The Ominous Ring of Kerry
Now everyone I have spoken to who was in
The beginning of the journey wasn’t so bad; it was like any other road. The only problem was that we kept ending back up in the same town.
We tried to leave five times, but every time we kept going the wrong way. It was getting a little scary. Finally we asked a man taking a walk early in the morning to help us out. He told us that the road was very hard to see and you would only know it if you were a local. Great! What is the point of signs if they don’t make sense? We were using a map too and it was sending us in the wrong direction.
Finally, we were free of the town that was holding us back and we were on our way to the Ring of Kerry. At first it was smooth sailing and then from out of nowhere, the roads began to morph into something I have never seen and hope to never see the likes of again.
We were heading up to the Ladies View as everyone I had spoken to raved about it. What they forgot to tell us was the higher we got up the mountain, the smaller the roads got. Besides just being small, they deteriorated before our eyes! They were in bad shape and were very windy, which we expected as it was on a small mountain, but these babies were so narrow and chock full of potholes and other fun!
There were cars that were going 10MPH, this is not an exaggeration.
We finally got a hang of the driving in the mountainous area but just then nature threw another obstacle at us. There on the road was a couple of sheep on the road grazing and completely ignoring us. Eventually they found a better patch of grass on the side and left, but everywhere we drove around the Ring, there was sheep close by the road. These guys were crazy! But I love them because they weren’t about time constraints; they were about the simple pleasures in life.
After what seemed like an eternity, we came upon the Ladies View.
The view was wonderful, but I am not one to stand idle, so I decided I was going to take a hike and began walking to an area where I could jump over the wall and get a better look of the view. It seemed innocent enough, but the ground was very damp and I was juggling a new Canon Camera in my hand. I had a flashback to Angie’s camera at the 
The walk was very muddy and I didn’t want to mess up the rental car with muddy shoes, so I decided to jump across a bunch of small stones that were lodged in the muck. It worked pretty well, except once in a while one would sink and I would have to move quickly to the next stone. I felt like Frogger!
After the hill and the mud I was golden. I looked back up to find Angie, but she was still by the ledge, I wasn’t even really sure if she knew where I was. But rather than yell out to her I continued further down to get even closer to the lake in the distance.
On my way there I met up with two gentlemen who I figured were Irish.
When Angie caught up with me these two fine gentlemen asked if they could take a picture of us together with the view. I am not one to turn down a cool photo op and agreed, how often am I at the Ladies View? After we said our goodbyes, I silently stared at the view. Part of me wanted to continue further down and see more. After seeing so much amazing scenery in 
After the Ladies View we were back onto the main road and headed further out onto the Ring of Kerry. The road progressively got worse which I didn’t think was humanly possible, well, it was. It was strange, because the part of the Ring we were on wasn’t green, but rather brown and hilly. There on the steeps rocky hills were sheep eating on the side. I have no idea how they were defying gravity on the hills as they were and kept imagining a few of them tumbling down the hill at any moment and hitting our car. Luckily, it never happened, though the image is still burned into my brain.
After 30 minutes, we realized that we were nowhere near the end of the Ring and that we had completely misjudged the time it would take to get around the Ring of Kerry. We made a decision that rather than take the whole ring and be in the car all day long and do nothing, that we would back track and head straight to Dingle instead. We would miss out on all of the beauty the Ring would offer us, but we didn’t want to be stuck in a car all day either.
So we did a u-turn in the road as there was nobody around for miles. As we headed back, we were met with a borage of locals that came out of nowhere who were flying down the roads at twice the speed that they should be. The drivers in
We kept letting them pass, but unfortunately heading down the Ring of Kerry by the Ladies View, there is no room to pull over, because if you pull over too much you will fly off a cliff.
Let me tell you, the ride up the cliff wasn’t bad. Why, because the roads were bad, but we were hugging the mountain. On the way down, we were hugging the roads that were on the cliff drop off points with lots of water and narrow roads.
Because we drive on the other side in the
Everywhere in Ireland they have signs that tell you how many people had died on that road that year, those damn signs weren’t helping me either. Apparently
Finally we got back onto a larger, straighter, flatter road that took us to the main freeway. We had to pull over at the local Spar and because I had to use the restroom. I didn’t even care that there was no seat on the toilet, after that trip, I could handle anything. We decided to grab a sandwich and a few snacks to keep us satisfied until we got to Dingle.
The Spar rocks and is a great place to get cheap eats. What I found interesting is that the Irish are more creative with their sandwiches. I had the tuna with lettuce and cheese and that was it. The woman looked at me confused and then a local came up next and had the works which consisted of everything you would expect on a sandwich but added mash and stuffing! It was like a Thanksgiving sandwich in the
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