Touring the Dingle Peninsula

Our third day was earmarked as the ‘Dingle Peninsula Drive’ day, which had an unexpected start. A young man walking by while we were next to the rental car pointed out that one of our tires looked flat. We thought we’d go to a petrol station and put air in it thinking it might be a slow leak. After that not working, we went to a car service place across the road. In 10 minutes, he’d found something lodged in the tire, fixed the hole, we paid in cash and we were on our way. His patch job lasted us all the way to Dublin!

To get some context about what we were seeing, we followed Rick Steves self-guided tour, which gave us just the right amount of information. Slea Head Drive is best driven in a clockwise direction and is about 50 km start to finish. While in my opinion, the drive doesn’t have a lot of ‘sites’, there is enough to see to break up the drive and it’s breaming with amazingly beautiful scenery around almost every turn. Did I mentioned we had yet another day of blue sky, not a hit of fog or rain?!

My favourites were the Staigue Fort in Sneem (worth the walk, especially if there are  unexpected sheep inside!), the beautiful beach watching a group of surfers (way more keen than me!) and the funky looking ‘beehive huts’.

The drive brought us back into Dingle, which we sadly said goodbye to before heading south to Kenmare. See you again someday, Dick Mack’s!

Our B&B for the next two nights was the Ashfield B&B in Kenmare, about a 2 minute drive from ‘town’, overlooking a golf course. It has a beautiful setting, including mountain views, a lovely owner and an awesome hot breakfast. Kenmare itself is a cute, two street town with lots of restaurant options. Much nicer, quainter than Killarney which is the other town people use as a base to see the Ring of Kerry.