Our trip to Ireland

Well, we made it back unscathed. Back to balmy, humid London. The weather in Ireland was a lot nicer, between 20-24 degrees and sunny most days. It rained just as we were flying out of Dublin, heading back home. Well it wouldn't have been Ireland without rain, would it?

Day 1

We go straight from work to Heathrow to fly to Dublin. A young bloke sits down next to us and sees our passports. In a strong Irish accent (which at times we struggled to understand as he mumbled and talked fast) he told us that he had been living in Brisbane for 18 months and that he was off home for a week to surprise his Mum. It was a last minute decision and the flights cost him $3K AUD. He was a great laugh and made the trip go fast (it was under an hour anyway). His advice was to get out of Dublin as soon as we could and see the rest of the country, as 'Dublin is too feckin expensive'. Another piece of advice was to never ask anyone in Ireland to say 'to be sure, to be sure' or 'thirty three and a third'. Apparently in all the time he has spent in Australia, everyone thinks they are hilarious by asking him to say these things. We promised him we wouldn't and said that Aussies couldn't really talk, as we have a funny enough accent as it is. He responded in a broad Aussie accent with 'Fair dinkum! F**kin' oath!' that had us in stitches. I love Irish people.

It was late when we got into Dublin, so it was straight to the hotel and bed for a big day planned tomorrow.

Day 2

Was spent exploring Dublin and a tour of the Guinness storehouse (NB is now addicted to the black stuff - apparently it makes you strong). One of my Irish workmates had told me that Riverdance was on when we were in Dublin, so I bought tickets just before we left. The show was fantastic, those dancers are just amazing.

Day 3

Our last day in Dublin was definitely one of the best days of the whole trip. It included a tour of Kilmainham Gaol and then a pint at O'Donohues, the oldest pub in Dublin. We were told that in this pub they get all different traditional Irish musicians come along with their instruments at any time of the afternoon and they basically just have jam sessions together. The musicians may not know each other and they don't get paid. They just get all their drinks provided while they play. There were no musicians when we got there, but as soon as the pints were poured and we got a seat, a fiddle player and a guitarist showed up. The guitarist had the most fantastic voice and we just soaked up the atmosphere for the afternoon. It was the same Irish friend from work who told us about this place and fortunately it did not seem to be in any guidebooks like Lonely Planet, so it was just us and a few locals and not overrun with tourists. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon, so we made sure we still got out and enjoyed the sunshine as well.

Day 4

A 5am start with a crazy cabbie to get to the airport for our flight to Kerry, in south west Ireland. We could have caught a train, but it would have meant changing trains halfway through and the connecting trains are not reliable and only have about 3 or 4 run per day. The train tickets were also double the price of an airline fare. So, not very carbon conscious of us, but oh well. When I saw the plane we were going on, I certainly wished for that train. The thing had propellers! We were going in a cessna! I was freaking out. NB just scoffed at me and told me it was a fokker, not a cessna. I didn't care what the fokk it was, I was freaked out. I was ready the kiss the ground when we landed an hour later. We picked up our hire car at Kerry Airport (A Peugeot 308 with only 1500kms on the clock, so it still smelt brand new) and were on our way to tour the 'Ring of Kerry'. We stayed in a little town called Killarney on our first night and did about 12-15kms of walking through the national park.

Day 5

We left our little B&B in Killarney and then headed to a town called Dingle. We took the sat nav with us and as per usual ended up in farmers yards and in people's driveways because of that bloody thing. The thing was, we noticed that none of the signs for Dingle were in English, they were all in Gaelic, along with other towns. As we didn't know what the Gaelic for Dingle was, we weren't really sure where we were going. It turns out that Dingle is one of the towns that only displays the Gaelic form of the name in signs etc. After not too long, we made the connection that we were headed for 'An Daingean'. Along with every other tourist in the whole of Irish Republic it seemed. It was a nice little seaside town, reminded us of Lakes Entrance, with 10 times more tourists. We also toured the entire Dingle Peninsula. We got to see stone forts and stone beehive huts along the coast.

Day 6

We had a massive drive ahead of us today, heading to Kenmare. The winding roads were quite scary at times and we couldn't believe that the speed limit on these roads was 100km/h. One great thing about Ireland is that they have their road signs in k's rather than miles like the English. We saw a pretty nasty accident on our way to Kenmare, though fortunately nobody was hurt. We stopped at the beach at 'Inch' and saw people having surfing lessons. Not something we expected to see in Ireland! We also toured Valencia Island, which was just gorgeous. We were going to be staying at a farm in Kenmare and were looking forward to that. However, when we arrived at the farm, we were told by the owner that she had to arrange for all of the guests to stay somewhere else, as she was having all of her family stay due to a family tragedy (2 deaths in her husband's family in the space of a week). She had arranged for us to stay at her sister's. This got us a little worried. Were we just going to be staying in some woman's spare room? The owner said she would direct us there, we just needed to follow her in her car. We drove for about 5 kms and I jokingly said to NB that we should be dropping breadcrumbs like Hansel & Gretel. We needn't have worried. Her sister ran a B&B on the other side of town and it was lovely. We had been told that Kenmare was a beautiful town. It was so overrun with tourists though, it could barely function. All the shops were mostly run by Eastern Europeans rather than Irish people, which meant much of the service was pretty rude. I know that is a gross generalisation, but that's how it was.

Day 7

We decided to play it by ear with what we were going to do and where we were going to stay. We decided that we liked Killarney quite a bit, so we went back there. Also because it was close to the airport for our flight the next day. We thought we might head out to Cork if we had the time, but we never got a chance to. I also wanted to get a photo of a sign to Tipperary, but that would have involved going to Cork. Oh well, there's always next time.

Day 8

Our last day in Ireland. NB's guts is telling him to lay off the bacon and eggs which he has eaten every morning since we have stayed in the B&B's. We headed back to Kerry Airport. Fortunately this time, the plane was bigger. It was then a 3 hour stopover in Dublin Airport before heading back to London. Ronald McDonald was entertaining kids at the Maccas at Dublin Airport. It was quite funny to hear him with an Irish accent!

What a fantastic country with such lovely people. Definitely recommend it!