So far I'm loving Ireland. It's been chilly and the light hasn't been great, but everyone here is so fabulous, and the scenery has been magnificent - the farther west we go, the prettier the country gets.
We spent our first night in Dingle at Mary O'Neill's place - and it felt like we had it all to ourselves. Mary is lovely, as is her son Stephen (though he's engrossed in sport for the most part and is hard to tear away from the TV), but her place is SPOTLESS. It's also deceivingly huge inside, much to my chagrin, since I'm the one that ended up lugging all the suitcases upstairs. It didn't seem like any more than a few stairs when I volunteered - that'll teach me!
We decided to pass on the Ring of Kerry, as mentioned earlier, and drive the Ring of Dingle instead (Ring of Dingle, Ring of Dingle, It's a Merry Little Jingle! - Sorry - it just makes me want to sing!). Mary advised us that we could drive the entire thing in about an hour, but mentioned that we might take a bit more time if we stopped for pictures and such. I think it took us a little over five hours, so not too bad, although Mom got a little antsy about keeping on a schedule. I can only imagine what the Ring of Kerry would have been like - we never would have made it to the end!
The Ring of Dingle is beautiful - absolutely breathtaking - and I am doubly, triply glad that we went before the summer tourist crowd began, since the roads were all but empty, the beaches pristine, and the winds clean of anything but salt and sea.
Our first stop, random and the result of an impulsive U-turn down what looked at first like a driveway, was Ventry Beach. They say that the Dingle Peninsula has some of the most dramatic beaches in Ireland, with long expanses of sand and wind-swept rock that are inhospitable to swimmers. I didn't quite hear the theme song to "Jaws" playing in my head, but it was definitely quiet, and mostly deserted.
I spent a little while on the beach, while Mom and Linda waited in the car, out of the cold. I went down mainly to take pictures, exchanged nods with the old man (a local) who was walking purposefully up the beach, and looked for shells. The water was excruciatingly cold, so I didn't venture in to look for shells after the first nanosecond of skin contact with the water, but Mother Nature obliged by washing a lovely specimen up onto shore for me.
The only other inhabitants of the beach, though it was late morning, were the gulls...
...and the lugworms. I wasn't sure what they were at first, but there were piles of lugworm sand everywhere. I took a picture of the one shaped like a heart, of course, even though lugworms are about 8 inches long and kind of gross. The sentiment seemed to fit.
I actually would have liked to hang out on the beach for a few hours, in spite of the freezing cold, but Mom and Linda were waiting, so I hoofed it back up the beach and we got back on the road.
The drive was phenomenal - even if we hadn't stopped to see a single thing, the road around the peninsula winds along the edge of the coast, a narrow ribbon of asphalt with its edge dropping off into the sea.
Surprisingly, though the edge was steep and the waters brutal...
...there were very few warnings along the way. We did see one sign at the beginning of the drive...
...but it didn't seem to dissuade the tourists.
As a side note to the above picture - these guys were CRAZY. The edge was literally inches from where they were standing, and they were clowning around and taking pictures while their womenfolk yawned in the car. I like to think of this as Darwinism in action, and even the gulls were a bit leery of the lunatics on the wall.
I know, seagull dude, I know.
There were quite a few spots where I wish I hadn't been driving - there were so many moments where I wanted to take pictures, but the roads were extremely narrow, there were very few pulloffs, and the tour buses have right of way. There were some moments when I was able to improvise, however. There was a beach near Slea Head that I wanted to capture, but the nearest unoccupied pulloff was in front of the giant crucifix that marks the westernmost point of Ireland.
There was a little bit of a view of the beach from the Slea Head pulloff, but it wasn't as close as I wanted, even with my super-fantaz-great telephoto lens...
...so I improvised, Irish style, and created my own photo opportunity.
Mom and Linda were good sports about being perched at a 45 degree angle on the side of a hill sloping into the ocean, just so I could take pictures of the beach...
...and the ever-present sheep. (Seriously, there are about 4 sheep for every one person in Ireland.)
I wanted to go down onto the beach itself, but it was actually really cold out on the edge of the world, and so we stopped at Tig Slea Head Cafe before continuing on down the coast, where we all had tea and shopped a bit. There wasn't anyone else there, so it was quite nice to sit and chat with the shopkeepers. This is definitely a place that I'd like to spend much more time in.
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