Beyond the Ring of Kerry

We are in Ireland! Already on day 5 of this epic six-week voyage and finally getting around to writing. I am currently sitting in Galway but want to tell you about our whirlwind of a time in County Kerry.

Driving in Ireland

You can’t fully appreciate the Irish experience without an understanding of the challenges of driving. In no particular order of difficulty, they include:

• Sitting on the wrong side of the car and driving on the wrong side of the road. This takes some getting used to – for both driver and passenger. While Dave clearly has the more challenging role of driver, I found myself wincing when he would err too close to the things on my side of the car. We, of course, chose to amp up the challenge by being frugal and renting a manual transmission vehicle. So not only are we on the wrong sides of both car and road; Dave is shifting gears with his opposite hand (thankfully he’s a lefty).
• Roundabouts. Europeans love their roundabouts and Ireland is no exception.
• Roads that are narrow and curvy. For people like us from the Midwest in the U.S. where land is flat and roads are wide and mostly straight, this was often nightmarish. Nothing like rounding a bend on a road more like a go-cart track only to have another driver, or even better a bus, come at you at a ridiculously high rate of speed. There is no room for error. Hedges are often right up against the road, sometimes scraping the side of the car as you try to carefully squeeze past oncoming vehicles.
• Navigation can be difficult. Again, we chose to forego a GPS due to the expense. I swear that leprechauns are playing tricks on foreign drivers. I had meticulously printed out maps and directions before leaving home and we had a map from the car rental agency. None of them matched – not each other and not the actual road signs. I failed as a replacement for Gretchen (our name for the GPS lady). We ended up paying for phone access to Googlemaps just to keep our sanity.

Having said all that, our first four days in Ireland were largely spent driving.

Kenmare: Gateway to Ring of Kerry and Beyond

Our journey started with a four-hour drive from Dublin to Kenmare, our home base for four nights. We stayed with Faye, who we found through AirBnB. Her house was a short walk from Kenmare town center and within minutes of the infamous Ring of Kerry (and closer still to the lesser known Ring of Beara – more on that later).

We had timed our visit to coincide with Kenmare Fair, for centuries always held on August 15th. We arrived in Kenmare on the 14th so after a pub dinner and a good night’s sleep, it was fair day.

Kenmare Fair is interesting but not all that exciting unless you are interested in livestock. The whole thing takes up a few blocks around the main square. Many booths were selling hardware, some had clothes, and a few had flea market items. The highlight was the animals which were all displayed together on one of the roads. They had everything from chickens to rabbits, goats, cows, and horses. We were done with the fair in a couple of hours so decided to head out of town to the Ring of Kerry.

Ring of Kerry vs. Ring of Beara vs. Ring of Dingle

The southwest of Ireland is spectacularly beautiful. Most rank the Ring of Kerry first, followed by Dingle and finally Beara. We did all three, one per day. The Rings are driving tours unless you have the time and energy to hike or bike them. They are long. The Ring of Kerry is the longest at 179km while Dingle is only 50km and Beara 137km. We did all three in the afternoon and lucked out with weather all three days. While they had been forecasting a 50% chance of rain each day, we only got showered on briefly during our drive around Dingle. The sun was scarcest on our drive around Ring of Kerry but was very much in evidence the other two days. We also anticipated traffic nightmares, especially on Ring of Kerry, but happily only experienced some of that on the Dingle drive which was done on a Saturday. In essence, we had as close to ideal conditions for these drives as you could expect.

Our verdict, based on numbers of stops and photos taken was that the Ring of Beara is severely underrated. Judge for yourself.

The Ring of Kerry

We picked up the Ring of Kerry right in Kenmare. The 179km route takes you through a part of Killarney National Park and Killarney itself. In Killarney you can visit the famous Muckross House but we chose not to because of our late start after Kenmare Fair. There are beautiful vistas along the road but much of the drive seemed to be in amongst the hedges with no views whatsoever. We also chose not to go off the beaten path much on this drive so that we could complete the ring before dark. This was, after all, our first full day in Ireland and we were still adjusting to the car and the roads. All in all, we enjoyed the Ring of Kerry but weren’t sure that it lived up to all the hype.

The Ring of Beara

Day two took us to the less frequented Ring of Beara. We had a mostly sunny day and, with a shorter distance to travel, we stopped more often and took the longer, more scenic route. This drive hugged the coast much more than the Ring of Kerry and had more towns to explore including the colorful Eyeries.

Dingle Peninsula

We had been to Dingle eight years ago in February and were curious about how different it would be in August. It was in a couple of ways. One, it was sunny and everything was in bloom. Two, it was much more crowded, in fact, the most crowded of the three rings. We started later in this one because we first stopped in Dingle town to check out the All Ireland Boat Regatta. It was really windy and the rowing teams had all they could handle just to get lined up to start. We watched only one race and left on our drive around the peninsula. Dingle has the most dramatic scenery of the three but it all comes in the first half of the drive.

Next up for us: Galway!http://europeyourway.net/galway