Ireland day 1066. Thursday 29 August 2024- Portmagee

Today’s summary	Spent the morning having breakfast, doing some shopping and then packing for our upcoming trip. Left Malahide about noon and drove 5 hours west to the Ring of Kerry. Staying in a guesthouse near Portmagee for 3 nights and hoping to do some sightseeing on the Atlantic coast. Took a walk in town in the evening then had chicken noodle salad we’d brought with us for dinner in our room
Today’s weather	Mostly dry and bright with long sunny spells. A couple of short downpours on the motorway around Limerick. Light westerly wind. Appx 17c

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The blue line shows where we walked) (No GPX today)

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

Another day travelling of today, following hot on the heels of yesterday’s solo expedition to Wicklow. This time, though, we were casting our net slightly further afield and driving right across the country to County Kerry, to spend three nights away exploring the Atlantic coast.

First though, being Mr and Mrs last minute, once breakfast was despatched this morning, we had to do all our packing and of course in the process of doing so, realised that we didn’t have half the things we needed for our trip. So we had to slot in a quick trip to the shops to collect these essentials, before we could even start shoving things into our bags. Eventually, though, we were shopped and packed and ready to go by about noon.

One of the great beauties of living in Ireland is that you can quickly see a lot because it’s so relatively small. So even though we were late in getting away, and even though we were travelling to one of the remoter sections of the west coast (to the Ring of Kerry, to be precise), we made it all the way there by late afternoon.

Once we arrived, we could immediately tell that the contrast with Malahide was going to be stark. The air was clear, filled with seabirds and ozone, the mountains were lush green sweeping down to the fractal coastline, and the roads were quiet. In short. it’s beautiful. We’re fortunate in that we are staying in a particularly well sited guesthouse with a stunning view over Valentia Island (surprisingly enough, it’s called “Valentia View”) just a couple of km away to the north. Our accommodation itself is just outside the tiny harbour town of Portmagee. We are close, too, to the bridge over to Valentia Island – which surely beckons us to visit in the coming days.

As soon as we had settled in to our room and inspected the menagerie in the back garden (pigs, goats and chickens seem to feature prominently), we drove 5 minutes west to Portmagee and had a look around. It’s a pleasant enough spot – which feels more like one of the remoter villages on the Scilly Islands, off Cornwall, or on the far north western Scottish coast. Luckily we got there just before the mini-mart closed at 7pm, so we were able to stock up on milk and biscuits, and the other essentials we hadn’t brought with us despite our urgent and extensive shopping trip in Malahide this morning.

For dinner we returned to our room and had a chicken and noodle salad which we had actually managed to remember to bring with us, then paused briefly to listen to, and to try and identify, the birdlife chattering outside our bedroom window.

But on to more sublime matters now. I’m going to dial into my Netflix account on my laptop, and see if Mr Musk’s satellite link is robust enough to stream another episode of “The Hour”. Failing that, it looks like an early night beckons!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Just before we arrived – a quick pause on the journey to look over the bay to the Dingle peninsula in the haze on the opposite shore	Mr Pig is in our back garden!

Val checking out the view from our bedroom window. A superb vista over to Valentia Island	Portmagee main drag. The only drag, in fact

The marina – a few fishing vessels (though mostly on the other quay) and a lot of commercial sightseeing boats	Today’s blog is brought to you courtesy of Starlink (Thank you Elon Musk). Never used it before and it is quite good. About 10-20 Mbits/ sec both uplink and downlink. Ping not too bad (40ms) considering it’s a satellite link

Quaint but mostly derelict old cottage on the outskirts of Portmagee