Ireland - finale

Our last full day was split between Killarney and Dingle (did ya see Leap Year??). In Killarney we visited Ross Castle
and the famous Muckross House which is a restored Victorian home, owned mostly by the English aristocrats who survived quite well during their time, while they watched the Irish starve around them.
Instead of touring inside the castle and the house, we spent our time out of doors, hiked to a waterfall and took a jaunting cart horse ride. You can see from the next two pictures how different our girls are. Bailey is here barely surviving, her lips are as white as a ghost, she has a weak traveling stomach, but she is not a downer, she will survive. We are just now finding this out as she has much difficulty with any sort of travel that doesn't include our own car.
And here is McKenna, in McKenna heaven because there is an animal involved that she gets to touch.
And finally, on our early morning drive to the airport, on the final stretch of road, low and behold we see our last red door. She is super cute and she is exactly the 100th red door that we counted on our trip. Nice.

More Love - Part 2

These red beauties are all over the landscape, along the side of the roads, everywhere you look.
Here is Bailey making new furry friends.
I realized I forgot to show the backside of the ring fort so here it is: Can you see Bailey (purple shirt) at the bottom and Mark and McKenna at the top?
This is a view from the drive around Ballinskelligs ring. There are no buses allowed on these particular roads, they can't fit even if they tried. The two Islands that you see off in the distance are the Skelligs, they are world UNESCO sites that house a monastery and a home for puffin birds. We wanted to go so bad but only a small number of people are allowed each day so the price is steep, over 200 in dollars for the Fab Four. Plus the weather was bad, we would have lost our lunch . . . and it was a good lunch, one you want to keep around for a bit.
Next was a beach cove that we let the kids run out their energy on. They could not get those shoes off fast enough. BUT we got the shock of our life, Bailey found not one, but two jellyfish floating in the tide. They had both gone to jellyfish heaven but still . . . jellyfish??? on the beach??? I couldn't get a clean shot with my camera.
I went out on a limb for lunch. I tried lamb stew in a pastry pocket. Why, oh why would you put ketchup on this?? It was good, but the DC was better.
This is the what you see from Ladies View as we are driving down into the valley of Killarney.
Here is another sneak peak at the little red doors. We started counting them . . . this one was in the 60's. I'll tell you where we got . . . later!
All week we kept seeing these cute little houses. Probably 1/2 of them were empty, abandoned. I have a couple of guesses why . . . the economy is crappy in Ireland, or they are summer homes for the rich and famous of Cork, Belfast and Dublin and the summer is not happening this year. Or maybe they are brand new awaiting their new owners. I'm hoping the third assumption is the right one. They just looked so forlorn and lonely. I felt sorry for them. They need someone to take care of them, make sure that red door stays shiny and happy. Poor Poor doors.

I. LOVE. IRELAND. Part 1

I've been thinking for the last 2 days how to describe how Ireland affected me. I can't do it, but I can tell you I loved it and that I want to go back. It grabbed at my mind and heart and I ended up leaving a piece of myself back there. Could be because I have a great-grandmother that immigrated to the US from Belfast. She has a very interesting story but what I love now is the statement she made upon arriving in Utah, which is often termed Zion to members of the LDS church. She said, "If this is Zion, I wonder where Ireland ranks"? I totally get this now, you hear it called the Emerald Isle but people, this place is GREENY GREEN baby.

Things we had to adjust to right out of the gate: driving on the wrong side of the car and road. I had to put my hand on my mouth to keep from telling Mark, "your on the wrong side of the road".

Irish call their shopping carts, shopping trolley's, I think I'll forever use that term. They have amazing bread. They have good Diet Coke (it is not different, just the same, the same is comforting). Animals are not fenced in or gated, they just hang out with you. You get to experience every type of landscape within an hours drive: beach and cliff coastline, farm land (and yes the farm land is sectioned off by rock walls), and mountain ranges with lakes in the valley's. A-mazing. Their houses are so cute I could just pick them up and put them in my pocket. AND they have the coolest front doors EVER. They are every color you can imagine. We started counting the red ones, (why the red ones? do you even know who I am??) and I'll tell you later what we found.

I think European's in general REALLY believe this!

Mark and I made it a point to try to talk to the locals as much as possible. We loved that we could understand them, well almost all of them. They are so friendly, genuinely interested in you, not just your euro. They tell you, "mind yourself" as you say goodbye. Ireland is a country with a volatile past, this has not changed. There continues to be physical violence in the big cities, political unrest and that is combined with the weak economy that is now causing the young generation to leave Ireland to find work elsewhere (mainly Australia right now). College graduates do not have jobs. This means the family owned farms do not have a next generation to take over, they are failing even with government subsidies, which is why most of the B&B's (and there are ALOT of them) are farms/B&B's, restaurants, dairy grocer's and everything else to keep them afloat. If you stay in a B&B in Kerry, you are moving into the house with the family and they make you feel like your are their family. I love that!

Our first day we found a castle ruin and a stone ring fort. We had a blast climbing and exploring these artifacts. Look closely at the ring fort, there is no mortar holding all those stones in place! This picture of the outside of the fort is the backside to the next picture. The fort is dug deep into the mountain. Most of the ring forts date back to around 400 AD . . . seriously.



Walking up to the ring fort:
Mark thinking, "Hurry up woman and stop day-dreaming, we got's to get climbing"

The next day we went to Valentia Island and hiked to the top of the mountain and this was our reward:


After conquering the mountain, we went to a little ice cream shack (I'm not kidding, it was the size of a shed), had a little treat, then met the members of the dairy: a pig, chickens, bunnies, guinea pigs and a goat. McKenna will tell you THIS was her favorite part of Ireland, holding the bunny.
More to come . . .