Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Breakfast in the hotels is beginning to become pretty familiar: scrambled eggs, sausage, white and black pudding (kind of a sausage), tomatoes, a selection of cereals and juices, and whole milk…and of course, hot tea. The morning in Ennis started as most of the rest have started. We’re also beginning to get the hang of having our suitcases in the hallway an hour before we leave. Thankfully, we were out about half an hour later than we’ve normally been leaving. The best part is that we had reached the front seats of the coach in the rotation. Every day we rotate two seats clockwise to give everyone a chance to be up front at some point in the tour. It so happened that today the rotation got both Alan and Joyce and Forst and Louise to front row seats. It was a good day for being in the front!

Our first stop was mostly a “pee break” in a small village called Adare, apparently the place in Ireland to go to get married. There are several thatched cottages and a small cathedral in the town. Back on the bus and off to the next stop outside of Limerick (which it turns out has nothing to do with the little poems) to a store that specialized in hand-crafted jewelry and wool clothing. We also were handed an Irish Coffee as we entered the store. Joyce and Forst thought they were pretty good. The merchandise was very nice, but a little pricey.

We were quickly off on a peninsula out into the Atlantic Ocean on the southwest corner of Ireland. The route around the peninsula has become known as the “Ring of Kerry”. It took about 4 hours to make the circuit through hairpin turns (try that in a 46-passenger motor coach that drives on the left side of the road), narrow roads, and many up and downs. It was well worth the effort as we saw some spectacular views of the island and the ocean. We had a late lunch stop about halfway around the Ring, with one of the most fantastic lunch views we’ve ever had. The tour book was very accurate when it said that we would focus our cameras on “sparkling seascapes, mountains dotted with brightly colored farmhouses, winding lanes bordered with subtropical vegetation.”

We took an unexpected stop to view the ruins of a ring fort that dates back to somewhere between 1000BC and 500AD. The architecture and construction was amazingly intricate for the time. It was also quite a contrast to much of the architecture that we’ve been seeing. Because of the recently booming economy in Ireland, there is a significant amount of new construction here. There are not nearly as many preserved structures as we saw in England, Scotland, and Wales, largely because the structures that were here a couple hundred years ago were thatched huts that wouldn’t stand the test of time.

Our last stop on the Ring of Kerry was Ladies View over the Lakes of Killarney, and then it was on to the Killarney Court Hotel and a tour dinner in the hotel.