On Monday morning we had to get up at 6.00 am to get to the airport, so I was standing in front of the check in counter quite tired … and then it happend. I don’t know if anybody else is having this experience with travelling over and over again. I certainly do so….there was a family in front of me, a huge one…that had obviously not read the instructions provided by Ryan Air. Travelling with Ryan air means that you have a limit of one bag for check in and one hand luggage and there are limits for weight and size of both. That family had a lot of more luggage than allowed and the woman at the counter told them they had to pay for that additionally. An argument was starting (I was thinking of coffee in the lounge) and the argument took nearly 30 minutes until daddy got to the cash automat and got the money to pay the additional luggage…..

The flight itself was a little turbulent but we reached Dublin safe and sound and departed the airplane for the luggage. In Dublin Airport this is a little round the world trip if you land in Terminal A.

We had originally planned to get to Dublin by bus (from the airport) and did this with a 90 min ticket which we could by via an automat. After some bus stops I already knew what the problem in Dublin would be. There is no record of the bus stations so you never know exactly where you are at the moment and when the station you want to leave is coming. Most stations have names, but not all of them and they are not displayed in the bus. So it is pretty hard to figure out when you have to leave the bus. I asked an Irish sitting next to me and his explanation was quite simple. Tell the bus driver where you wan to get out and he will call you when you reach that stations. The Dublin bus drivers must have an enormous brain for being able to keep this in mind. But it worked pretty fine and after 25min in the bus he called for us and we left the bus directly in front of our bed and breakfast.

Liz was the one to welcome us and was one half of the owner of the bed and breakfast. The room was really nice and clean and to my absolute surprise they had blankets like I am used to have them at home. Normally when I travel somewhere outside Germany I am used to have several sheets combined to a blanket… We were directly informed that for breakfast we would be able to get coffee as well and I really hoped that this „coffee“ deserved it‘ s name… I’ve had terrible coffee in Ireland and normally switch over to tea when I’m there. I asked Liz how long it would take us to get to Trinity College if we walk the distance and she told us it would take us about 20 minutes, so I decided to walk there. Everybody who knows how good I am in reading maps would have already started to laugh at this point. Additionally I have absolutely no ability to orient myself. After one hour somewhere in Dublin and I must admit I had absolutely no clue where we were I tried to find the streetname on my map again and suddenly help arrived. Someone who was looking like a banker or lawyer stopped beside me and asked me if I had lost my way. When I told him where I was heading to he started to laugh and had to admit that I was quite a distance from Trinity College. Due to that nice guy I was first able to find the river (it’s a shame but we were running in circles so that we even didn’t get to the water) and from that we finally reached Temple Bar district, where I wanted to get into the tourist info. This was closed (bank holiday..) and so we ended up in some bar to have dinner and start my holidays with a typical Guiness in a pub named O’Neills.

When we decided to get back again we didn’t even try to walk back. We directly picked a bus and I could already figure out myself where we had to jump off (a fact I was quite proud of).

As for the weather (before I forget that). First day, first shower. A quite heavy one, but only for 20min or so….and to our great relief it would be the only shower for the whole week.

It turned out that ,even if it was written that way during the booking, we were not allowed to pay the B & B with credit card as in all other B & Bs before. Normally I wouldn’t mind if I knew ahead, but as we more or less booked all B & Bs with the remark Credit Cards accepted we didn’t bring enough cash with us and had to get cash in Ireland more than once (combined with high charges of course).

We started quite early that morning and took the road through Killarney National Park which is really a beautiful and very huge park that normally would invite everybody for a week of hiking. We only stopped at Lady’s View and took some pictures before we proceded to Kenmare where our next B & B was booked.

The B & B in Kenmare was really beautiful. Possibly the best one we had during our trip. It was in walking distance to town and unfortunately I can’t find it anymore in the internet.

We walked into town for dinner (walking distance were like 10 or 15 minutes) and had our dinner in „The Bridge“ which was more or less one of the first restaurants we came by. They serve a very good steak!

It was rainy the whole day (as can be clearly seen on the picture of Lady’s View)

We started early and had to drive until 2 p.m. to get to Dingle. The weather during the driving was terrible and the road to Dingle was very bad so it really took us some time to get there.

The Bed in Breakfast we booked, O’Shea’s,  is some km outside of Dingle and not exactly what we thought it would be, but as it’s only for sleeping it’s no problem, but I would not really recommend it as walking into town is quite a distance and walking back in the middle of the night seemed not to be a good idea.

As it was still raining the afternoon we had a walk through Dingle town. A very beautiful and nice town. Dingle has an aquarium we visited and as we were quite exhausted from the day we decided to end up in a pub and chose O’Gradys in the harbour area. I can really recommend food there and we were in the lucky position that it was Champions League finals and we watched Liverpool win the match. Very nice atmosphere and lot’s of fun.

Due to the bad weather the picture of that crow was the only one taken on that day.

Our trip  started with a lot of delays. At check in at airport Hahn we already had a family in front of us that had over 30kg too much luggage. First they tried to pack in a different way and after half an hour they ended up in paying over 200 Euro for the additional luggage. When we reached the hand luggage check they were in front of us again and it turned out that daddy had a knife in his luggage which caused again delay for everybody behind. Finally they headed for the wrong gate (Kerry and London are obviously not the same city) and so we had to wait for them again. Needless to say that they had booked priority boarding and were extremely loud and unfriendly because of having missed the priority boarding. This all ended up in 20 min delay. Thanks to family „I‘m not able to read the flight restrictions before the flight“.
When we reached Kerry and made our way to National Car Rental where we had the next problem family in front.  5 people that all wanted to be registered as driver and none of them had done that beforehand.
Our car turned out to be a silver Opel Corsa and I was quite surprised to realise that the Irish streets haven‘t changed a bit in the last 10 years. We needed quite some time until we found our first bed & breakfast „Sheridan Lodge“ in Tralee. The owner was absolutely nice. After she had shown us the room she invited us for tee & cookies and chatted with us for quite some time. She explained where it would be best to park in town and we went downtown. Tralee isn‘t really a beautiful city but the choice for the first day would have been either Killarney or Tralee just because of the distance to the airport and as we both didn‘t want to drive to far on the first day (as we needed to get used to driving on the left side of the road first).
We had dinner at a tiny pub, as it was Sunday we hadn‘t too much of a choice, and it turned out to be delicious seafood and apple pie afterwards. Perfect start for the first day.