Ireland Day 3 (or 4?): Dingle and Beyond

This has been a long and interesting day. Kay and I met our son, his wife, and the machatunim at a cafe in Killarney for breakfast in downtown Killarney and then headed for the Dingle Peninsula. Jon came with us and handled the driving, and we went to the Gallarus Oratory. I looked it up, and it’s a bit like America’s Stonehenge in New Hampshire. Nobody knows who made it or when it was made, and it may very well be a recent creation designed to be a tourist attraction. You lay down your 5 euros and walk up the path, and there it is. I walked around it, stuck my head inside, and walked back to the car park.

Ok, one more thing to check off my bucket list that I didn’t even know was there. But Dingle is an astonishing place. Judge for yourself:

After some sightseeing, we parted company. Jon and the Yratas headed for Limerick, and Kay and I headed for Ballyvaughan. We decided to explore a little and took the northern route to County Clare.

A long section is one lane with a sheer drop to the left. If you see a car coming from the other direction, you look for a turn-off and pull in and hope there is enough space for the other vehicle to squeeze by. A couple times there was only a few inches of clearance, and I thought that maybe I had finally pushed my luck too far. But the Gods of Ireland were merciful, and we somehow got to the bottom of the glen and headed up the road to County Clare.

There are other challenges to driving in Ireland. The first of these is getting used to driving on the left. This, in and of itself, is not so difficult; you start to adjust pretty quickly to being on the wrong side of the road while sitting on the wrong side of the car. However, this is a very different prospect when the roads are narrow. How narrow, I hear you ask? I’m not the first to mention this, but it is so narrow that you feel like you are going to sideswipe every car and truck coming from the other direction. Because of this, there is a natural tendency to drift to the left. Unfortunately, this being Ireland, there is almost always a quaint hedge or stone wall mere inches to your left, although they don’t seem so goddamn quaint when you could reach out and touch them out the passenger window. I couldn’t help but imagine an irritated Irish wife berating her spouse, “Semus, whatever were you thinking at all? That stone wall you built is a full 3 inches from the highway. Is it giving away all our land you’re after? Away with ye, ye wee monkey!” 

And then there are the speed limits. It is almost never less than 50 kph unless you are in a village, and once you get on the open road, it’s often about 100 kph. It’s so narrow that on a number of occasions I could hear the vegetation brushing the side of the car. The worst was when I got so close that my passenger-side mirror collided with not one but two side views of parked cars. We stopped, and miraculously, nobody was damaged that I could tell. The Irish don’t seem phased by the speed. This became abundantly clear when we were coming into Ballyvaughan on the locally famous Corkscrew Hill. Here it is:

Imaging my surprise when some guy in a Beemer actually passed me on the way down. We somehow managed to survive, although at several points I thought I heard my grandparents calling me to move toward the light. But at long last, we arrived at Hyland’s Hotel and checked in. 

Tune in again to read the next installment of the Ireland saga.