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.
• Your narrative at the beginning of this entry is REALLY throwing me off, LOL. I have ZERO recollection of those details and very few photos of this area/part of the drive (and the ones that I do have are very generically labeled)... I was probably asleep when she was explaning what we were seeing. :-P.
ReplyDelete• Photo No. 6 is cool and perfectly captures just how terrifying that road was, haha.
• I really enjoyed the Blasket Islands Centre-- it was fascinating to imagine how those people lived in those tiny houses on that tiny island. I could never. It also really made me want to learn Irish but: (1) Irish is hard, and (2) my brain literally cannot physically handle more than one foreign language, all of the synapses start misfiring.
• I'm pretty sure that Dingle was another place where I insisted that we eat even though you weren't hungry because I'm always hungry.
• Love the blue skiesssssssss. I wish we'd had more pretty days. :(.
• This was our big shopping day, haha. We both splurged. This reminds me that I really need to wear that jacket-y thing I bought more.
• I like it when you post photos of the menus because then I can guess at what I ordered. Of those choices, I'm 100% sure I chose the Chicken Kiev, and I certainly hope that I also ordered the cheese tart because dang that sounds amazing right now.
• That Trump-impersonating street musician was amazing. I have several videos of him, as well as random intervening hailstorm, haha. I regret not buying his CD.
• I miss Orchard Thieves. :(. It's probably a super-common cider that you can easily buy here at every single grocery store and I've just never bothered to look, but I'd prefer to keep it a ~special Ireland thing~.