Day 4 – Killarney to Cork

Remember in my ‘Planning & Prepping’ blog I spoke about how before we left we made sure the tent was waterproof…. yeah well we were wrong. During the night, in a continuous pattern I felt heavy droplets of water bounce off my forehead. The tent is definitely NOT waterproof…

This morning was slightly different to our normal routine. When we woke up at 7, my bf did everything to get us organised- made us breakfast, went to cook pesto pasta for lunch, washed the dishes and packed the car up. I wasn’t just being lazy, I was actually writing my blog. It may not seem it but this is like writing a essay everyday for a week and takes up a lot of time…especially amending all the spelling and grammar mistakes in the first draft. I usually write it in the car when we are on the go but as we were doing the Ring of Kerry today and the whole point is to admire the views, I thought I’d try and get it basically done before leaving camp at 9am.

To start, we visited Killarney’s national park – the first national park to be opened in Ireland. It is huge. Here, we came across Ross Castle. We may have been a couple of hundred miles out when we first tried to visit it on our way into Galway, but better late than never eh.

Muckross house and gardens was our next stop. We walked around the gardens taking all the secret paths through the shrubbery which lead us to a huge open area filled with many different fruit trees. There was a bigger selection here than the first aisle in Tesco. The pear was delicious and even better as it was free. After, in the gardens cafe we decided to treat ourselves to a coffee/hot chocolate and a slice of cake to share.

We hopped back in the car and before starting the Ring of Kerry we pulled over to check out Torc Waterfall. It was ‘splashing’.

The Ring of Kerry was long but worth it. There were so many cyclists, I don’t know how they didn’t die with exhaustion… I was struggling and I was in a car. Every time I drifted off to sleep though my bf would kindly put down all the windows in the car and blast the music. So thoughtful of him…

For lunch we stopped at Kells, a small seaside resort at the far end of the peninsula. After demolishing my pasta, I was busting for a pee and couldn’t find a toilet anywhere so my only option was to strip off, get my swimsuit on and go in the sea. Fortunately, the relief of the pee distracted me from the freezing cold water. We continued on passing Waterville where the famous Charlie Chaplin used to come for holidays and Cahersiveen, birthplace of Daniel O’Connell – I swore that he and Daniel O’Donnell where the same person but apparently not.

Once we completed the full circuit of the Ring of Kerry and before reaching Cork, we visited Blarney Castle and Stone. Kissing the Blarney Stone is one of the 100 most popular things to do before you die. The queue was an hour long though so we decided to sack it and kiss each other instead. Who said romance was dead? We explored the Castle grounds and the poisonous garden before finally heading to our hotel in Cork.

When we arrived at cork there were no spaces left in the hotel car park so we had to park miles away. However, the only space we could find was one you had to parallel park into and because my bf is shockingly bad at parallel parking I had to do this for him. I reckon he felt very emasculated, although he is a good driver at everything else to be fair. Once we checked into our room, we went straight to the hotel pool for a quick dip and to relax in the hot tub, sauna and steam room. It was so nice to feel clean again.

After the pool, we showered and decided what we could have for dinner. We ended up going to a local Tesco to get some nachos, dips, brie, crackers and alcohol, and ordered a pizza from the hotel and got it delivered to the room. Whilst we were stuffing ourselves, the room phone rang. It was the reception ringing to offer us complimentary breakfast in the morning because our door handle was a bit loose. This day couldn’t get any better.

We tucked ourselves up in the fluffy bed sheets, put on some classic Saturday night TV and drifted off to sleep dreaming of our full Irish breakfast in the morning… and each other of course.