busses are, well, “busses”. When they turn on a corner, they usually need the entire road, not just their lane. Which leads to all kinds of traffic – I’m amazed there were no accidents.
We only got halfway to Kenmare when Alex, dejectedly, declared that we were far too behind schedule to do the Ring. She had greatly wanted to do it properly and racing around it before the sun set was a Bad Idea. At 4pm, it was already late in the afternoon, and although the sun would stay up for quite some time yet, so many other things could hold us up from getting to our B&B on time.
Snapping a few pictures at the Killarney National Park, we turned about and headed back north.
Lacking a direct route to Blennerville, we had to go through Killarney again, up to Tralee, before turning south-ish towards our destination. And even with a map that we had consulted in advance, accidentally missed the turn and forced to go down a laneway barely the width of the car – weeds were whacking the mirrors as Google sent us down the 80 km/h road.
Tyke, son of the B&B’s proprietor, let us in and we got settled. Given the lateness in the day, we felt that we should make the most of the daylight we had left. We felt Dingle was the right decision. Tyke said there were two routes: the scenic route, and the fast route.
For the record, they’re roughly the same in time. The key difference? The “fast” route is about time, the scenic route … well, we’ll get to that.
Dingle was already half-closed when we arrived. The tourists had already left for the day. In a way, it was the best possible time to visit, since we weren’t fighting for space. Gift shops were still open, but pleasant, the line at Murphy’s Ice Cream was short, and we got free parking.
We ate at Paudie’s Bar, attached to the Dingle Bay Hotel. It was … acceptable. (Honestly, finding good food in tourist areas is a challenge. Serving in volumes has a habit of squashing taste and quality. I’m not suggesting Paudie’s is tasteless, just that their clientele was clearly defined.)
Then we went to Murphy’s for dessert (half the town seems to be named after Murphy). We didn’t know what to expect when we arrived. Some of the staff were handing out samples as we waited out turn. One of them, curiously, had a North American accent. He went on and on about how they had spent so much time getting the mixes right. Would you believe they have a Sea Salt flavour? And Irish Brown Bread? Would you believe that they’re amazing? Kerry County cows for the win! (Murphy’s also in Dublin. I highly recommend visiting, if you get a chance. But go to Dingle.)
We headed back on the scenic route. This route goes roughly northeast out of Dingle, right up the side of a mountain to Conor Pass. We had no idea what was waiting for us.
The road up is weavy and windy (w-eye-nd, not w-ih-nd), reaching the lookout atop Conor Pass. I’ve been to a lot of passes with various lookouts, but I cannot recall one quite so beautiful. It sits 456 metres (about 1,500 ft) above sea level. You go from sea level to higher than Calgary in barely 7 kilometres. And people do that route on bicycles!
The view from the top is astounding, especially looking north towards Brandon Bay. It’s windy (w-ih-nd), though, as the weather is urgently trying to get over the steep ridge. And it’s quite a drop from the top, too.
We stayed for quite a lot longer than I expected as dusk approached. Normally for us, it’s a few minutes, snap a picture or two, back in the car and off. But we were easily a half an hour. We were there so long that Choo Choo tried to make friends with (and possibly kidnap) a lamb.
The route down the north side of the mountain is quite a different matter. The south side, which leads to Dingle, is two lane (mostly) and fairly easy to travel. The north side? Single lane plus maybe space for a human walking on the side of the road for about a kilometre and a half(ish), between the pass and the Conor Waterfalls.
I can only imagine what hell that must be during the day with tour busses.
We stopped, of course, at the waterfall. Because who wouldn’t? (Well, if there was no parking, I could understand…) I tried not to have a heart attack as my children climbed steep, wet rocks in less-than ideal footwear. Then we headed all the way back down to sea level, relieved that we hadn’t attempted that route during the day.
Dusk was turning to darkness by the time we’d returned to sea level. Alex become obsessed with stopping at a beach to see the surf before we couldn’t see anything. We found a road into what would turn out to be a parking lot adjacent to a caravan (trailer) park. The kids refused to leave the car, forcing Alex and I to not dawdle on the beach.
It was dark by the time we returned to the B&B. Thankfully, I think we’re the only ones here. No late start for tomorrow, though. We’ve got a lot of driving ahead of us.
