We’ve got a fairly simple drive and explore day today. With a bit of a treat of a couple of characters when we reach Dingle.
First off though, we leave Martin in Kenmare Aire for the last time. And drive the Kenmare to Killarney leg of the Ring of Kerry (RoK) for the fourth and last time.
The weather was a bit grey as we covered the 30-odd km through the Gap of Rohan (Moll’s Gap) and down past Helm’s Deep (Ladies View) to Killarney.
No stops, no pictures. We’ve been there, done that.
When we got to Killarney though we did stop for fuel. €1.84 for a litre of diseasel. Much better than the €1.94 we paid last time (somewhere near Kinsale maybe??). And also much better than we saw later in the day at around €1.90.
We stopped at the garage in front of the engineering works that we stopped at to fill with LPG a few days earlier.
And then the run to Dingle, the only planned stop being Inch Beach.
Inch Beach
We had thought about finding a site around Inch Beach, but decided in the end to push on to Dingle. But we did want to stop at the beach and take a look.
The smallish car park was a) full and b) height restricted.
So even though I said I wouldn’t we parked on the beach. What could possibly go wrong with taking a nearly 3 tonne vehicle onto a beach!
The beach is another stunner though (they certainly aren’t all like this… there are some regularly “just nice” beaches and coves too).
Even Inch Beach has guide boards telling you that you’re a numpty if you decide to go too far down the beach.
Speaking of going too far down the beach (and seeing as I’m pacing… GRRR!) Sue went for a walk. Easy on the way there, not so on the way back. Though she did come back fully exfoliated… the sand gets everywhere!
I took this shot from the van. Sue is the speck slap bang in the middle, on her way back.
You’ll have seen a few of these Wild Atlantic Way signposts already. But we’re starting to collect them now that we know they’re everywhere… a picture of each one we come across.
Strand seems to get used a lot for beach names in Ireland. Obviously Trá is Irish for beach. Strand is… well… English for beach. But you don’t see strand used very oftne in the UK. Or perhaps that’s just me. Good research there, John.
But by now I’m getting a bit paranoid. The engineer in me is screaming something about sand, mechanical things and grease. Inch Beach is made up of really fine sand (we were brushing it out of orifices, both ours and the van’s, for days) and my inner B.Eng was shouting “Don’t stay too long… you’ll be ingesting all this sand into the filters of the van and the oily bits on the exposed bikes sitting on the bike rack”. I know the surfer-hippy-dudes hang around on beaches in their vans all the time, but they’re not exactly known for their ultra-smooth-running jalopies, are they?!
In then end the van was totally ok on the beach – at least from a sinking perspective. The sand was rock solid and took the weight of the van easily. No drama getting off the beach.
(Edit from future John: the van is still covered in fine yellow sand three days later)
And at least we didn’t do like a friend’s brother once did and came back too late to find his MGB, axle deep in sea water.
Then as we left Inch we stopped further along the coast for a piccie back to the beach.
Then another one…
Then another one…
And on to Dingle. The scenery is pretty much the same as the Kerry Peninsula north shore that we weren’t super impressed with a few days earlier. Nice, but not the reason for Arthur and Fenchurch to stop by on a visit.
Dingle Bridge House Mobile Camping
We’ve booked ourselves in for two nights at this place.
Michael (Dingle) and Joanna (Boston)
Well, what can you say about Michael and Joanna. A couple of characters. If you believe Michael’s hype then he’s done everything and been everywhere. Difficult to divine the fact from the fiction, but there’s a lot of both, so best just to go along for the verbal ride.
I’m not going to go into everything he told us, that’s not for public consumption. But I will share what we think is appropriate in tomorrow’s post as we leave these two behind.
Suffice to say for this post… Michael and Joanna run the Bridge House Pub, which Michael tells us dates from 1703. It’s behind the main front of Dingle and has a river running down the street to the side.
The critical bit for us is that Michael (like our friend Martin in Kenmare) has converted a chunk of land into a concrete and gravel aire. This time behind his pub, not next to his stone circle, like Martin. There are marked-out slots for about a dozen vans, but we saw 18 vans parked on the lot both nights and he says his record is 32 (for a music festival).
There’s a bathroom for camper use, at the back of the pub – and you sort of have to walk through the pub kitchens and up some stairs to get there.
The washing up sinks are below the bathroom.
And then, like we mostly did, you can also use the loos at the back of the pub. Which are kept open from early morning to when the pub shuts. So… you’re brushing your teeth with a half-cut local trying to balance his lager on the side of your sink!
However, the bathroom above the kitchens was spotless, but often had a queue. The loos in the pub were fine in the women’s and disabled, but the gents were a bit grotty… I suspect mostly to do with the half-cut locals rather than M & J’s attempts to keep them clean.
This site does have drinking water available but unlike Kenmare it does have both grey and black disposal.
Dingle
It was early afternoon when we arrived in Dingle. So we went for a walk around town.
Lots of US accents. Dingle seems to be a bit of a mecca for travelling Americans. All very nice of course. Then most other nationalities are also present in numbers too.
One stat I’ll chuck in here from Michael is that Dingle has a resident population of 6,000 people, but sees 1,000,000 tourists each year. The 2022 census actually puts the town at 1,671 people. Perhaps Michael was including a generous chunk of the peninsula. Or just being Michael.
This shopkeeper clearly isn’t a Trump fan…
And because I’m not firing on all cylinders, Sue left me on a chair by the harbour (see below) and went off looking for boat tours we could go on. At least she doesn’t stick a blanket on my knees yet!
So the chair… you see all sorts when you sit on a harbour-side chair for a while. Grandads playing with grandkids, Russian au pairs practising their English (that’s what it sounded like for 10 minutes or so)…. all sorts.
But the chair.
I was sitting on a single-seat, metal-framed, wooden-slatted chair. The metal frame had a single leg. They looked a couple of years old. Well made, sturdy and free from graffiti. The strange thing was that a couple of (what I’ll assume are locals — ‘cos you’d need insider info to know about this) walked by the empty single-seat chair next to me and gave it a twang. That’s the best I can describe it, ‘cos the chairs vibrate like a plucked string. One good thwack and they vibrated for minutes. One guy gave the chair a double thwack and it went on for ages. I had to have a go of course — what fun. Surely, this must be hot gossip or local TV news fodder for more than one person to know to do this. Hilarious. I bet the local council are beside themselves that this is what their new seating installation is known for.
When Sue returned about 40 minutes later, laden with boat tour pamphlets, we started to make our way back to the van.
It was about 4:30 and I was pretty famished and had a CFS food craving going on, so we aimed for what we thought was “a chippy” that we’d seen on the way down to the harbour.
The Fish Box…
The Fish Box
Turns out we’d stumbled on one of the premier fish and chip restaurants in town. This only became apparent when we sat down at a table.
We just wandered in and asked for a table for two. There was a bit of chatter behind the “wait here podium” and they showed us to a seat.
But for the next 30 or so minutes, the 30 or more people who wandered in were all told there was a wait and they could leave their names. The waits were 40 mins or more. We lucked out getting a spot.
But it also became apparent that people seriously wanted to eat here. It wasn’t casual trade, they really really wanted a table.
And the signs outside clearly said that they didn’t take reservations and that take-out could be ordered from another place (without actually telling you how to get to said other place).
But back to our experience. Our waitress was proficient but seriously unflappable (seeing as we’re talking Arthur and Fenchurch… then she could easily hold down a job at Milliways). At first I thought she had a serious sense of humour failure, but in the end we had a good chat and a laugh – turns out she’d been to a wedding reception at Bristol Zoo Gardens and knew all about it moving out of town. She got a tip. Tips weren’t / aren’t a thing at all on our trip, but the Fish Box was offering us the chance to leave a tip, so we did.
But the Fish Box was a piece of work to behold. They weren’t rushing anyone, far from it… this is Ireland remember, nothing gets rushed. But the throughput was considerable. We saw people queuing 20 deep to get in before they opened the following day and I’ve no reason to suspect the queues disappeared any time before they closed.
I had a GF smashed burger (the menu in the window said they did GF… that’s why we wandered in in the first plaice 😉 ). I was tempted by the F&C but my body was shouting burger – it’s weird how a crash gives me cravings, but the cravings don’t fix the crash (I could write a whole book on that side of it… I can hear the screams from here… “please…. no!”).
And Sue had fish and chips.
The burger was fantastic. The fish was good. But we both decided the chips were a bit meh.
Still, that was €45 for basically fish and chips for two.
There’ll be more on the Fish Box when we get to Michael’s stories tomorrow.
Had to get a piccie of the Hotties slab in the Walk of Fame outside Dick Mack’s. We presume they’d played here at some point. But that was probably 40 years ago and I suspect Dingle is a different place now to what it was then.
Then back to the van.
We went through the boat trip pamphlets and made our booking for tomorrow. We decided not to do a Blasket landing tour. The landings were for 3+ hours and I wasn’t up to spending 3 hours wandering around an island. And we’d done a few island walks already on the trip so decided we’d spend more time on-boat and hopefully see some wildlife.
The weather was looking poor in the morning and better in the afternoon, so we booked the afternoon trip and hoped it didn’t get cancelled like our Skellig one. Sue was also getting nervous about how rough it was going to be, so we’d bought some sea-sickness tablets in town earlier.
Fingers crossed for some good weather tomorrow.
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