Saturday, September 25, 1999

I'd looked at the distance we were to walk on our last day and noted the time breakfast started and I was concerned. We are slow walkers - or at least, I am, and Art has to slow down for me, and I thought the chances were good that we wouldn't make it to our pick-up spot at Dunquin by the appointed time of 5pm. We headed out as soon as we were able and stopped first at the Mountain Man shop on our way out of Dingle to pick up more comfortable insoles for my walking shoes. When the owner saw the insoles I had, he said that what I'd been given was for breatheability, not for shock absorption. As I put the new ones in my filthy shoes, I felt better already.

On the way out of town the black clouds gathered, so we decided to put on our rain bottoms. By the time the rain started we were ready, and we walked companionably along the tarmac, hot but dry. We took another long, muddy uphill green road (that means unpaved), recently trod by at least one horse, with great backward looks at Dingle. According to the book, we were on

...an historical route that the old Blasket Islanders used on their journey to Dingle town. Bothar a gCinn winds up through a bower of fuchsia and the very air is tinged with timeless memory.

We stopped at the top of the hill for a snack. I commented to Art that we'd been fortunate not to have many muddy downhill green roads - too slippery for my comfort. Thinking about it, that's probably why the walking people recommend that the Dingle Way be done clockwise.

On the way down the hill we missed the trail turn described in our walking guide. As it turned out, on this last day's walk we only went about a third of the distance on the Way-marked trails. Unknowingly passing the turnoff, we did get to see a great ruined castle instead.

A detour is possible for instead of descending you can go straight on the Mam Clasach to view Rahinnane Castle, principle residence of the Knight of Kerry, the Fitzgeralds, after the coming of the Normans. This imposing site was once the headquarters of the O'Falvey family and its setting in a very well defended ringfort marks it out of the ordinary.

Going surface roads above Ventry beach to reconnect to the designated path, we stopped to snack by a cool-looking creek. I commented that if I had a bit more energy I'd take off my shoes and socks and soak my feet. Walking again, we found a tiny store along the roadside and picked up more snacks and another round of Kleenex. We then made a phone call to have the taxi pick us up at 6 rather 5. The lady on the other end of the line said they had a tight schedule so we should take the road to Slea Head to make sure we'd get there on time. It was disappointing to think that not only had we missed the middle part of the planned walk, through the town of Ventry and along the beach, we were also going to miss the last hillside stretch. But I didn't think we'd want to rush, especially since there was a "toughish" uphill climb involved. So we trekked down nearly six miles of pavement instead of taking the hillside route, which was supposed to have great views of the sea. For part of that route we were adopted by a dog who insisted upon accompanying us. He was a fairly young fellow, dashing about, and I had concerns that he'd run out in front of one of the vehicles that passed us. But he was apparently experienced in the ways of traffic. After a couple of miles we stopped for a break by a house, and a young girl came out and offered to take the dog to where he lived - apparently just a short distance back down the road.

The pavement was tough on the feet. I felt like a person whose car had run out of gas rather than a holiday walker, and was tempted a couple of times to put out my thumb and hitch a ride for the first time in my life. It was a winding coastal road, doubling back somewhat in places. But we did stop to see the beehive huts and to take a few pictures of the Blasket Islands, uninhabited since the 1960s. In my opinion, those two shots of the Blaskets are the best pictures Art took on the whole trip.

We arrived at our pickup point half an hour before the taxi, waited under the eaves of the closed-for-the-season Teddy Bear Museum watching the drizzling rain, then drove back through Dingle to pick up our luggage. Hard to believe how fast it was for the taxi after our 7 hours of walking! Then over Conor Pass and back to Tralee. Conor Pass is very steep; we would have had to be mountain goats to have traversed it on foot.

We asked the driver how the sheep got rounded up in the areas where the fencing was scarce and sheep with the markings of different farmers grazed together. He said that when it was time to mark the lambs in the spring when they did the shearing, all the dogs around went out and drove all the sheep into common pens. The lambs stayed right with their mothers. Once the sheep were in the pens, the farmer marked each of his lambs. When the shearing was done, the sheep were let out again. I'm not a country person, and I suppose it's possible that method is used in other areas with grazing animals, but I'd never heard of it before. It does make property-line fences less necessary.

I noted that our week-long adventure really covered a relatively short distance "as the crow flies", but quite a bit more along the trail - and certainly a wealth of experience, visual beauty and history.

We have a B&B near the center of town, very convenient for dinner and an "early to bed" while we pondered how to spend our next week, and where we would stay the next few nights.


Sunday, September 26, 1999

I skipped breakfast again to sleep. We were ready - overready - when the taxi came for us just before 1 to take us to Kerry Airport to pick up the car to begin the "Go As You Please" phase of our trip. As it happened, the car we were to have had was unavailable, so we got an upgrade to a Peugeot, and even that one had had to be driven in from nearly 100 miles away. Apparently they didn't have the surplus of cars we sometimes run into in the States, but seem to be more conscientious about serving the customer well. We lucked out. We paid the surcharge for the excess liability - that meant that, for 28 pounds (about $35), no matter what happened to the car we wouldn't pay any extra money.

(It turned out to be a good decision, because before we'd driven more than 10 miles the front right parking light (spotlight) popped out of its socket and broke; later in the week, Art passed a parked car in a crowded village and clipped the other car's left-side mirror with our left-side mirror; on another occasion, while pulling into a narrow parking lot at one of the B&Bs we were staying in, he hit the wall at the edge of the lot with the bumper. We also got a rock chip on the windshield. When we dropped the car at Dublin Airport the next week, there was nothing to do but give the keys to the fellow and hop in the shuttle for the airport.

The other decision we made at the car rental counter at the airport turned out to be not such a good idea. Rather than paying another 28 pounds for a supplemental driver, we decided that Art would do all the driving. It turned out to be fairly stressful for him. In addition to getting used to driving on the "wrong" side of the road, the gearshift was on the opposite side but the configuration of the gears was not a mirror image. So there were many incidents of starting out in third gear instead of first, grinding the gears, and stalling the car. For Art, who considers himself an experienced, expert driver, his lack of success at mastering the Peugeot was a frustration for him. When he was a teenager, his family had an Isetta, a car with a left-handed shift, but with a mirror configuration. So every time he got into a quick-thinking - or quick acting without thinking! - situation, Art reverted to his adolescence, threw it into fourth, and killed the engine. And because the driving didn't become a "second nature" thing for him, he spent much attention and energy on the driving and didn't have the opportunity to look around much. For my part, I was acutely aware of the difficulties he was having, which detracted from my enjoyment as well. We decided that from now on, if we're renting a car for more than three days, we'll pay the supplement and share the driving.)

It was raining as we left the Kerry Airport, tracked back to Tralee to get on the correct road, and headed off. We took the ferry across the Shannon River - we'd read that it was more scenic than driving the 80 miles upriver to Limerick where we could cross the river by bridge. We'd studied a map and decided that the town of Kilkee looked like a reasonable driving distance for us, since we could get there in late afternoon and have a chance to look around, have a leisurely dinner and rest, and then have a good long day sightseeing the next day on our way to Galway.

Kilkee is a seaside town, much more crowded in the summer than in the shoulder season, which is when we were traveling. Some of the shops were already closed for the season. Our B&B was on a strand by the ocean. The hostess reminded me of one of the German singers in the movie "The Sound of Music" with her old-fashioned bun, large smile, and sturdy shoes. She recommended a walk by the cliffs, which we did. It was about a two-mile walk we took. The cliffs are limestone, and the erosion caused by tides and wind has cut into them in a spectacular way. It wasn't a tourist attraction, though, so there weren't any crowds - mostly locals, it looked like.

The beach leading to the cliffs had a most interesting phenomenon. There were many round rocks where the waves came in, and the beach was kind of steep. As the water receded from a wave, many of the rocks rolled downhill, rattling against each other. Art referred to them as "yacking rocks". I can't remember ever hearing that kind of sound on a beach.

Afterwards we went into town for a good dinner.

Monday, September 27, 1999

Drove from Kilkee to the Cliffs of Moher. Very commercialized, disappointingly so. Even had a fellow selling hand-knit sweaters out of the back of his van. Same with Irish cassettes and jewelry. There were two tour buses there. It was the first time on our trip that we've been with that large a group of people. The cliffs themselves were impressive, towering 700 feet above the sea. There were fences to keep people away from the edge, since this area is not stable - but more than half of the people went over the fence anyway. The same with our group - half of them (Art) went over! It made me nervous to see how close people would get to the edge of those high cliffs. I stayed away because I know the cliff magnets will suck me over if I get to within 15 feet of the edge of anything. I asked Art which of our kids he thought would have climbed the fence, and he said, "All of them." I'm glad we went to the Cliffs of Moher, but the ones the day before at Kilkee made more of an impression on me. That was probably because we were closer to them and could clearly see the impact of wind and tides on the limestone in the area.

We headed further north through County Clare and the Burren. On the way we backtracked a little to visit a local exhibit about the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. I found out that the famine was largely political, the English landlords wanting the rent for their lands, but with a blight on the potato crop the tenants couldn't pay, so they were turned out of their houses. The woman sitting at the exhibit was using an electric typewriter; it has been a long time since I've seen one of those! She had the same coloring as me - dark hair, gray eyes and fair skin. We had about a half hour conversation while Art finished up with the exhibit.

The woman gave me a sheet with a list of the genealogical research centers for each county in Ireland - names and addresses, and some email addresses. Apparently there are many Americans coming to Ireland these days to "search for their roots". I was glad to have the list, because we were interested in Counties Mayo (for Art's relatives) and Westmeath (for mine). We decided we'd stop at those places during the remainder of our trip to see what we could find out.

Then to the Burren, a region that is so rocky it looks barren, but it really has a thriving population of plants and tiny animals. Apparently the area used to be forested, but the trees were cut down and the soil blown away by the wind (or, as Art remarked, "eroded into the underworld", as there are many underground caverns). The area also features numerous archaelogical sites. There was a stone tomb there, called the Portal Dolman, thought to be 3000 years old. It reminded me of a tiny Stonehenge. It's at the edge of an area that resembles a jumbled graveyard of stacked rocks. We would like to have had a day to walk on one of the trails.

Arrived in Galway around 6, but got lost and didn't get to our B&B until 7. We had to navigate through rush-hour traffic and about six "roundabouts". We don't have these traffic features in Seattle (yet, interrupts Art), but we did experience them in Boston a couple of years ago. They're used in place of freeway onramps, offramps and signals. They're like big traffic wheels, where the cars go into the center of the wheel while they're going around, and then move to the outside of the wheel when they're exiting onto another road. Roundabouts are actually a pretty practical way of getting vehicles off one road and onto another without traffic signals. Anyway, the roundabouts in Galway went clockwise - backwards from our Boston experience. So we'd approach the roundabout, take a very fast look at all of the route possibilities on the sign that would appear about 50 feet before we entered the roundabout, compare the sign quickly to the road number we were looking for on the map, I'd shout something like "Go to 2 o'clock" or "Third road", and Art would head into the melee and shoot out the other side. I'm proud to say that we only missed one turn in these roundabouts - but since we had no idea where we were going it was pure blind luck.

We had to stop twice to ask for directions to the B&B. After a week on foot in the country, coming back into a city was a shock. So many people, so many cars, such narrow roads! I should say that Galway is a city of about 35,000 - not that large by American standards - but far larger than the places we'd been in since we'd left Dublin over a week before. The room at the B&B was the smallest room we've had yet - a family home that was converted - but nice people - Helene and Pat Hanlan - just a little older than us. Helene retired a few years ago from her position as a dietary supervisor at a hospital, and Pat is a policeman in Galway. We found the city center and had a very good grilled seafood dinner. We plan to spend at least two nights here in Galway. Pat tells us that it's supposed to be a nice day tomorrow (Tuesday) and then rain on Wednesday. We wanted to visit the Aran Islands on a fair weather day, so we'll go there tomorrow and then spend Wednesday in town, exploring, when rain won't be so bothersome.