Lovin' Ireland

July 2

Ron and I loved the hostel we stayed in so much last night, that we decided to stay another night and do the Slea Head Loop today without our bags on. 40 miles on the dot. Today was truley some of the best landscape we had yet, un til the super heavy fog rolled in blocking our views. LOL There were tons of ruins along the way to visit - we spent almost as much time off our bikes as we did on.


Down the pier at the tip of the Dingle Pennisula. This is in lots of postcards - but with sheep coming up.


The landscape before the fog rolled in.



An ancient bee hive hut!



July 1

Despite starting our ride this morning in the rain, after about 20 miles it cleared up. Yeah! We had a surprisingly quick ride into the town of Dingle today, only about 45 miles and less than 4 hours! You can tell - not a lot of hills. We decided to stay in a hostel to get out of the rain from our previous night and day in it. We took a walk along the bluffs before supper and actually saw Fungi, this lone bottlenose dolphin that lives in the bay here at Dingle. He has been here for 26 years so far and there are boats that take people out to see him. He's guaranteed to visit or you get your money back. People can even go swimming with the dolphin. I think the town bought him from Sea World.



Fungi - the local dolphin and unofficial town mascott.




Dingle



The beach at Inch. Those vans rent surf boards and all sorts of people were surfing!



June 30

Today was supposed to be our "off" day from cycling, but we still managed 25 miles of cycling between all our exploring. We tried to start the day off exploring the National Park, but Ron got his bungee cord stuck in the sprockets so bad, we had to abort the trip and head into town and a bike shop. So we spent the morning walking around town and then went back to the park to ride around the lake and find the waterfall. By the time we got done with all our exploring it was time for dinner and then back into town for a movie - Year One - and then of course to a Pub for some more music.



Torc Waterfall, inside the National Park. Again flip the picture in your mind.



Muckross House, the old manor that sits in the National Park. It was pretty impressive.



An old yew tree in the Abby inside the National Park.


June 29

So Ron and I left Kenmare at a pretty reasonable hour, expecting the absolute worse heading up the mountain passes with all the warnings we were given. However, much to our shock and delight, the mountain passes were not steep at all. There was climbing and amazing views - but not the treacherous steep road we were expecting. In fact we made it to Killarney in such good time that we set up camp and hopped back on our bikes to bicycle the Gap of Dunlow, another mountain pass, that was beyond beautiful. By the time we had dinner and walked around town, we called it a night and went to bed pretty early. 50ish miles today.





On our way up to the Gap of Dunloe - you can see the winding road we cycled up in the background.

Kenmare, the town we left to cycle over to Killarney.

Me cycling thru a rock tunnel on the way into Killarney. Notice I don't yet know how to rotate images.

Ron and I at Moll's Gap - our first mt. pass that was not very steep at all.