Pre Tour
I did not want to drive in Ireland, so we booked cities based on public transportation availability. Kilkenny, Cork, and Killarney. As I started looking for tour guides using Tours By Locals, I discovered that most guides in Ireland are willing to drive pretty much all over. (The whole island is only about the size of Maine.) So except for the trip back to Dublin from Killarney, we used guides to get from city to city, overlaid in red on the RS map.
Day 1: Wicklow to Kilkenny
Our first guide, Don, picked us up at the Dublin airport and even though we had just taken a red-eye from LA, we started touring immediately, driving around Dublin to County Wicklow. We stopped at Powerscourt House and Gardens, a magnificent estate with rolling hills and beautiful gardens.
We drove through more rolling hills with quilt-like green fields bordered with an amazing yellow-orange flower that we would see all over Ireland. Gorse. An invasive plant that they use for hedgerows.
We headed into the Wicklow Mountains National Park and stopped at the Lough Tay overview. Amusingly, we had just seen Lough Tay in a movie, “Irish Wish” (with Lindsay Lohan), and I recognized it right away. Don pointed out a house in the distance, and said one of the people who lived in that house had been friends with many famous musicians, including the Beatles, and that "A Day in the Life" was about him. “He blew his mind out in a car. He didn’t notice that the light had changed.” I had that song in my head the rest of the trip!
We went to Glendlalough and stopped at a cemetery that had a big section of headstones with “Kane” on them, my grandmother’s maiden name. Don said in all likelihood those Kanes were my ancestors, but the stones were hard to read, and the deaths were from the 1600 and 1700s. I hope to research this.
Then we stopped in Hollywood, which Don said was where Hollywood CA got its name. I had never heard that story, but some local put their own Hollywood sign in the middle of his sheep ranch. (I have since learned that LA historians dispute this story.)
Our last stop for the day was Kilkenny. Our hotel was in the city, with no parking, so we had to walk a full block with all our luggage - just like a Rick Steves tour! Good thing we packed light. And we had managed to stay awake until 8 pm so the time zone change would be a little easier.
Click on the first photo to see each section in a larger slide show.
Day 2: Kilkenny
We walked to the Kilkenny castle and met Brian Hogan, Kilkenny resident and former bricklayer who makes a living now as a tour guide. We walked around the castle perimeter and then into town, and he seemed to know everything about Kilkenny. We really were charmed by it.
Stopped at St. Mary’s church which is no longer a church but now a museum but had been a disco at some point. There are graves inside the church and in the cemetery next to it. The guide pointed out that the very wealthy had donated lots of money to be buried “next to God not the Bee Gees and Donna Summer. And they didn’t expect people to be literally dancing on their graves." The first of many Irish story tellers who made me laugh out loud.
We stopped at still-in-business churches, including St. Cannis with its 100-foot tower. I climbed to the top of it on a stone circular staircase. After lunch, we toured the Smithwick’s Experience. Smithwick’s is a local beer more popular than Guinness in these parts. But Guinness bought them a few years ago and turned the Kilkenny brewery into a tourist attraction. My favorite part was the ticket seller, wearing a large Smithwick's ID tag with her name, Niamh. I asked her how to pronounce it. She was thrilled that I asked and proudly told a long story about the name being Gaelic and how it was almost a lost language and how it’s coming back. (And it’s pronounced Neev if my notes are right.)
We then walked back to the Kilkenny Castle and went inside for a tour. About a quarter of it had been torn down in battle and never rebuilt. I loved the grand hall, with its huge fireplace with carved scenes and the rafters with animal heads at the ends.
After a great dinner, we enjoyed music in the bar at the hotel. Great craic, as the Irish say.
Day 3: Beaches South of Waterford, Cork
This day was a bit of a bust schedule-wise, but the weather was to blame. Brian met us at the hotel with his car, and we headed south to Waterford. Since the weather was so nice, and rarely like this, Brian suggested that we go to the coast first, and then go back to Waterford. The coast was great, and we were enjoying it so much that we kept going and going. We never went back to Waterford, and we got lost on the way to Cork, so much so that we got caught in rush hour traffic and didn’t get to Cork until a little after 6.
The hotel we had booked was a classic, where Michael Collins spent his last night. (He was assassinated outside of town the next day.) Princess Grace stayed here, and JFK stopped here during his trip to Ireland.
Day 4: Cork to Killarney
After breakfast at the hotel, a new guide picked us up, Ray, booked once again on Tours By Locals. The first thing he asked us was “Do you want to see the Blarney Stone?” The tour website marketed this as a visit to the Blarney Stone, but these tours are completely customizable. We said we didn’t care if we saw it or not. He said “That’s great because there’s a cruise ship that just docked with 4,000 people on it, all headed to the Blarney Stone. That would be your whole day if you want to see it.” No kissing other tourist germs for us, thank you very much.
We headed to Cobh (pronounced Cove) and stopped at a cemetery where many Lusitania victims are buried. Most in mass graves since the bodies couldn’t be identified.
We stopped at the cathedral and admired the multicolored houses that climb the hill across the street. These have become a Cork landmark, really just because of the paint, not because there’s something historic about the houses.
Titanic’s final stop was in Cork on its fateful journey. It was too big to get close so it moored in the middle of the harbor, which is huge. We visited a Titanic memorial garden that overlooks that spot.
One of the reasons I wanted to go to Cork is that I know one of my ancestors, Simon Healey, left Ireland from here so I had always thought he was from Cork. It turns out this port was just where many people left Ireland from; he could have been from anywhere on the island. We went to the Heritage Museum to try to find more information on my relatives. No luck with that, but the museum gave me a sense of what my ancestors went through on the “coffin ships” to escape the famine. Next to the museum was the huge cruise ship Ray had warned us about. A skyscraper on its side. Blocked out the sun. What a difference between that and the coffin ships shown in the museum.
From there we drove a ways and stopped at a Holy Well, where St. Saint Gobnait founded a church in the 800s. We did have a drink of the cold, crisp well water. People come from all over for the curative effects, but we didn’t feel any different, other than well hydrated.
We drove through the hills to Coom which is home to the highest pub in Ireland, surrounded by sheep farms. We enjoyed the views but not the brews. (Meaning we didn't stop in for a drink, not that their brews were not enjoyable!)
After lunch in Kenmare (a cute town that Rick Steves recommends over Killarney), we stopped at the Torc waterfalls.
We then drove through Killarney and checked into the elegant Great Southern Killarney Hotel, which had been recommended by Ray six months earlier. A stretch for our budget but the train station is on the grounds.
After an excellent seafood dinner, we walked around Killarney at night and could see why Rick Steves doesn’t recommend it. It’s very touristy, with many loud revelers in the streets and way too many shops selling plastic trinkets. We had a great time in spite of this, and even bought some genuine Irish goods, though, including a flat cap for me, which I'm wearing in the Welcome photo.
Day 5: Killarney, Ring of Kerry
Ray picked us up at the hotel and drove us through Killorglin, where a goat is crowned king for a week every year. We stopped at the Cahergal stone fort, from the days of Viking invasions. I don’t understand how people survived attacks in this, but obviously they did.
We took the ferry to Valentia Island and drove the narrow roads to the tetrapod footprints. I never would have managed to get here on my own. I have to admit the footprints look like indentations in the rocks. It’s hard to know if these are really the footprints of sea creatures that became land creatures, and it’s really hard to imagine that Ireland was south of the equator when the tetrapods swam/walked the earth. But the present day view from here was amazing.
Later we drove past a large vertical stone that was used as a guide marker before there were roads. High tech for its day. The next stop was even more high tech: the point where the transatlantic cable reached Europe, Telegraph Field. I had never really thought about the specifics of the transatlantic cable, but this was mind boggling that something so important connected here, on the edge of nowhere. The telegraph office has been abandoned because of newer high tech.
We could see the Skellig Islands from here. The Skellig Islands were used in some of the “recent” Star Wars movies as Luke Skywalker’s remote home. Photos of Mark Hamill are all over the area. I had to pose with one. (I worked on publicity for the first Star Wars movie and took this photo with the stars; this link takes you to my Facebook page, but the photo was included in the book My Girls, by Todd Fisher.)
We stopped in Waterville, where Charlie Chaplin used to summer with his family in the 1960s. We stopped in Skeem and at the Muckross House before returning to the hotel around 5.
