Monday, August 31, 2020

County Kerry

Today we started out on our journey through County Kerry to the Dingle peninsula, passing one town you might recognize...Castlemane.  That "Wild colonial boy" went to Australia though, and not the US! I didn't know that till I heard the song here. 

 From there we passed the Inch Strand and stopped for pictures a couple of times of the beautiful landscape, 









even seeing 5th century beehive huts briefly from the road, 






before continuing to the Blasket Island Centre. This small Island was home to roughly 200 people in the early 1900s, but had been evacuated at the resident's requests by 1950. 






The townspeople spoke Irish (Gaelic) as their first language, and have now become an important part of Irish literature because they wrote books about their lives on the island in Irish. 


(Example of what a house would look like on the Island)




From the center, we traveled to Dingle Town, a small harbor town, for lunch. 






We decided to get lunch in a pub--since I was in one of the two real fishing towns in Ireland (remember, fishing hasn't really been a big part of the Irish diet, even though they have an abundance of it in rivers/lakes/oceans). I had a bowl of the local chowder, which was very yummy. 




 We had sun and blue skies, which made for some gorgeous pictures of the cute pastel colored town.
















After plenty of pictures, we were back on the bus


and on our way back to Killarney.  It was still early afternoon, so we wandered around town looking into the many shops. 





I might have bought myself something as a splurge. We had an early dinner with the group (the last included dinner) 



before wandering again and listening to some fun street music until it started to hail. 





Because of the cold and strange weather, we headed down to the hotel pub tonight and listened to the live music there...mostly classic rock with some country and a couple Irish songs. The last one we heard was Proud Mary for example. On to Limerick tomorrow after one last morning here in Killarney.