County Kerry
Last weekend Siobhán Ní Chonchúir and Megan Markey took us on the greatest weekend trip of my life. We went to Killarney and Dingle in County Kerry, which is on the southwest coast of Ireland.
Friday 30 June 2006
The landscape from the jaunting car:
We arrived at the Muckross Estate and wandered around the gardens for an hour. The plants were unusual and oversized. I felt like I’d stumbled into a book of fairytales or Alice in Wonderland.
If you look closely you’ll see this tree has wrinkles like a human:
We explored Killarney National park by boat until we arrived at Ross Castle:
This is the only time you’ll ever see me in orange:
Here’s the Captain and Sam. (Sam is the dog):
Ross Castle:
After touring the castle we hopped on a bus to Dingle, where Siobhán is from.
These are shots from the bus window:
The program paid for our dinner at Paudie’s Bar and afterwards we took a walk around Dingle and ended up at Murphy’s Pub where there was an engagement party and live music.
Bosco O Conchúir gave us a tour of the Dingle Peninsula.
Here are some scenic shots taken from inside the bus and outside (see if you can distinguish just by looking):
We stopped to look at Ogham stones. Ogham was the Gaelic alphabet during pre-Christian times.
Many Irish-speaking writers have hailed from the Blasket Islands.
This one is nicknamed “the dead man” and you’ll see why if you examine its horizontal shape:
Along the way we saw Beehive Huts, stone huts that were inhabited from ancient times to 1200 AD.
The best part was the trip to the beach called Com Dhineol:
I thought of Drew for many reasons and the only one I’ll go into is that July 1st was our third anniversary. Here I wrote a note in the sand:
(By the way, there’s a comma after “anniversary,” but I lost it in the shot).
Sunday, 2 July 2006
Some of us closed down Murphy’s Pub the night before. We were almost seasick during our morning boat tour of Dingle Bay. The tour was to find the town’s dolphin named Fungie. We found him within an hour, but we kept circling until the captain realized some of us aren’t normally quite as chalky-white as we were that day.
We returned to Dublin via bus and train and made it back to Leeson Street before nine at night.
I’m going to try to take at least one day trip each weekend (I’d take longer trips but the workload is too demanding, and it just doubled now that I’ve switched workshops). Dublin’s a great city, but the Irish landscape outside of the city is truly remarkable. It’s an amalgamation of everything beautiful I’ve ever seen or imagined in my life.