I had a fitful night’s sleep and woke with my left eye swollen nearly shut. I think it was from dehydration. Even taking water bottles with us, we are fairly constantly on the go, and so don’t get enough to drink. We’re trying to do better.
We ate breakfast at the B&B again and were ready to check out a little before ten. It has been a rainy, cool day, more like the Ireland we prepared for. I put our destination into an offline Google map, and we started toward Muckross House and Muckross Abbey on the Kerry Peninsula. It was a pretty long drive, but we got some pictures of what we thought Ireland ought to look like — overcast and foggy.
I’d set Google to avoid tolls, so we took a lot of secondary roads, some of which were really fit to be one way streets. It’s interesting to see how normal this is to Irish drivers. We came upon a one lane bridge, and the car coming in the opposite direction stopped to let us across like it was such a mundane thing. In America, I think there would have been road rage involved. Some of the names of the roads here are really funny.
When we arrived at the Muckross House complex, we discovered that the roads shown on Google were not open to cars, but rather were only for walkers, bikers, and pony carts. So we walked about a mile to the Abbey, where we got some really nice pictures.
I think ruins have been among Jeff’s favorite things to photograph. There was a graveyard on the grounds that had a mixture of really old and really new graves. Jeff figured you had to know somebody to be buried there.
We then walked about another mile and a half in the other direction to Muckross House, which used to belong to the Herbert family until they had to sell it due to the expense of Queen Victoria visiting there in 1861. The house eventually passed to the family of a California businessman who gifted the house and grounds to the government of Ireland to create Killarney National Park, the first in the country’s history. We took pictures of the outside because going inside was only for guided tours. I was very glad to get back to the car because all our walking was catching up with me.
Our next place to visit was Blarney Castle. I was nervous for Jeff to go up the slippery steps because of the rain, and we contemplated skipping it. But Blarney was one of the few things Jeff had specifically wanted to see, so we made the long drive into the interior of the country. I’m really glad we went. The grounds were some of the most beautiful we’ve seen, even in the rain. I was not about to climb that castle, but I did enjoy taking pictures of the flowers. I also wanted to see the Poison Garden, but not without Jeff, so I sat on a bench and waited for him to go up and kiss the Blarney Stone. I didn’t wait very long. He came back in only a couple of minutes and said the queue was down to the first floor, and he didn’t feel like waiting that long for something so touristy. We toured the Poison Garden, and he explored other parts of the castle.
We even got to sneak a little kiss under an arch we sheltered in to keep us out of the brief rain.
From Blarney we drove to Cork Airport to return the car. We stopped a little outside Cork to fill up the car before returning it, and a half take cost 33 euros, or around 37 dollars. As much as I enjoyed Blarney Castle, I was feeling really rough now, and asked Jeff if we could just hire a taxi from the airport to our hotel instead of hike from one bus stop to another to get there. He is a great husband and said yes. Our cabby was the first one in line, and he was a funny, chatty man who associated Memphis and Elvis with us when we said we were from Tennessee. He dropped us at the hotel, and I was so happy to find that this place had an elevator!
Once I stepped inside the hotel room, I decided I didn’t want to go back out again for the night, not even for supper. However, Jeff had been hankering to try Uncle Pete’s Pizza since we started planning this trip. I asked him to go eat there on his own and bring me back whatever leftovers there were. So now I’m alone in the hotel room, waiting for him to get back safely and writing this blog. I think I’ve disappointed him today not being able to do all the things he wanted to do. We will go to bed early tonight, because we need to catch an early bus in the morning to visit the Rock of Cashel.