Ireland

We landed at the Shannon airport around 10:00 AM local time, breezed through customs, and had only a minor hiccup with the rental car, while also successfully declining all of the offered upgrades. We knew the car would be an adventure: stick shift (which both Benton and Tim were comfortable with), the driver on the right (think about it: that means the shifting of gears occurs with the left hand; luckily, the clutch and gas pedal are not reversed!...

The big destination for the day was the Cliffs of Moher. On our way there, we stopped in Ennis for breakfast and, afterwards, poked around the town a bit, including ducking into the Ennis Friary and spending some time poking around those semi-ruins. The Cliffs of Moher were everything they were cracked up to be. After stopping in the visitor center (meh), we took the path to O’Brien’s Tower and then walked the 3....

We headed out from our Kilbane Glamping pod and down the road to the quaint town of Adare, where we had a nice little breakfast (we’re starting to remember the “Irish breakfast” standard from our trip to Dublin a couple of years ago). The rain started just as we left breakfast for our walk to the Adare Friary, where we poked around a little bit before stumbling onto a river walk that looped us back into town....

We were both feeling like we’d been pushing things a bit, so today was going to be a bit lighter on the activities front. We…failed at that. Oops. We got a pretty late start—slept in, had a leisurely breakfast at the AirBnB, and then refilled the car with gas (petrol!) before heading to Killarney National Park, where we took the short walk to the Torc Waterfall….and then continued on for a longer loop....

We hiked to the peak of the tallest mountain in Ireland: Carrauntoohil. This was an hour’s drive away, but we think it took us more like 1.5 hours, as the roads were mostly small on the route we took, and our inability to even remotely approach the posted speed limit was in play (even the locals don’t seem to come close to the 80 km/h posted limit on some of these roads)....

This was essentially a travel day. It got off to a slow start, as Benton’s stomach decided to empty itself through the entrance rather than its usual digestive exit shortly after midnight. The root cause is a bit of a mystery, as we shared our dinner dishes earlier that night, and a COVID test came back negative (which Benton protested taking, as he maintained that he did not have sufficient symptoms; but, we had tests, and they were going to expire mid-trip, anyway, so he went ahead and used one)....

Alas! The title has a double meaning! What hit Benton two nights ago hit Tim last night, so he was up and aggressively emptying both his colon and his stomach in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, our Dublin flat is sufficiently small that Kim got to hear that (she thought it was Benton). This led to another slow-ish start to the day, but we headed to Windmill Lane Recording Studio for a tour, which was pretty neat....