Day 29: Hiking is pretty nice when you aren't carrying all of your luggage on your back

We rose early-ish this morning but completely failed to get a good start, not leaving the B&B until after ten thirty and then realizing we had left our guidebook behind, so we (well, I) had to run back and retrieve it, pushing the start back to eleven. But we had an excellent and filling breakfast, and our host offered to take our bags to Dingle for us since he was already doing the service for another pair of walkers. So even a late start wasn't much of a problem today.

We hiked for a few miles before reaching the ruins of Minard Castle, which was damaged by Oliver Cromwell's forces in 1650.

The ruins of Minard Castle

We also saw a tour bus parked by the castle, with guess what logo painted on the side? That's right, REI Adventures! I wanted to ask the group about it when we saw them coming back from whatever hike they were doing, but I didn't quite work up the courage.

We soon traveled onward to Lispole, an intersection that boasted a gas station and even a little shop! We bought a bit to eat and hiked on until the Way took us off the busy highway and stopped to consume our purchases (a tasty little chicken and bacon sandwich for me and a Diet Coke for Mom because she is, well, Mom). We rested for half an hour and continued onward to Dingle. That was our only appreciable break for the day; thank goodness we weren't carrying our packs!

We continued on through the beautiful scenery (and the sheep) for another few miles before we reached the point where the Way turns from a nice little farm road into a potentially boggy, certainly grassy, and in our mind pointless track. The turnoff itself was, well, a turnoff.

Overgrown stile, uphill climb: we NOPE'd out of that pretty quick

After that, we had a lovely pleasant walk down to Dingle. As luck would have it, we passed a very neat little medieval bridge over the Garfinney River, which we would have missed if we had taken the original track.

The old bridge, from the new bridge

We continued along the road and after a couple of uneventful miles we arrived in the coastal town of Dingle. We found our accommodation and our bags and took showers before heading into town for some food.

Now there is a movie that I rather like called Leap Year, which is about a woman who goes to Dublin to propose to her boyfriend because it's apparently an old Irish tradition that you can do that on Leap Day but the other 1400-odd days of the four-year cycle the men propose. Anyway, after a few travel problems that through some very confused geography land her in Dingle, she pays the owner of the only pub in town (and the only inn, and the taxi service) to take her to Dublin. Even more transportations mishaps occur, they fall in love, and eventually they get engaged on the Cliffs of Moher (which some more flexible geography is within walkin distance of Dingle). Very sweet, more enjoyable the more you watch it (which is why I like is so much, I've seen it about five times now).

But the point I want to get across here is that Dingle is not a single pub/inn with a couple of additional buildings. It is the biggest town on the peninsula, with a flourishin tourist trade and even a friendly dolphin!

Chock-full of restaurants and B&Bs and gift shops and a fantastic ice cream shop

We ate dinner at a fancy restaurant that mistakenly called itself the Old Smokehouse, did NOT expect cloth napkins, white table cloths, and French names for our food (I had duck, Mom had salmon en croute), but it was delicious and nice to have a bit of class for once. Then we ice creamed and finished the night in a pub listening to Irish music, catching a bit of soccer, and experiencing a very drunk German man who told us about eight times that his friend was turning fifty and that there were too many Americans. We eventually left him to his friends and returned to our B&B for a nice long rest.