Day Two. Dingle. Maybe the Dingle ate your baby.

Thursday, 5 March 2009.

We woke up at 7:45 am (that's right, I said AM) and left around 9:30 or so and headed for Dingle. It took us about two hours. The drive was pretty diverse. We were on a highway as well as small one-way windy roads bending around the mountain. We stopped for both pedestrians and sheep. Our sites along the way included blankets of green, waterfalls, sheep, snow capped mountains, the Atlantic ocean and did I mention sheep?

When we arrived in Dingle, we parked and started exploring.

Dingle is a cute coastal town full of colorful shops and restaurants like Adare, but the one major difference...fresh fish. We had lunch at a place called John Benny's, which came recommended to us by our travel book. We were the only people in there except for a regular at the bar. Being in a coastal town, we knew the seafood was a must. Our meals included mussels, an open face smoked salmon sandwich and the seafood chowder. And no Irish meal can be complete without a Guinness. Ice cold and frothy.

After lunch, we walked around some more, popped in and out of a few shops before continuing our tour of the peninsula by car.

Our car took us up and around the coast. Stellar views. A bit of history. Tiny villages. Loads of sheep. Scenic stop offs. The Atlantic ocean like we had never seen it before — a beautiful blue/green. The whole drive took us a couple hours and it circled us back around into the town of Dingle.

We parked again and decided to do some more walking around before we headed back to our villa. We grabbed some fresh fish (Pollack) from a fish stand to make for dinner. The Apple Tree was dessert stop number one for us. We had read they served up deep fried candy bars. How could you not try that? Deep-fried Mars bar with a couple dollops of whipped cream. It was scrumptious times three. Dessert course number two was had at Murphy's, the local ice cream shop. When we walked in, we were greeted by two extremely kind women. I say extremely kind because they handed us an endless amount of samples of all the different flavors. We finally settled on a choice and sat down to enjoy. DJ was in mint chocolate chip ice cream heaven.

After dinner, we went into Adare and found a warm seat at Bill Chawke's, had a pint and watched darts on the TV (which seemed to be like their WWF wrestling over here). There was supposed to be live music, but it was pretty dead. We moved on to Aunty Lena's. Much more lively place. We initially thought there was a pub quiz going on, but apparently it was race night. This consisted of gambling on old, taped horse races (the horses were on the wrong side of the track going the wrong direction, not that we have much experience with horse racing). I guess this is how Adarians gets their kicks on a Thursday night.

Today's added bonus – we saw a rainbow on the way home. Sadly, no little men or gold. I guess rainbows suffer from recessions as well.