April 18, 2005 - The Ring of Kerry.

It was hard to leave such a comfortable B&B with such nice folks, but we were headed further south, so we bid them and their cozy fireplace adieu. As the day dawned nice and sunny, we decided to drive as far as we could around the Ring of Kerry on the Iveragh peninsula and then find our next B&B to stop for the night. I almost pulled out in front of a car pulling a horse trailer at a T-intersection right off the bat, but Monika yelled at me in time to stop driving forward and Lois yelled about the car in back of me in time to stop driving backward, so our car ended up unscathed although I was mentally shaken up a bit. Probably it was a good thing as I was extremely careful after that and didn't have any problems, but it does go to show that keeping vigilance at super high levels was really necessary when traffic comes at you from completely unexpected directions.

Besides looking for traffic in all the wrong places, the other problem I had in Ireland was maintaining a good scan of my rear view mirrors. Looking in the left and right hand side mirrors was no problem since I always scan both left and right mirrors at home; the only change was that in Ireland I had to pay primary attention to the right-hand mirror and secondary attention to the left-hand mirror. That went OK. But the hard part was forcing myself to scan the rear view mirror, and I think I finally figured out why. The basic problem was that for all my years of driving in the U.S., scanning up and to the left gave me absolutely no information at all, whereas scanning up and to the right gave me the view of the traffic behind me, which was often vitally important. So, in consequence I learned to automatically scan up and right. In the right-hand drive position in Ireland, however, scanning up and to the right is completely useless (nothing is there) and you must scan up and to the left to find the rear view mirror. It proved to be hard to convince myself to do that; it always took a conscious effort. At last I discovered that I could adjust my right hand mirror to also show me the cars behind me, so I adopted that as my final solution.

We joined the Ring of Kerry road with no further incidents and started our circuit of the Iveragh Peninsula. Our fist stop was the Kerry Bog Village Museum, and that took us a while because we got somewhat bogged down. Ahem. Although patronized by tour buses, which made us leery, this attraction turned out to be a genuine tiny settlement focused around the cutting of the nearby peat bog. The settlement consisted of houses for the turf cutter, a blacksmith, a dairy + stable house, a laborer, and a thatcher. Although the thatcher as the skilled tradesman had the nicest house, all these homes were quite simple and rustic. Furnishings were plain and functional, more along the lines of what we had seen at the Muckross Traditional Farms "small farm" exhibit than what we had seen at the Bunratty Folk Park.

The exhibits displayed implements appropriate to the occupations of this village, which included a forge, a turf wheelbarrow, and a variety of farm implements for harvesting the long reeds used for thatching. Serendipity slapped me in the face again when an old gentleman from the tour bus noticed me studying those implements and started to explain exactly how they were used. It turned out that he had worked on a farm using exactly these kinds of implements back in the 1960s and remembered quite vividly how the functioned and occasionally malfunctioned. We discussed how the cutter, the bundler, and the flipper-over (these are my names, not his) would all be used in sequence to get these sheaves of reeds cut, bundled, and dried. He also mentioned how tricky it was to stay on the hard, cast-iron seats when pushing on various levers to operate these things. It was extremely dangerous if the worker fell off the seat, and a lot of folks were seriously maimed or died using these implements. Once again happy to be in the Good New Days where we use motorized combines, I picked up a couple of CDs of Irish folk music as we exited the museum and continued on our way.

As we drove along, the scenery was just magnificent. The sky was deep blue with puffy white cumulus clouds, and we had great views of Dingle Bay directly to the north. We stopped to take pictures of the Dingle Peninsula across the bay whenever we found an overlook we could safely park in, which was rather seldom, as it turned out. The tour buses were supposed to all be traveling counter-clockwise, and we were also because it is much better on those narrow roads to be going WITH the tour buses rather than coming AGAINST them. I must say I saw a couple of tour buses also going around clockwise during the day, so obviously there are some scofflaw drivers out there also. Most of the oncoming traffic was, thank goodness, automobiles, but when big trucks came I had to slam on the brakes and squeeze over onto the non-existent left hand shoulder to give them enough room to pass.

When we ran out of road we found a ferry, so Monika was happy (see "Muschi Loves a Ferry" photo-poem). The short ferry ride took us over to Valencia Island on the western edge of the Iveragh Peninsula. This section was too narrow for tour busses and technically off the Ring of Kerry road, but I would highly recommend it if you ever get out that way.

When we parked to walk in Knights Town, an old lady toddled out of her house to inform us of the best route to take while driving across the island. She routed us first out to a big slate quarry where we had views of the lighthouse at the mouth of Dingle bay, and then up and over to the western end of the island. At the western edge of the island we found a small monument to the first successful telegraph line across the Atlantic. Successfully laying that cable on an unknown deep-sea bed was, in a way, the moon shot of the mid 1800s. From the monument site we also had good views of the Skellig Islands, two small, steeply-sided islands way offshore that somewhat resemble giant shark's teeth dropped into the ocean.

Coming back to the mainland via a causeway at Portmagee, we stopped for a bathroom break and lunch at a bar the old lady had recommended. Public bathrooms were not all that common in Ireland, so we were happy to see this one. I was intrigued by the "Tidy Toilet" award plaque on the bathrooms that stated these toilets were actually award-winning toilets. Aw go on! At first I thought this was another one of those Irish gags where somebody was pulling my leg, but the plaque really did look official and the language contained not a hint of levity, so I guess it was really on the up and up. The toilets were, I would agree, some of the nicest public toilets I have seen with nice wood trim in the interior, so the "Tidy Toilet" award from my point of view was well deserved.

Returning to the Ring of Kerry, we passed some peat fields that had active digging. It turns out that nowadays the turf cutters use some motorized equipment to help with the dirty work-sensible if you ask me. Once back on the ring road, we drove back east along the south edge of the Iveragh Peninsula and had wonderful views of the Kenmare Bay to the south. Across the blue waters of the bay we could just see the mountains on the Beara Peninsula sticking up from the horizon.

Our one stop along the way back was the Staigue circular ring fort. This fort had huge walls made from stacked slabs of stone and was in a remarkably good state of preservation for being 2,000-3,000 years old. I was fascinated that the entrance still held some slabs that forced you to turn sideways as you entered, but I could clearly see the defensive purpose in such an arrangement.

After a whole day of playing dodge ball with trucks and the occasional bus on the Ring of Kerry, I was ready to stop when we reached the town of Kenmare. As we approached town I saw a sign for a "Druid's Cottage" B&B, but we pushed on to find one closer to the center of town as Lois wanted to do some pub crawling. Unfortunately we found the ones in town were rather high priced or didn't have rooms, so we ended up going back to the Druid's Cottage for the night.

Later we drove into town for a pub dinner at the Purple Heather, and the kind lady at the counter gave me the paper after I started automatically reading it over her shoulder. We decided to take a walk after dinner and were circling around the main street shop area when Monika saw a sign pointing to a "Stone Circle". We started to walk down the lane in that direction when a cute little black cat crossed our path, stopping to stare a bit when I "meowed" at him. Later we saw yet another black cat at the Druid's cottage. (Fate? Coincidence? You decide!)

After following the "Stone Circle" signs for several blocks we did, in fact, arrive at an ancient circle of standing stones on a small knoll. The circle consisted of 15 large boulders set in roughly equal distance from a central big stone in the center. It was a very quiet and out-of-the-way place, but clearly the grass had been trampled right next to the big center stone. Now ordinarily I am not superstitious by nature, but you have to realize that we had the concatenation of staying at the Druid's Cottage, crossing the path of a black cat, and finding a Neolithic ring of stones possibly used by Druids all within a few minutes of each other. I imagine things can get more coincidental than that, but it certainly would take some doing.

Nevertheless, we returned to our B&B without incident and settled in to plan for the next day's travels (Lois and Monika) or work on Baby to download pictures and update the journal (me). I didn't hear anything untoward that evening except for the usual dogs barking threateningly, sheep baaing frantically, and someone coughing and choking downstairs, so I finally concluded all the druid stuff was merely my overactive imagination and turned in to sleep.