Mike Tayse and Family go to Ireland, Part 2

Mike Tayse and Family go to Ireland, Part 2

So on Thursday, we headed to Dingle. It's about an hour from Kilarney.  You drive through mountains/hill like that above.  Most of them have stone fence rows, which impose a rough, geometric, look to the landscape. Lots of them have old, abandoned stone structures just, seeming, randomly placed for visual interest, I never got tired of just looking.  

Like so many(read, all)of the pictures I take the pics don't do justice to what you really see.  The above beach pics are from outside Dingle and it was beautiful place to walk about.  Above is my most wondrous wife, patiently waving as instructed. 

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For the trip we drove, and by that I mean mostly Caleb, a Renault Fluence.  It was a turbo diesel and although nothing special in the way of cars I suppose, I really enjoyed it and it was a very nice ride.  It was a silver, 4 door sedan, nice trunk, good legroom, quiet, decent acceleration, and it got very good mpg, and that's with Caleb, generally hammering it up and down mountains.  They actually measure fuel usage as a liters used per 100 kilometers, which is a hard number for this, raised in America boy, to wrap his little pea brain around, at least intuitively or when trying to do  a rough estimation/conversion in his head, while driving. 

After driving a turbo diesel,  experiencing the acceleration, mpg, the lesser priced fuel, no glo plugs, no weird smell, and no weird sounds, you really wonder why they don't have them here.  I can't see the downside of the diesels in Europe.  I rode in some diesel taxis too, same no sound, smell, or special concern associated with driving them.  We even rode in one of those, off at a stop and back on when you step on the gas, in this case diesel, cars and it seemed to have no intrusive eccentricities to make you not want to have one.   I'd switch today if they came on the market. Although, having said that, going pure electric probably makes the most sense to this guy.

In Ireland you sit on the right hand side of the car and drive on the left hand side of the road.  Having never done this, it was pretty funny as everybody yelled at me to do and drive in various ways!  It all worked out, no accidents, and really, Caleb drove mostly. 

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So we drove down this coastal road on the Dingle Peninsula, where you see stuff like this, pretty incredible really, it was a constant, "Wow...would you look at that", sort of a thing. 

As you drove you would come upon more wonderful views of the ocean and ancient stone structures.  Some more intact than others, but all reminded you that this place has an ancient history. You'd look one way and see evidence of cultures from long ago and on the other side beautiful cliffs, mountains, and the ocean. 

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'Ya just can't escape Hollywood!  One of the recent Star Wars movies, the one that ends with an older, Luke Skywalker on top of a mountain with cliffs, used this location.  

Above are some shots of the locations used in the movie, it was all amazing and easy to see why the are would work in a dramatic way. 

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I'll put some more pics up of this, and it's hard to see in this picture, but it's very old fort/village of some sort. There are lots of stuff like this. It had some standing stones and old walls and the like.  It was on our drive around Dingle. 

This was also seen during our drive around Dingle.  A more recent, probably 800+ years old, structure.  All fit together without mortar.  Just carefully selected stone stacked up.