We are LOVING Ireland!
We spent our first week here (of three) in County Cork,
which was the perfect place to start.
We rented a teeny tiny car in Dublin and then drove south
for about four hours to the small village of Rosscarbery, along the coast. Renting a car in Ireland is quite the
undertaking since they drive on the left side of the road here, but Tony has
been fearless (can’t say the same for Kate…) and has nearly mastered the art of
ignoring all of one’s natural instincts in order to drive on the wrong side of
the road. We’ve basically gotten
used to the fact that we need to drive on the left now, but there’s just no
getting used to Ireland’s roads…
Though their highways are pretty nice and relatively new, every other
road is narrow (they all look like they must be one-way, but they’re not), with
no shoulder, with lots of blind corners, with ridiculously high speed limits,
and with so many bumps and holes and partly-falling-off-edges, that you never
feel quite safe on the road. It
doesn’t help that these tiny roads are full of gigantic tour buses which don’t
seem to notice that they can’t even fit on the road by themselves, let alone
passing a car coming the other direction.
Despite the tiny size of our car, we have felt more than once that we have
barely just squeezed by the car coming the opposite direction. It’s ridiculous what happens on the
roads here! Definitely an
adventure…
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| Notice anything wrong here? |
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| Teeny tiny car |
But what better way to celebrate arriving to your
destination alive than to eat fresh fish ‘n’ chips and enjoy a pint of Guinness
in a perfectly quaint Irish pub?!
That’s exactly what we did once we arrived and got settled in
Rosscarbery. It felt like just
what we needed to get our time kicked off right.
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| Yum |
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| Nolan's Pub |
At the recommendation of a friend, we stayed in the Celtic Cottages
in Rosscarbery. Though we
originally booked one without a view, the very nice lady who ran them (Maureen) offered
to upgrade us for no extra charge, so we spent seven days on a hillside
overlooking the village with a gorgeous view of the town, the bay and the
Atlantic Ocean. It was so peaceful
and quiet there, and since we didn’t have Internet in the cottage, we spent our
time reading (a lot), cooking, enjoying fires, talking about the future, and
playing Scrabble on the iPad. It
was extremely relaxing.
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| Our view |
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| More of our view |
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| The fireplace--this is as big as they get here |
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| Double rainbow! There must be two pots of gold down there |
Our location was perfect for exploring some neat surrounding
areas, too. We went on a little
day-trip to see Mizen Head, the southernmost tip of the mainland of
Ireland. It’s beauty was rugged
and natural—just what you picture of the Irish coast.
On the way to Mizen Head, we stopped at the Dromberg Stone
Circle, a 10,000-year-old smaller version of Stonehenge. The surrounding countryside was
gorgeous and equally as impressive as the ancient work of man.
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| 10,000-year-old work of man |
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| Much older work of God |
On a different afternoon, we drove out to Galley Head, just
south of where we were staying, to see the lighthouse and the beaches along the
way. The countryside in County
Cork is just beautiful—soft rolling green hills that go all the way to the
water where they drop off into dramatic cliffs of jutting stone. The beaches are incredibly smooth and
all of the stones are perfectly flat—each and every one ideal for
skipping.
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| Stone skipper's paradise |
We climbed up on one of the little cliffs and found the most delightful ground covering. The turf was so bouncy and spongy that it seemed you could bounce from one mound to the next. It felt very much like being in a Dr. Seuss book.
Another one of the beaches, closer to Rosscarbery, had a
huge variance in low tide and high tide, so when we saw it at low tide, the
beach itself was massive, stretching flatly out to the water for a very long
way. The sand and rocks and ocean
and the clouds passing overhead made for a very dramatic scene. Everything here is dramatic and
beautiful.
The sky here is always changing because the weather is always changing. It rains one minute, hails the next and is gloriously sunny a few minutes later. This makes for the most consistently beautiful and dramatic skies we’ve ever seen. The sky seems so much bigger than normal and the clouds seem more majestic somehow, always moving quickly enough so that you can watch them change in a moment. It’s almost magical to watch it, and our cottage provided the perfect viewing point to just sit and do that.
There are cows and sheep everywhere, and since it is Spring,
there are baby cows and sheep everywhere, too! You can hardly look at any vista without seeing brown or
white dots spread through the hillsides.
It’s lovely.
There are stone walls everywhere. Every road and field is surrounded by low stone walls, made
mostly of stacked stone, sometimes with mortar. However, many of these walls have been around for so long,
that they are nearly completely overgrown with grasses and plants and sometimes
trees. These walls are used as
fences between fields, too.
Sometimes they are so low or worn down that we wonder how they can keep
the cows and sheep in, but we have discovered the answer: they don’t. It is very common to see cows or sheep
on the wrong side of the fence.
Most of them don’t seem to mind; instead, they look at you as if you are
the one on the wrong side…
Guinness is about 100% better here. And it’s always on tap in a pub without
exception. If you ask what is on
tap, they don’t say Guinness.
Apparently, that’s a no-brainer.
Rather than wood, peat is the main fuel for fires here. Peat has a very distinctive and nice
smell, and the faint smell of peat fires hangs over every village. We are glad to be here when the weather
is still damp and cool enough to require fires.
We love it here!
There is lots more to share, and we are already two counties beyond Cork now, so we will post more soon.
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