Jeana's Family Blog: Ireland Day Five, Ring of Kerry

We began our day-long drive right after breakfast. We'd been told we just had to drive the Ring of Kerry, which is supposed to showcase all the variations of Ireland's natural beauty—gorgeous beaches, mountains, lakes, beautiful flowers, trees, rhododendrons all over the hills. But first we stopped along the back roads at this old house that's pretty much in ruins.

We also stopped to poke around this castle near Killarney, but it started raining so we didn't stay long.

This wonderful building housed some free public toilets.

Yep, that's us under the umbrella.

We stopped at a mall that was pretty unremarkable, then we headed on up to the Gap of Dunloe for lunch. I'd been remarking to Eric the night before that although we'd had some pretty good food in Ireland, I still hadn't had any traditional Irish food so we scoped out Kate Kierney's Cottage before we left. And wow am I glad we did! I had the bangers & mash and they were simply amazing. Oh and there was an Irish peat fire burning to keep us nice and warm during the rainy day.

Eric had the lamb, Bianca had some Thai chicken, and there's my amazing bangers & mash

After a while, the rain stopped and we were able to stop and get out of the car, along the way. One of my favorite places we stopped was at this old ruined castle—Ballycarberry Castle. We climbed around and down. It was pretty crazy, really.

That's Bianca and you can see the sea (it was low tide) behind

We stopped at a rocky beach. The girls played while I just rested and enjoyed the sound of the waves.

We made another stop around another beautiful, scenic view of the ocean.

Shortly after we took this picture, we were driving through a tiny village called Castlecove and I pointed out the house I wanted (I seem to always want to live in the amazing places I travel to). This was my landmark Georgian I dreamed about fixing up the rest of the car ride.

We still had quite a bit of driving to do. We went passed this lake, got stuck in a little construction, and wished we had more time to get out and walk around a little.