Day 10, 20 May 2012

One of the more colorful streets in town.

Day ten was supposed to be a, relatively, short one.  We were going to go down to the Dingle peninsula, less famous than its southern neighbor, the ring of Kerry.  The drive down took about an hour and a half and was pretty curvy.  There were some queasy stomachs in the back seat when we got to Dingle town.  Tracy, we discovered later, was just coming down with a stomach bug that would affect her for several days.

Dingle is part of the gaeltacht, where the Irish government pays to maintain Gaellic culture.  As part of that, all of the signs are only in Gael.  While this is grand, to be sure, Dingle relies on tourism to survive, so the townspeople have gone out and painted Dingle under the Gaelic name so tourists know where they are going.

Fishing boat in the harbor.

The waterfront and main tourist area.

Dingle is a quaint little town with a small fishing port, a dolphin in the harbor and roads leading around the Dingle peninsula, making it the tourist hub for the area.  We got in before the rush, though things are pretty quiet in Ireland right now.  We parked in the pay parking, putting in three hours as we have gotten bitten every time we only put in two.  I took some pictures of the boys on the dolphin statue in the square by the pier.

The boys riding the dolphin statue.

This is my kind of hardware store.

Rhys, chilling while he waits for Granddad and I to catch up.

The courthouse.  It is open for one day a month.

The ladies wanted to do some shopping.  Granddad and I did not.  Owyn decided to go with Nana and Tracy since they promised to go to the dolphin store.  Rhys came with us.  We walked up through the town and back down.  It is sort of laid out on a triangle.  Granddad had Rick Steve’s guidebook, which pointed us to a couple of little wonders that we would have missed without it.

There was a hotdog stand that was supposed to open at noon.  Both boys wanted a hotdog.  Rhys and I got there at a quarter till and waited.  He ended up opening at 1220.  That was just when Owyn arrived, so the timing was good and they each got a dog; Rhys’ with ketchup and mustard and Owyn’s with just ketchup.

The ladies had hit a bunch of stores, one of which had a restaurant in it.  This had blown Owyn’s mind.  It was the first thing he had to tell me about when we all got back together.  “Daddy, there was a store that had a restaurant in it!”  He was very excited about that.  He didn’t even mention the custard that Mama had bought him there.

As the boys munched on their dogs, and the ladies stopped in one more shop, we moved down the pier towards a restaurant that Granddad had made a reservation for us in.  The food was splendid sea food, though this is when Tracy’s stomach really took a turn for the worst.  They had an incredible seafood chowder, which is really a specialty throughout Ireland we are discovering.

They boys ate a little bit but we didn’t order them lunch, since they had already had hotdogs.  They were restless by the time we were wrapping up, so I took them outside to play while everyone else finished their food. 

The rest of the family trickled out to the car and we began the long process of getting in and getting buckled up to go.  I’m the only one allowed to drive, so I am always in the front right.  Granddad sites front left.  Nana is behind Granddad with Tracy behind me and Owyn in between.  This makes for a very crowded back seat.  With three butts and a child booster it is quite hard to get to the seatbelts.  Rhys is in the very back in a jump seat.  He seems happy back there, though that seat does seem to induce the most car sickness.

The boy's auntie Karm had bought them several presents to help keep them busy on the trip.  Their favorite, by far, was the compasses.  They would stare at them and then announce, "We're going the right way".  "Keep going this way Daddy, we're right on course".  It was both hysterical and made us feel good, since using a compass is a useful skill.

The ring of Dingle is done in a clockwise direction, starting at 6 o’clock with Dingle.  We eeled up the narrow road, stopping or slowing for pictures.  The road is about one and a half cars wide and has stone walls and hedges on both sides.  The shoulder is only about a foot wide in the widest spots.

Famine cottage.  Abandoned since 1848.

Iron age ring fort.  

Our first actual stop was at a famine cottage.  In 1848 the potato crop rotted in ground.  Ireland was depopulated through deaths from starvation, made worse by English cruelty, as well as by immigration, both voluntary and forced.  The Kavanaughs left the cottage in 1848 and never came back.  Now it is on a farm.  There is a walled path leading up to it, through pastures.  The farm family charges 3 euro to go up.  Granddad was the only one willing to pay the fee.  The ladies and the boys stayed in the car while I got out to stretch my legs and calm my nerves.  Did I mention that the roads are narrow?

The edge of Europe.

After the famine cottage we drove around the outer edge of the peninsula, hitting the western most point of land in Europe on the way.  This is a dubious claim in my eyes as Ireland is an island and there are several islands farther out.  Whatever.  It makes the locals happy.

The "harbor" for the island is in the bottom of this picture.  Goes a ways towards understanding their isolation.

We stopped at the Great Blascket Island Center.  This is a museum devoted to the, now abandoned, village on Great Blascket Island.  The school there closed in the early part of the century and the Irish government forced the final few oldsters to leave the island in 1952.  This was an isolated, Gaelic speaking population of fishermen just three miles off the shore of the mainland.  They had some sheep and grew some vegetables.  The soil was created, as it was on the Dingle peninsula, by bringing sand and seaweed up from the shore and mixing it with the native clay.  This took many years and yielded a very thin topsoil; just enough to grow grass and some food.  The fishermen there fished from traditional carracks, though made of canvas rather than leather.

The oratory, over a couple of stonewalls that are everywhere in Ireland.

This is about as simple as a stone church can get.

Side view.  It was very difficult to get a picture without people in it.

After the museum we continued on and found the Gallarus Oratory, built around 700AD.  The inside of the church is about the size of our bedroom back home.  The interior is dark and very austere.  The only break to the raw stone is the window, opposite the door, and the two large stones, that stick out, to hang the door from.

Due to sickly stomachs we called the day here and took the quick way back to Dingle, then back to the cottage.  We did make one quick stop on the way, however.  We just had to stop at the South Pole Pub and take pictures.  One of the local boys joined the Royal Navy and made three trips to Antarctica.  Tom Creane came back and opened a pub, where he spent the rest of his days.  Since I have been to Antarctica I had to get some pictures to celebrate the connection.

A nice retirement business.

There was much napping on the part of little boys on the way home.  They both get car sick when they try to read or watch movies in the car.  Nana will read them a story from time to time but there is only so much of that that any of the adults can handle.  They have discovered that sleep is a time machine and that if they rack out, we are often “there” when they awaken.

The trip back was not bad and we had big plans for dinner.  We had bought a disposable grill and some steaks the day before.  I grilled the steaks while Granddad fried up some potatoes and we made a salad.  It wasn’t my best grilling job, but it was passable and made us all feel better.