Sunday, August 31, 2003 (Newcastle West - Republic of Ireland)
Pub crawling slows you down. Another second night
in the same place. Still looking for those DVDs. Never too far from another
castle. And where shall we go now? Why pay for a campsite when you can
park
for free?
Day 172. Still a little tired from yesterday
evening’s pub-crawling, we got up slowly this morning to another one of
our now characteristic pancake breakfasts. I anticipated this last night and
pre-made the pancake mix, ready for this morning. Actually, now that I think
about it, I’ve eaten breakfast every day since we started touring in the
brick. Ordinarily, I don’t eat breakfast at
all.
For the second time now, we
spent two nights in the same place without moving on. Doing so breaks up the
tedium of continually moving on from place to place and we enjoyed the time
spent on the end of the peninsular. As one of Irelands biggest tourist
attractions, the Ring of Kerry is a terribly touristy (tacky even) place but we
somehow managed to find a secluded spot in a nice setting away from the busloads
of tourists to rest. Just before we left the campsite, I topped up the water
tank and emptied the chemical toilet. With all the brick’s systems now
fully charged, serviced, topped off, etc., we left Cahersiveen. Within an hour
or so, and the odd stop here and there to admire the scenery, we had completed
the Ring of Kerry and were full speed ahead (at a staggering fifty miles or
eighty kilometres per hour) towards
Killarney.
Killarney is not a
terribly large town – about medium sized for this region of Ireland. We
wandered around the centre of town for a while and procured a few provisions
from the local supermarket. I had high hopes that we would find a DVD shop large
enough to stock the fourth season Star Trek Deep Space 9 that was released just
this past week but, alas, I was disappointed in this regard yet again. The
situation is getting a little desperate, as we’ve now completed all of
seasons three and two and I’m starting to worry about what we will watch
next. It looks like we’ll have to wait until we reach the next big city
before we’ll find it now. We will be passing through Limerick tomorrow so
I’m keeping my fingers
crossed.
Having explored Killarney to
its fullest extent (which amounts to just a few main shopping streets by all
accounts), we drove over to the nearby Ross Castle and spent the remainder of
the afternoon ‘doing’ another castle. The keep of Ross Castle is
almost completely intact on the outside and is well taken care of on the inside
too. The inside has been extensively refurbished and, as a result, seems to lack
a lot of the charm that you find with less well-preserved castles, at least for
my liking. We listened intently to the guide as she took us up the stumbling
steps and through the various levels. All the previous experiences we’ve
had with viewing castles recently must be starting to pay off since there was
nothing in her well-delivered speeches that was new information for either of
us.
We then spent a while debating
where to go next. The original plan was to travel westwards along the Dingle
peninsular. There are apparently some seal colonies on the outlying islands at
the end of the peninsular. I was all for this originally but it suddenly seemed
like too much of a repeat of what we’ve just done over the past couple of
days and there is still plenty more yet that Ireland has to offer – we
hope. In the end, we decided to give the Dingle peninsular a miss after all in
favour of continuing farther North. We’re still not quite sure exactly
where we are going but it is in the general direction of Limerick and then up
towards Galway. We’ll take another look at the map tomorrow morning to
figure out what our next move will
be.
In the meantime, we’ve
stopped for the night just a few dozen Kilometres South of Limerick. With a full
tank of water and a completely charged battery, we have no need to spend money
on a campsite so we drove around a little looking for a secluded place somewhere
out of the way to park for the night. Our host location for tonight turned out
to be the car park of the local public library. Even though we are mostly out of
sight, we did get a visit from a friendly neighbour who reminded me that the
headlamps were still on. Nice little town.
Posted: Sun - August 31, 2003 at 01:16 PM