Ireland Adventures: Day 7 - Killarney

Another beautiful day in County Kerry Ireland. Kevin hadn't planned on us doing the whole Ring of Kerry route but he was feeling a bit badly that we "hadn't had Dingle" and he thought if the weather held we would go as far as we could until there was no use turning back. Below are the pictures of our trip. I wish my camera and phone were better as the colors are hard to imagine. By the way, for those of you who are reading this and aren't facebook friends with my brother, you can maybe look at his pictures on his page if you're interested. His camera and phone camera are better than mine.

We stopped in the town of Kenmare for our daily Guiness and fish and chips.

These next pictures are of the other side of the national park from where we walked yesterday. As you might imagine, it's an enormous park and these views were some of the most staggeringly beautiful I've ever seen. It looked like a made up place.

Our last stop of the day was at Muckross which is a mid 19th century house which lies in Killarney National Park. It has been well preserved and much of it is still decorated with things from the original owners. It's big claim to fame is the Queen Victoria once visited there for 2 days. Interestingly, the queen gave them seven years notice and brought 100 people with her. The number of things in the house that were created for her two day visit is really absurd - including things like a sideboard in the dining room commissioned in Germany which took 3 years to carve. There are large gardens and horse drawn carriages which would take you down to the lake but it had been a long day and the weather had turned cold and misty. Kevin had encouraged us to take the tour which took an hour and I feel that was partly because he went down the road to a hotel to watch the quarter finals of a hurling match. He showed his metal by coming to get us even though there were only a few minutes left in the match and the score was tied. We listened to the last minute in the car. Interestingly, the match ended tied and there is no over time. So, they're just going to play again next week. This, in a stadium that holds 82,000 people and was sold out. I can't imagine this sort of thing ever happening in the U.S.