Kenmare to Killarney… again
Well, the day started nice and sunny, I think that’s the last of the sun we’ll see for a few days. It is supposed to get a bit better on Sunday, but that’s day 20 for us and we probably will be thinking of heading home by then.
But today…
It’s time to make our 3rd trip from Kenmare to Killarney, but it probably won’t be our last. When we’ve done the Ring of Kerry (RoK) we’ll need to get to Dingle from the south side of the RoK, and that means Kenmare and Killarney again. But that’s in a few days from now.
Moll’s Gap
At least today the sun was poking through the clouds when we got to Moll’s Gap, so we stopped and took some more pictures.
Ladies View
Ladies View was also showing a bit of sun, and no coaches parked up this time.
We will probably have to do that route again when we finish the RoK and head to the Dingle Peninsula.
LPG Refill
Once we’d passed Muckross House we were on new turf, heading for Killarney and our first chore of the day – a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) refill.
As I mentioned yesterday, I think, the LPG gauge on the dash had dropped from about 80% to 20% overnight. These gauges seem to be quite unreliable, so we had no idea if this was a real drop, just the electronics playing up or a leak.
For a day or two I’d been getting a weird smell in the front of the van as I was driving. It wasn’t quite a gas smell but it was chemical.
I’ve not had to deal with LPG before so I didn’t know if that was the smell or not. So that was driving a bit of paranoia about a leak.
Best to get the tank topped up and see what happened. I guess we could have done a flame test, but I wasn’t up for it given we rather depend on the van not being a burnt out shell. There was no sign of the smell when we stopped, inside or out, and there was no smell in the back of the van. So I wasn’t too concerned. But best to fill up and see what happens.
Apple Maps was telling us that there was an LPG filling station behind the Texaco garage on the way into Killarney. But when we got to the map location the only place we could see was some sort of engineering works. They did have a big tank in the front yard, so Sue jumped out of the van and went to ask.
Lo and behold this was the LPG filling station. And they did seem to do campervans quite often. But all three of the employees were covered in oil (the “I work in a garage sort of look”) and it wasn’t the camping/caravanning sort of place we were expecting.
We needed a brass adapter between the van and their tank, which the guy went and found from their shop. He thought we should probably have had one. I’ll need to investigate that.
There were a few false starts with the filling but eventually we put about 8 litres in.
Now the tank has a capacity of 25 litres. But that’s not the cut-off level (from what I can make out). LPG tanks are limited to about 80%, so that should be about 20 litres. And we filled with 8. That’s when their filling nozzle cut off.
Hmm.
And the gauge (which is a pain ‘cos you have to run the engine – can’t just be ignition on, and nobody wants to run the engine when there’s gas around) was only showing about 40% full now. Up from 20, sure, but not the 100% I was expecting when the pump is set to cut out.
There wasn’t much for it though. Their pump wouldn’t put any more in and we had at least 8 litres more to work with than when we started the day.
So we paid up and left. A whole €12.
But as soon as we got on the road the gauge went up to 100%. This is going to take some Jedi mind-skills to fathom in the future!
Ross Castle
Next up was a quick stop at Ross Castle on the outskirts of Killarney. It’s on the edge of Lough Leane, the largest of the three Lakes of Killarney. Muckross Abbey, which we visited yesterday, is nearby in the same national park. It’s all very close together.
Great little castle.
We stopped at the café (of course) but only a GF chocolate brownie to eat for me. That was breakfast – boo!
And then onwards to Killorglin.
Killorglin
We’re still on the search for some breakfast and there’s supposed to be a few good cafés in Killorglin.
We did manage to squeeze the van (with bikes sticking off the back) into the main Killorglin car park.
But we struck out on breakfast. All the cafés we had in our guide books and online were closed, or we couldn’t find them. There are some really posh restaurants (like The Bianconi) in Killorglin, but it was too early for them to be open and we just wanted breakfast anyway.
But while we were there we took a stroll over their eight-arch bridge and took a picture of their goat.
The goat was even depicted in the car park as a mural.
Like a lot of the towns we’ve visited, things can be a bit deceiving… on purpose. Not all the shops are what they appear to be at first. As you pass through you see the brightly coloured fronts and what appears to be a thriving community (and I suspect Killorglin is better than many in that respect), but some of the shop fronts (and houses in other towns) have painted facades that just make them look well looked after.
We thought these two were funny though…
And onwards again on the RoK. Still hungry.
Rossbeigh Beach
The next stop is further down the north coast of the peninsula at Rossbeigh Beach. Though technically we weren’t allowed to park in the car park at the beach (height restriction to stop campervans parking overnight) so we had to go to the campervan zone which was about 500 m along a narrow track to a lookout point.
That was a bit of a disappointment. They’d pushed us out of the beach area and up the cliff. There was no beach access from where we had to park and a chunk of a walk to get back to the beach. Very disappointing that campervans can’t use the beach car parks. I guess they’ve tried allowing campers by putting up “no camping overnight” and that hasn’t worked. And they also probably open up the height barriers out of season so campervans can park overnight, but still… annoying.
It also wasn’t easy for us to get into this designated car park, or down the narrow roads. Bigger vans than us would really have struggled. It’s probably why we were on our own.
Nice view back to the sand-bar beach.
We cut our losses on breakfast and made something in the van that we ate on our stools in the car park.
How…ever… as we drove back to the main beach car park we wanted to use the seafront loos. And seeing as there was a chuffing great lorry parked up outside them beyond the broken yellow line marking the edge of the road, we decided to park up for a couple of minutes.
Loos were a solid 7/10.
But we did wander down the beach for 100 m.
Kells
Next up is Kells and Kells Beach. We’re getting into mid-afternoon by now and I must say I’m not impressed by this bit of the Ring of Kerry (from Killarney to Cahersiveen). I was expecting the same sort of scenery as we saw on the Beara Peninsula or the Kenmare to Killarney drive. But the landscape is much more open. There are big mountains on either side of the water, but they seem a long way away and are not as impressive as the Scottish glens or the Alps. Don’t get me wrong the scenery is lovely, well worth a visit, but I was expecting too much from the hype I’d read. Hmmm.
Anyway, Kells. We’re doing the RoK, so we’re stopping at places on our way. Coach tours cover the 179 km (111-mile) loop in a day. We’re taking days to do it, so we’re stopping.
Interestingly, when we told a woman from Cork about our trip and said we were going to take 4 or 5 days here, she said “what do you want to do that for, there’s not that much to see”. Hmmm.
Anyway, Kells.
The road down to Kells from the main road is great fun. One of those “one car wide” twisty turny descents with deep fern-infested woodland to either side. Great fun. It would be a total disaster in Cornwall, there’d be dozens of cars all backed up during peak season. Somewhere like Porth Curno or Porthgwarra (which have similar access roads) are just bedlam in the summer.
Anyway, Kells.
We squeezed into a space next to the lifeguard station (the lifeguards were busy practising their skateboarding skills) and went in search of coffee.
This is not the Kells from the Book of Kells. We asked at the coffee hut on the beach. Of course we had a coffee… and went and sat on the beach rocks to drink it.
There was a rather amusing selfie session going on with a guy in the water. First with a selfie drone (doing all the hand gestures to control it as he posed in the water) and then with a GoPro as he filmed himself diving under the water and spiralling around as he emerged. If this had been a tropical beach in the sun then I’m sure the footage would have looked awesome, a grey day at low tide… not so much.
Mannix Point Campsite
And so we reach our stopover for the next couple of nights. We’d been off grid at Kenmare Aire and so a campsite with proper showers, toilets and lecky was what we were after.
And… the Mannix Point campsite had had some great reviews. It had won awards for best campsite in Ireland. We were expecting a lot.
But as we’ve said before. You never know until you arrive.
The track down to the site was an ordeal. There seemed to be endless vehicles coming up the track and we had to wait at the top (next to Met Éireann’s Valentia Observatory). And when we got onto the site it just felt a bit run down.
And we later learned that it had won awards for years, including TripAdvisor awards as recently as 2022. Hmmm.
But… it got better. This is clearly a place that people make a beeline for. The showers and loos are spotless and there’s a great communal building with washing-up facilities, washing machines, a big conservatory eating area and a big kitchen area. If you’re camping then this would be great to get out of the rain and be somewhere with other people to talk to.
And we had washing to do. So we put a wash on and then a tumble-dry, ‘cos it was raining and we didn’t have anywhere to dry our washing otherwise.
But…. best laid plans and all that. The clothes were still wet when we got them out of the dryer. Either we’d put too much in (less than a full tub of the washing machine) or the dryer wasn’t up to muster. The clothes were hot but still soaking wet.
And the site reception was shut by now so we couldn’t get any more tokens for the dryer to have another go.
So we had to rig up some sort of attempt at a washing line. But the wind was high (so we couldn’t extend the awning all the way) and it was drizzling, so anything pegged towards the wind was just getting wetter, not drier.
There was then nothing for it but to bring the washing inside when it really started to rain. We slept with rope washing lines strung up in the van… a very damp night!
The communal building by night
Started watching Season 4 of Ted Lasso. There’s something very wholesome about Ted Lasso, and in an age of not very funny comedy, it’s genuinely hilarious… at least it hits my funny bone!
We’re going to try and do Valentia Island tomorrow. We’ve booked a non-landing (all the landing ones are booked for ages ahead) Skellig boat trip for the day after tomorrow. So we’ll do the boat trip on the way out of the area as we head to a booked site in Sneem.
J
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