Oh the places to go.....

Luck of the Irish

So Sunday night we left Paris and took a flight over to Ireland. We landed in Shannon and got our car rental. I made Dave drive because I don't want to have to worry about driving stick and on the left side of the road. We headed to a town called Bunnratty to a pub someone told us had good food for dinner. Ireland is so green and the land is all devided by either a stone wall or trees. It's absolutely beautiful and I'm already inlove with this place and want to come back someday.

We found Bunratty and our pub, the Durty Nelly. It's located next to the Bunratty castle. The castle does a dinner and show, kind of like Medevil Times but a lot more money. $52 euro which is probably around $75 or so. A bit too much and we settled for pub food, which was ok. After dinner we drove into Limmerick for the night. Our hotel lady was quite chatty and told us that she used to work for Prince Charles and started telling us a few stories about him and Princess Diana. It was quite funny.

Monday morning we were back in the car trying to get to the castle in Limmerick called St. John's castle. He was the brother to King Richard (think Robin Hood days). I can't remember if he even went to the castle or not but it's more of a fortress right on the river than a castle. After seeing it and the cathedral we decided to head out and drive down to a town called Dingle. It's the pennsula before the ring of Kerry and all of our books say that it's a prettier drive, plus in Dingle there is a dolphin named Fungi that has decided to stay and become a resident and is quite the tourist attraction now. We tried to leave Limmerick but the streets are crazy and there's no rhyme for reason with this country and it's streets. It ended up taking about an hour to find our way out of that place before we could get on the open road.

Ireland really is just green and more green everywhere. And between houses there's fields of sheep and cows. They mark the sheep with different colors to distiguish what belongs to who when the sheep get out. As we got closer to the Dingle Pennsula the weather started to get worse. The fog came in and the rain started pouring down, which made it hard to see anything. We started to go up a hill or more like a mountain and the higher we got the narrower the road got. The turns got steeper and the water started running onto the street. It was getting pretty hairy. I even took a picture of Dave's knuckles cuz they were literally white from him gripping so hard. There we some places where you had to stop to let the oncoming car pass you because the road was so narrow. Once we got through that we were on our way down the what we know now is Connor's pass. The locals in Dingle said that it's really bad to drive in weather like we were having. Lucky us!! I guess we're just getting the true Irish experience!!

Dingle town is one cool place. If you every come to Ireland you have to make it one of your stops. It's right on the ocean, but due to the weather being stormy we weren't able to go see Fungi!! What a bummer. To make up for it we did some shopping which there was plenty to do. There were tons of different shops that sell art, jewerly, pottery, things Irish and everything else. It's a great little beach town. And I found out that Dingle is where they filmed "Afar and Away" with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. After shopping we hopped back in the car to drive around the pinnsula. We stopped at a fort and also another fort but these were in the shape of beehives. Pretty interesting. They built them that way to help keep the weather and wind out and you'll get both there. Unfortunately the weather got bad again and we couldn't see too much. But what we did I can imagine that with good weather it is quite lovely there.

After dinner we headed out of Dingle to Kilerny for the night so that we can do the Ring of Kerry on Tuesday which is the next pennsula over from Dingle.

posted by Camille @ 11:06 AM