April 19, 2005 - Ross Castle in Killarney.

After another great breakfast we closed the loop on the Ring of Kerry by driving from Kenmare over Moll's Gap to Killarney. On the way down from the gap we stopped at "Ladies View", a promontory from which Queen Victoria had viewed the vistas back in the 1840s. She was suitably impressed and they renamed the promontory in her honor. Even though the sky was overcast and the colors of the mountains were more muted as a result, we were also impressed by the view.

Continuing into Killarney, we parked at Ross Castle, a restored 15th Century Irish castle shaped like a large square tower. Ross Castle was situated on the shore on of the lower of the three lakes around Killarney, a picturesque position and one that should have also helped in its defense over the centuries. But in the end the lake actually made it easier for Cromwell to ship his cannons over to the castle and force it to surrender in the mid 17th Century.

The history of the castle was a small part of the history of the centuries of struggle of the Irish against the English, and it clarified for me the antipathy that many Irish seem to feel for the English even in the 21st Century. I saw one bumper sticker that said something to the effect that "I root for the Irish soccer team and whoever is playing against the English!" That antipathy might help explain Irish neutrality in World War II that I had wondered at when we read about it at Foynes.

In any case, the castle itself was a lot of fun to visit. We climbed a narrow circular staircase to the three upper floors, each one with a different purpose. The ground floor was for storage, the second floor was the parlor, the third floor was the earl's family bedroom, and the fourth floor was the banquet hall. We also looked in at the kitchen area, the servant's quarters (very tiny!) and the garderobe or privy. Each floor was equipped with authentic period furniture but only one of those pieces was Irish and it came from a different castle. Still, it all helped us imagine how the earl, his family, servants, and soldiers all lived, and boy did it again make me glad to live in the Good New Days.

At the end of the tour we decided to walk the 3 kilometers from the castle into Killarney through the National Park. The trail wound around along the lake shore passing by an old abbey on one of the islands and then up a small river to reach the cathedral. While walking we were passed by "jaunting carts", small horse-drawn carriages that are used to carry visitors around parts of Killarney National Park, for a price, of course.

By the time we reached town we were getting hungry but we thought it would be easy to find a place to eat around the cathedral. Boy were we wrong! We ended up walking almost another kilometer into the main part of town before finding a cluster of open pubs and bistros just about a block from the Tourist Information Center where we could finally have a bite. Carefully inspecting all the menus posted outside, a great custom in Europe, we chose a tiny bistro on the second floor of an old building and settled in for a meal plus a well-deserved rest.

After lunch we decided to walk over to the Tourist Information Center down the street and see what that was all about. But in the middle of the block I saw a sign advertising Internet access and we stopped to check our Email. It cost us 1 Euro for 15 minutes, which was just enough to find out that Lois had not sold her house and we did not yet have a grandchild, and that's all we really wanted to know. So we continued to the Tourist Information Center, which was really more tourist gift shop than information center. In the States we are used to Information Centers that have all free material and helpful personnel. Here nothing was free and the personnel were only interested in acting as cashiers. Nevertheless we did find nice stickers for the truck and some interesting books that we took with on our way back to Ross Castle.

We walked back through a small botanical garden and past a house that had palm trees growing in front. It always shocked us a bit to see palm trees in Ireland; it's just not something we expected that far north. But given the influence of the Gulf Stream, the west coast of Ireland hardly ever gets a deep freeze and palm trees grow quite well.

Climbing back into the car we started our drive back to Kenmare and almost ran over some sheep that had blithely wandered into the street. Outside of the Burren, sheep were almost everywhere in the southwest rural section of Ireland. Although they wandered the roads, they seemed to have a pretty good sense of staying away from automobiles, for which I was eternally grateful. The sheep were also surprisingly colorful; each flock was spray painted with some unique color scheme, such as a red butt or a blue neck. Presumably the paint schemes helped identify the flocks, but it did look almost comical.

In Kenmare we stopped at a supermarket to buy meat and cheese for our evening sandwiches and at a bakery to buy scones and rhubarb pie for desert. Back at our B&B they had the TV on to watch the selection of the new pope, and we saw Cardinal Ratzinger become Pope Benedict the XVI. After a light supper with Lois in our room, we all worked on a miscellaneous collection of tasks: crosswords, arranging music, reading, updating the journal, and then it was time to head for bed. Since we were all sitting or lying on the bed to begin with-not many chairs in the B&B rooms-we didn't have all that far to go, which was good because we were really tired!