IRELAND - DAY SIX - TRAMORE TO DUBLIN

Day 1 Getting There | Day 2 Northern Island | Day 3 Londonderry to Galway | Day 4 Dingle | Day 5 Tralee to Tramore | Tramore to Dublin

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Today is our last day and it's time to head back to Dublin for our early morning flight back home. We have a few stops along the way.

This once again involved a ferry ride - not a lot of bridges in Ireland once you get away from the big cities.

Driving has been fun, the GPS in our car definitely has a sense of humor. On several occasions the "Little Bitch" would take us on  a side trip on the narrowest roads you can possibly drive on while on her screen I could see an alternative route running right alongside. However, she was never wrong and her weird route got us where we needed to in almost the same amount of time with a lot to see along the way. The picture on the right is a fine example - she took us on this crazy narrow road and brought us out here through this gateway to the main road.

The other cool thing I saw today is that our rental car also has automatic windshield wipers. The strangest thing, it started raining and the wipers turned on and varied the speed perfectly according to how hard it was raining and then turned them off when the rain stopped!

Maybe its because i am not abreast with the latest car technology (I drive a 14 year old sports car or my golf cart) but that was pretty impressive to me!

Our last supper at a local pub. Wendy has chicken tenders - not Irish you say? You'd be wrong. A very popular Irish dish is Goujons. And what are Goujons, you ask? Strips of chicken battered and deep fried. Sounds like chicken tenders to me. I had Guinness Stew (with a Guinness of course).

Here's a weird thing about Ireland. We have been looking for a typical pub each night that serves basic pub grub like in Scotland and England. Doesn't exist - the pubs here either don't serve food or they serve high end gourmet stuff.

Yesterday we looked  up 8 pubs in the town we were staying in and not one had pub grub, and it's happened in every town. NO bangers and mash, no Sheppard's pie, no pies and gravy. Nope you gotta yap $17-$30 for fancy food such as we have been eating.  Tonight's dinner was the closest we got to pub grub, the first pub we have found with a simple menu. Of course every pub does offer hamburgers and steaks. Damn Yank influence.

Meat pies are also NOT a thing here unlike the rest of the British Isles - they are almost impossible to find, only seen one or two at an occasional gas station fast food counter. No pie shops, none in bakeries. I was most disappointed.

However the food we have been eating has been excellent, but I don't know how the Irish stay so skinny! Perhaps the cold burns all the fat.

The other thing hard to find is public restrooms. Very few. Unlike Britain and Australia.

It has been an excellent trip, but I will say that I was disappointed in the Irish castles when comparing them to the Scottish Castles. There are many more castles in Scotland and they are very, very impressive. The Irish people are super friendly and wonderful hosts in the B & Bs we have stayed in.

The only problem we had was finding the damn places - all but one of our B & Bs HAD NO STREET NUMBER. Just the name and street. And GPS machines like street numbers. So we can find the street but then have to crawl slowly looking for the place. Many of these B & Bs are not in the GPS database and because our phones don't work here we can use Google without a Wifi connection. Was very frustrating.

If you land up behind one of these, you're in for a long, long ride at 10 MPH, there's no getting by and no pull outs. Another fun thing today!

That's it folks, see you in January for our trip to Africa!!!