Sunday 24th May
Dublin
Took a taxi from the airport to our hotel, which, it turned out, was across the opposite side of the city. The taxi driver was a chatty fellow who had spent a great year in Australia about 15 years ago, and had lived in Many for a while then travelled through NW NSW and central Australia down to Adelaide. He helped us with a few suggestions about where we might travel to over the next week.
The hotel we had booked, Butler's Town House, is in an older Georgian style house in an area similar to Kensington in London, so it seemed quite familiar to me. You walk up stairs to go in the front door, and it has a large guest lounge on this floor and the dining room and conservatory (where breakfast is served) is on the ground level. After lugging our bags up 3 flights of stairs and rearranging the furniture in our room to suit us (for some reason, in Europe they always put twin beds right next to each other – doesn't make any sense to me at all), we walked to a local Indian restaurant and shared some deliciously spicy things and a couple of beers. It was very strange not to have had any Asian flavours at all for a number of weeks.
Monday 25th May
We got up early (well, 7am) and after breakfast walked into the city to get a City Tour bus. I was surprised that I wasn't at all impressed by Dublin as a city – there were a few interesting buidings and the huge Phoenix Park looks as though it would be a good place to spend time if you lived there, but otherwise it was a bit dingy and higgledy-piggledy. It was very cold on the top of the bus and we hadn't really dressed for it – it had been 22 the day before, and was only 14 at this stage. We had a warming drink and then shopped for a couple of hours …. some of us more successfully than others (as attested to by the fact that Peta posted a parcel home the next day to reduce her baggage). It had been a long day and we had eaten a delicious lunch at an Italian restaurant in a very swanky new area within Arnotts department store, so we went into Marks and Spencers food hall and got a couple of salads for our dinner, hopped into a taxi and spent the rest of the evening in the lounge reading, blogging and downloading / uploading photos.
Tuesday 26th May
Late breakfast and a slow morning deciding where to go then to Hertz to collect our hire car which is a brand new Toyota Aurius – a nice little car that handles really well and just the right size for us and our luggage. We had googled 'prettiest villages in Ireland' and found a place to stay in Adare, which would take us towards the south west. Peta navigated us onto the motorway and off we went. When we arrived at Adare at about 5.30pm, we were disappointed to discover it was on the main road and a little like Berrima x 10. The town (not village) was busy and the place we had booked to stay was on the main road, so we continued driving and rang the owner to explain that we preferred to stay somewhere quieter. Then came the challenge of finding somewhere else. Suffice to say that it was not a great experience - the one you have to have at sometime on a holiday.
Wednesday 27th May
But then we found somewhere to stay around here ...
We drove south through Kerry to a little fishing village called Portmagee. We are here again tonight - Peta has braved the elements and gone 12 kms out to sea in a very small boat to visit the Skellig Islands and I have opted to stay on land for the day. I'm in charge of booking accommodation for the next couple of nights - it's a Bank Holiday weekend and the Irish are on the move! The weather is quite cold, wet and blustery but everyone assures us that Saturday is going to be gorgeous. This is a view from just above our B&B.
Dingle Harbour (below) - we stopped on our journey south for a coffee break in this lovely little village.
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