Today we travelled to the southwest county Kerry, stopping at a cute market town called Macroom and landing in Killarney for a lunch of vegetable soup and a walk around the town. Besides pointing out the sights, our tour guide Tony has been filling us tourists in on details about everything from the Irish economy to weather to the political situation. This last topic has been particularly eye opening as the situation is more complex here than I think the average North American realizes, certainly than I realized.
The highlight of our day and the trip for me was driving around the Ring of Kerry, a 170+-km driving route around county Kerry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Kerry that starts at Killarney and curves around the Iveragh Peninsula to include spectacular views along windy roads that made me glad we’d outsourced the driving to a professional. Stops along the way included the extensive Rossbeigh beach (yes I put my feet in the water), Ladies View (apparently named for the admiration by Queen Victoria’s ladies in waiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_View) and towns like Kenmare.
At the end of the day we landed in the cute little town of Dingle https://www.dingle-peninsula.ie/ where we had fish and chips at a restaurant in town called Harrington’s. Finally after many nights of being either too tired or too late to go to the hotel pool, Mom and I made it to the spa at our hotel where sitting in the hot tub we chatted with a retired fisherman who said he had lived 200 m up the road all his life and told me all about his four kids and the family he had in Montreal but had never visited. Travel stories come from everywhere.