Ireland: Beach Morning With One Fascinating Lady And Cobh.

Our time in Ireland was coming to an end. Since our flight out of Cork was not until 21:30 or so, we had to fill up the date with more sightseeing along the way. We checked out from our lovely house around 10 am and drove across Connor Pass again towards Dingle town to find some more beaches. Once we had to ask for directions, and the lady turned out to be such a friendly woman that she talked and talked and told us half of her life story before she was done. She helped us find this tucked away small beach that the kids fell in love with.

This is where they spent an hour building a Fountain of Youth or something like that.

The sun was shining and this Dingle beach looked stunning.

Exploring the rocky edges again.

The person who took this family picture is one interesting lady, but I’ll tell you in a second about her.

Oh yeah…love my wonderful family.

As the kids were gearing up to play, a dog came down the beach and started barking at the waves, running down the shore back and forth, back and forth. It was a bit strange, we thought. And then a lady came down behind her wearing a bathrobe and a towel. At that moment, we were still chatting to the first lady who had given us direction to the beach, and she appeared to know this bathrobed lady. Anyway, after a while, the first lady left, and the second lady got into the water and started swimming.

Now, I know I said it was warm and sunny. But it was not THAT warm or sunny. I know the temperatures were around 65 F, and that’s still too chilly to go for a swim in the ocean, if you ask me. Well, not for this lady. After fifteen minutes or so, she came out and we started talking to her. She shared her fascinating story with us and we couldn’t help but wonder about how interesting this woman was.

Her name is Nuala Moore. She lives in Dingle Town on her own, grew up in a fisherman’s family and was taking care of her dad up until last year as he was not well any more. As kids they used to come down to those beaches there all the time, not supervised or anything, but just to explore and swim. They all grew up respecting the sea. To them, the sea can give life by providing food but it can just take you away as well in an instant. She loves Dingle and talked lots about how it is such a great place to live.

The most incredible thing about her is the fact that she swims professionally in cold-cold waters. In icy waters. She was one of the people on the team of swimmers who swam around Ireland. She was also on the team of people from all over the world whose goal was to swim from far east Russia to Alaska through Bering Strait last year. She told us about many of her adventures, and how the boat that they were on had to be a medical boat to make sure that it doesn’t belong to one country or the other to break any international waters rules. It was fascinating to listen to her daily routine and how she comes to this beach every morning for a swim.

She went on to tell us how amazed she was with our children who didn’t get bored quickly with the beach. They decided to play with rocks and then build things out of rocks and pebbles. She said that as she swims she sees many families come down to the beach, take a few pictures and then leave because kids just don’t find it entertaining enough. I was very happy to hear that. Here are our happy-to-play-with-rocks kids.

And here is this lady—a rugged Irish woman who is strong in body and spirit.

Sadly, we had to move on as we still wanted to see another beach before driving towards Cork.

Mark, wait!!! Don’t fall off the rock!

A couple of miles down the road, we found another secret beach that I’d read about the night before. It was a feast for my eyes. Such a unique place! That piece of sand extending into the sea looked amazing. So fun to walk on being surrounded by water on both sides.

Wellies came in handy again. Seriously, we could have stayed here all day.

Have I convinced everyone yet that Irish coast, specifically Dingle, is gorgeous?

We still had a couple of hours to drive to the airport and we were getting closer to lunchtime. So we stopped by at Tralee’s Tesco and grabbed some deli counter foods such as tuna and potato salads, plus some sandwich stuff. Eating in a parking lot is not ideal, but we did fine.

Our last stop in Ireland was way down south. It was in Cobh. Cobh is a small town near Cork. It used to be a significant port for big ships. Any guesses what else it is known for?

In 1921?? Titanic left Cobh on its unfortunate journey. This was the last stop before departing into the ocean, last chance to get off. And one person did get off feeling the premonition. Here are the boys next to the Titanic memorial.

Cobh is a cute harbor town with beautiful windy streets and shops.

Oh my goodness, just realized we were all matching in this picture-haha.

What’s for dinner tonight?? Candy!!! Yep… we let our children have candy for dinner, and all the leftover snacks that we needed to eat before our flight home. They talk often about that one evening in Ireland when they had candy for dinner-haha.

What a great place Ireland is! There is so much more to see besides these most famous places that we visited. We still need to get to Dublin somehow, but ideally I would love to just chill in one of the very Irish villages by the sea, somewhere even less touristy than Dingle.

That’s all for now! And now my Irish posts are done.

Lyana.

Ireland: Cliffs of Moher and Burren.

Our adventures started early this day. Our plan was to leave Dingle and drive about and hour and fifteen minutes to Tarbert , take a 20 minute ferry over river Shannon, cross over to County Claire, drive up another hour and a half to the spectacular cliffs on the west coast of Ireland called the Cliffs of Moher. This route, although more expensive, was more time efficient and promised to be more picturesque. We booked our ferry tickets online, a roundtrip to save money, and thought we were set.
As we were approaching the tiny town of Tarbert with the ferry port, we realized that we were beginning to be surrounded by fog. Lots of fog. As the sun was coming out, the fog was not lifting. And as we pulled into the port town and followed the directions to the ferry, we realized that we could hardly see the river Shannon, that’s how foggy it was.
We arrived to the ferry terminal, but there were no signs, no ferry, no person at the ticket counter to find out what was going on.  There were two buses waiting for the ferry, and, luckily for us, one of them was on the phone with the terminal on the other side. He found out that the ferry was not coming at 10:30 (that’s the one we wanted) as it was too foggy. And they were not sure when the next one would be. Most people were just pulling up to the terminal, seeing the fog and turning around.
Sadly, that’s exactly what we had to do…and then we had to drive all the way pass Limerick to cross the river and get back on track. So our great plan to be most efficient did not work after all-haha. We added an extra hour to our driving time that morning. We quickly modified our plans and decided to go to Burren National Park first since it was on the way to the cliffs coming from Limerick.
As we drove up to County Claire, pass Enis and all the cute villages, the weather started to clear up. The sun was shining, it was WARM! We followed Rick Steve’s book’s instructions for exploring Burren area, but we were not really sure if we were making progress in getting to Burren National Park.

We needed a place to eat our sandwiches (that we had pre-packed. See? We have to be prepared here)…and this old church looked like the perfect place.

Honestly, it was cool. It was weird and spooky to me, but the kids thought it was awesome.

They were not scared to go inside the ruined building…but I chose to stay near the graves.

Next, we stopped at the visitors’ center for Burren, and then everything started to make sense. The area is called Burren, and it’s vast—it includes a lot of villages and wild terrain. But Burren as we know it from pictures was a specific area to which you had to drive and then hike to. So the guide gave us good directions to Kilnaboy village where we could park and hike.

And let me tell you, Burren is STRANGE! It’s so odd and so magnificent at the same time. It’s desolate and amazing, barren but so unique.  This was the first stop the kids wanted to make to play hide-and-seek. Another great place!

As I sat there listening to the kids squeal with delight, I thought to myself, “This is a perfect relaxing vacation”. I sat and listened to buzzing of bees around me, fluttering of butterflies and birds. Otherwise, the air was just still and quiet. I couldn’t believe that this was the place that people on Tripadvisor describe as eerie and windy and “out of this world”. My experience was completely different, and we loved it!

We drove a bit further into the barren lands, then stopped and explored a bit more. We could have gone way higher up the mountain if we wanted, but we were short on time (due to the ferry plan falling through).

Here is a close up of these weird rocks that look like they are one big cracked massive rocky surface, but for real they are movable rocks.

Yes, Burren was a success.

Another thirty minutes towards the coast and we made it to the cliffs. As we were gearing up for super windy conditions, we realized Alex left his Loch Ness sweatshirt at the place in Burren where they played hide-and-seek. Argh!!! Well, we thought, we’d make a decision later whether or not to drive back for it. For now, I grabbed some gloves and jackets and we headed up to the walking trail along the cliffside.

Do you recognize this view? It’s truly majestic!

This was a busy place, although you can’t see it on this picture. Hundreds and hundreds of people walking along the trail that goes up to the top of one of the cliffs and then loops around to go back along the side of the cliff that just..goes down. There was a lot of walking involved, everyone got HOT! What? Wasn’t it supposed to be windy and called? I was over prepared.

And then…the two older kids decided to be stinkers. They thought that there is no point of walking even further to the top of the cliff if they already saw plenty. So instead of dealing with dragging them with us, we left them to sit by the side of the road, like two lost puppies. Mark was our determined child who didn’t mind a few extra meters to climb.

We could see the kids from the top, but I was still nervous (although knowing they were not going to go jump of the cliff or anything).

We took our time to enjoy this glorious view in this sunny weather. AMAZING!

Well done, Mark! You’ve jumped up for pictures in so many countries now!

My super cool awesome husband who decided he liked Ireland quite a bit.

And, of course, my baby and I.

Finally, we started walking down the trail walking along the edge of the cliff. Not for the faint in heart. I was quite nervous as well, so I walked fast to just get it over with. Katya loved it!

This place and the Burren are definitely two places to not miss in Ireland. The cliffs are free to explore but you have to pay 6 euros for adults. No one checked our tickets, but you have to buy them to get into the parking lot. Give yourself an hour to walk around as it’s not just walk out of the car and get to the cliffs kind of thing.

After the cliffs, it was getting late…we had to catch the last ferry back to Tarbert at 7:30 and we were still two hours away from the port of Killmer. Our plan originally was to drive down this beautiful western coast to see some rock pools near Kill but after much thought we realized that even if we forgot about Alex’s sweatshirt and drove down to see the rock pools, we wouldn’t have much time at all. And then we thought about how much Alex loves his Scottish sweatshirt and decided to make our boy happy. We drove back half an hour to the Burren, found the sweatshirt almost immediately and then drove to Killmer via an inland route.

We arrived to Killmer ferry port with twenty minutes to spare, just enough for the kids to play near the water again with a homeless dog.

Although we didn’t take many pictures of it, the sunset that day near the river was just gorgeous. We felt like we had a fantastic day in County Claire.

Kids bundled up (Alex in his favorite sweatshirt) and rode the ferry on the top. In fact, at the end of this day, Mark said this was his favorite part of the whole day—sitting outside on the ferry.

We came home quite late, got last minute Chinese again and…watched a bit of the X Factor (seriously, we’d never watched this show before, but it’s been really fun! This season is quite good in the UK).

And thus we have one one-way ferry ticket left to give to someone to use within a year…I’ll be looking for friends who might be able to use it. It’s good for either Tarbert-Killmer or the opposite direction route.

Our trip has been fabulous so far (despite a ferry mishap), and we still had one more day left!

Lyana.

Ireland: Dingle Day

It’s been a very long while since we posted much. We’ve been very busy with various things, half of which I can’t even discuss. I hope I can someday. At the moment, I have a bit of random time to spare, so I hope I can catch up on a few more blog entries.

Right. Okay. So we are still in Ireland, hanging out at Dingle peninsula. On our third day in Ireland, we headed across the Connor Pass to Dingle Town and to drive the Ring of Dingle. It’s a mini version of the Ring of Kerry, but just as exciting if not more.

We were lucky with weather once again, being blessed with a dramatic backdrop of clouds all around us. It did sprinkle a few times, but it’s not a problem if you are wearing good raincoats.

It is about 30 miles, I believe, to drive around Dingle following a specific scenic route, so not completely all around. We started with assessing the situation of how far it is to roll down the hill… at least this is what I think of when I look at Robert’s facial expression here.

Beautiful views all along the coast.

Mark and Alex.

One of the scenic spots marked with a large cross.

A ruined house with a view of the ocean.

We came across a beautiful beach, famous for the movie that I have not seen “Ryan’s Daughter”. We decided to stop by here, eat our packed lunch (picked up stuff at Dingle Town on the way) and let the kids play.

Seriously, that’s all that the kids need—a rock and some water.

Just admiring the water.

Love teaching my kids to be happy with simple things.

Mark just wanted to get his pictures taken so he could show them to his class (since he was missing three days of school for this trip).

Which kid is this? So high! It’s Alex, I remember. He is being so safe climbing in his wellies…don’t know where his parents are.

Our self-timed pictures. We are all getting better and better at them, right? haha

My monster and I.

And then we found another rock to use as our camera tripod and took a few more pictures.

There is always time for a silly picture.

And then…the “high jump illusion” pictures begin. I mean, seriously, I am sure I don’t jump that high. But who knows?

Oh we are having so much fun!

Getting our exercise for the day.

These two are loving it.

Mark’s new passion-writing… “Mark at Dingle”.

Our traditional picture through the ages.

Cleaning up after our sandy trip down.

Yay, he still loves me after I drag him everywhere!

A few kilometers further down the road, we stopped at this fabulous stop for hiking. And this was the kids’ favorite spot to play.

Hide-and-seek among the boulders—the best game ever.

Robert and I just relaxed on the top, taking a few pictures and talking to a friendly Irish guy from County Claire.

After driving the Dingle loop, we stopped again at Dingle Town. This is a harbor town with fantastic views and a very friendly atmosphere. It’s has its own pet even! This Fungie the dolphin. Apparently, he lives in the waters nearby and boats go out regularly with tourists to look for Fungie playing in the waves. And if they don’t find it, you get your money back.

We walked around town for a while longer, got ice cream and decided to go find some more beaches. We were looking for one particular spot that Rick Steve’s told us about, but somehow the map that he had in his book was leading us to the wrong place. I even stopped at a convenience stop and asked for directions but they turned out to be way off course. Instead, we went to this old ruined castle called Menard.

This medieval castle stands right on the coast with majestic views of the bay and Kerry peninsula. Because the tide was low, the kids had lots of rocks to play with, build with and throw into the water.

We all know who had the most fun.

I am telling you..Dingle is just beautiful, especially when it’s so sunny.

Here is a picture of some Irish cows for you, waiting for us by the car.

We drove home through Connor Pass, the infamous crazy road across the peninsula. Well, actually, it was not as bad as people made it believe on Tripadvisor, and possibly it’s crowded and more adventurous during summer months. One thing for sure—it gives us beautiful views of the valleys on the sides.

And this is to remember we crossed the peninsula via the pass…twice. Pictures don’t do it justice, you’ve got to see this country in person.

We had a full day of sightseeing, using the fact that the days were still quite long, although it was middle of October. We drove home, got dinner at a local restaurant and watched X Factor again (our traditional program to watch on vacations).

Bye for now.

Lyana.