Itinerant Philosopher

After ten days and 260 miles of cycling along the Atlantic coast of the West Cork region of County Cork, we finally reached a new county: Kerry. An Irish crow, on the other hand, would only have to fly 36 miles between our starting point in the city of Cork and tonight’s town, Kenmare. Following the coastline is not very efficient, but it sure is beautiful!

New county!

“Tidy towns” are a thing

Old rocks in a circle

Kenmare is a lovely, touristy little town with lots of interesting “recent” history (1800’s) as well as history going back to the Bronze Age. The biggest stone circle in the south-west of Ireland sits pretty much in the center of town, which is convenient for lunchtime Druidic activities. While it’s not dramatic, it is a nice setting. I found the official site explanations amusing: “The Kenmare stone circle may be oriented on the setting sun. It may have been used for rituals by Druid priests.” Basically, they don’t know jack, but the rocks are pretty cool, anyway.

Kenmare is a jumping off spot for folks visiting the Ring of Kerry (a day trip for most folks, but several days of cycling for us). That means that the town is big enough to have two services we were excited about, and which inspired us to leave last night’s B&B early this morning so we could maximize our time in Kenmare.

1. Good restaurants. There are a lot of good restaurants in this town. Heck, it’s nice to see *any* restaurants after the past few days. We got here in time for a late lunch.
2. Laundry facilities. After almost two weeks of doing small batches of laundry in the sink, we were pretty excited to sit in a laundromat and get our clothes truly clean. Except for the clothes we were wearing, we washed everything.  This tells you something about our minimalist lifestyle that doing laundry is something we look forward to!  We were amused that we were doing laundry in a town called Kenmare, even if all the appliances were LG. It was odd to do laundry in a business that is both a photocopy/business center AND a laundromat. I’m sure that there’s a joke in there somewhere about separating colors vs black and whites, or maybe “hot off the press”,  but I can’t quite find it.

“Hot off the press”

2 of 3 whiskies we tried tonight

We continue to learn more about Irish whiskey. Tonight we did an actual whiskey tasting. The bartender was very good about explaining whiskey to us. So far we’ve experienced six different whiskies. I’m still leaning toward Yellow Spot as my favorite.

Keeping Track of Where We Are

You can see our progress at: Joy and Tony’s Ireland Wild Atlantic Way 2017