Day 6 - Ringa Dingle

Our adventure today was to drive the scenic Loop around the Dingle Peninsula.  But before I write about that, a little side note.  We spend a lot of time in the car and we all have our same spots.  Bobby and me like children in the back seat with our pile of food, maps and other miscellaneous crap; Triecia as navigator and Damon driving.  At least once a day we have some laughable moment with our SUVan.  Every morning when we get in the car, the driver's seat adjustment automatically resets the seat for a midget.  Given that Damon is 6’4”, the morning routine is… get in the car, Damon turns it on and then starts yelling when the seats automatically moves forward squishing his legs while he flails frantically trying to re-adjust.  Yes, every morning.  He got out the car's manual and tried to reprogram it yesterday, but today proves that it didn’t work.  Keeps the rest of us entertained.

There are several famous loop tours on the West Coast of Ireland, the main three being the Connemara Loop, The Ring of Kerry, and the Dingle Loop.  Given that the Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Loop are right next to each other, I had nicknamed the Dingle Loop the Ringa Dingle.  It really rolls of the tongue better.  All we knew about the Dingle Peninsula was that it was scenic, and contained 10,000 residents and over 500,000 sheep.  If we are ever going to be part of a romantic comedy where our car breaks down and we get waylaid by a herd of sheep, this was going to be our best chance.

It took us about 2 hours to get to the town of Dingle.  The drive was just gorgeous.  Weather went between cloudy and sunny, but the hills and valleys and stone walls and sheep were everywhere.  

Our Sheep Wall pictures are getting better!

We also see old buildings dotting the landscape.  I don’t mean a building from 50 years ago – I mean crumbling stone castles, forts, etc. everywhere, interspersed with modern housing.  They just leave stone towers alone and build around them.  

Old Castle (?) next to a modern house

We heard that at one point, there were 3,500 castles in Ireland – I imagine some of these buildings we see are remnants.  I haven’t mentioned it yet, but since we’ve been in the car so much, we downloaded Demi Moore’s new auto-biography, which has kept us entertained the entire week.  

Dingle is a small town and we had to circle it twice to figure out how to get to the Main drag.  We’ve noticed that in all Irish towns, you can park in your direction on either side of the street, which makes figuring out if a street is one way exceptionally difficult.  We had a few close calls on that one!  Once in Dingle, we had, you guessed it, a pub lunch. 

Dingle Harbour

Dingle Street

Lunch Pub

The Ringa Dingle is about a 30-mile loop if you do the whole thing, which was our original goal.  I had been so excited for the Ring, but the first few miles were just more sheep and walls and I was starting to feel a little guilty about dragging everyone out here.  There were a few historic places to stop but given that each one cost 3 Euro per person and it was cold and windy outside, we would send one person out to scout to see if it was worthy.  Damon found one cool thing but didn’t tell us about it until he came back to the car – he got to pet a sheep and a dog and crawl in a hole.  He said it was cool. We trust him.  

Then all at once, we hit the ocean, the sun came out, and the scenery changed to breathtaking landscapes.

Narrow curvy road with stone walls on both sides

No passing room

One of the coolest unexpected things we found was a film site that was used in The Last Jedi.  Since Damon is a total Star Wars geek, we had to stop.  And by total fluke, he was wearing the most appropriate t-shirt for the occasion.  

For some unexplainable reason, both Damon & my Invisiligns seem to be characters in a lot of our stories.  This time, Damon was taking off his raincoat for a picture with the Star Wars sign and his Invisiligns went flying out of his pocket.  He and Bobby worked together to clean the street grit off of them before we continued.

The film site was on private land and up at the top of a steep grassy hill.  We donated 1 Euro each to the land owner and hiked the hill dodging sheep land mines as we went.  Triecia only wiped out once.  For those keeping track, we are at 1 each hiking wipeouts for me, Bobby & Damon, and 2 for Triecia.  We are a coordinated group. 

At the top of the hill, which was at least 3 fake summits later, there was a little building completely filled with sheep poop (the only shelter on the hill) and one very phallic looking rock. It was very windy at the top.

Sheep Shelter

As a fellow Outlander devotee, Triecia was desperately trying to move through this standing stone to find Jamie Frasier in 1745 Ireland.  Only he is Scottish.  Oh well.

On the way back down Star Wars hill, we ran into a heard of sheep.  Since Damon was able to pet one earlier in the day, I wanted to give it a go as well.  We slowly approached the group, but with this guy giving us the death stare, we thought maybe this was not the right herd to go in for the snuggle and backed away with eyes locked until we were a safe distance.

We spent so much time at Star Wars hill that we opted not to do the full loop and cut back across the middle to get back to Dingle.  But not before we stopped at Inch Beach.  No clue how the Inch name came to be, but I read that you could drive your car onto the beach.  It should go without saying that as we entered the beach, I had to tell Damon “NO DONUTS.  NO GOING IN THE WATER” because I know how his mind works and I know he was headed right for the water. 

stopped, did some artistic leaping pictures, and then finished our Ringa Dingle. 

We were just getting back into Dingle and we were all commenting on what an awesome driver Damon has been – especially on these crazy narrow twisty turny streets.  We had the gopro on all day today and one day I will post pictures of how nuts Irish drivers are as they pass people.  In any case, as we were pouring on the accolades, Damon is making a left turn.  A very wide left turn.  Into oncoming traffic.  I just started yelling WRONG LANE WRONG LANE WRONG LANE and he luckily swerved into the left lane narrowly avoiding a head-on crash.  No more accolades until the car is returned unscathed. 

Our stop for the night was Killarney.  We found a B&B that had a phenomenal rating, so we decided to start there.  Triecia and I are usually the room-getters.  The B&B side door was unlocked but we couldn’t find anyone.  We wandered the house yelling but no one came, so we started to leave and then Eileen popped out in her slippers – she didn’t have any residents this night, so she was going to close up shop, but then decided to open for us.  We had two wonderful rooms and run of the common areas, including a lounge/library well stocked with drinks and snacks. 

We walked into town because we knew there was a great Irish wool sweater shop, where we loaded up on all things Irish wool, then had dinner, then went back to the B&B where we had cookies and tea before heading into a bed that, I kid you not, had 3” of down cushion below and like 11” of down blankets on top – it was awesome!  Unfortunately, I had started to feel a few cold symptoms coming on and loaded up on Advil and sleeping pills to try to ward it off, which pretty much put me into a coma until morning.

Killarney at night