Leanne & Mark's 2023 European Travels

Today was a bit of a nothing day. We hadn't planned it that way, but it's the way it turned out.  We planned to drive to Plumbridge in Northern Ireland to have a look around the area where Leanne's grandmother, Rose, was born. We weren’t in any rush to get away as we only had about an 90 minute drive this morning. It had poured a lot of the night and everything was pretty damp when we got up in the morning, but the sun was breaking through, so we were hopeful for a reasonable day's weather. We took off across Ireland and eventually realised the speed limit signs suddenly didn't make any sense and we struggled to workout why. Instead of seeing 50s and 80s and 100s, we were suddenly seeing 30s, 40s and no limit signs. It was getting us rather confused. Then we saw distance signs in miles. Eventually we realised we were actually in Northern Ireland (UK). There had been absolutely no sign of the border. Even in Australia when we go from one state to another you get the ...

After our night in our tiny B&B and a decent breakfast, we headed off this morning and decided we were going to see a few sites on our way to where we’re staying tonight at Sligo. We headed off to  Aughnanure Castle  which is about half an hour from Galway and had a good wander around. Really interesting - built in the 16th century by the O'Flaherty’s and formed the seat of their power for several hundred years until they were knocked off by the Poms. It was one of the few castles that wasn’t destroyed as part of Cromwell’s actions in Ireland, mainly because the  O'Flaherty’s  fled before Cromwell got there so there was no need for him to destroy it.  After that we headed cross country and had a look at a couple of interesting pictures of countryside went to lock you know one of the most spectacular England views we’ve seen so far in Ireland reminds me very much of what we expect to see in Scotland. With a large inland lake surrounded by the highland type mo...

OK I admit I’ve been a little bit slack. I was pretty tired yesterday after a long day out and lots of driving. So I didn’t get around to doing report. So today I'm posting two blogs. The first one covers what I am calling Rainbow Day (Wednesday). The day looked much more promising than the previous days we’ve had, with scattered cloud in a mainly blue sky with sunshine. However, by the time we got to our first stop at the Cliffs of Moher the rain showers had started to move in, along with a gale straight from Iceland! It was a bit like Melbourne weather after a change with alternating sun & showers and this weather persisted all day. The result of all of this was we had rainbows regularly off and on all day - we'd have a shower, it would clear and the sun wpuld come out and, voila, a big rainbow would appear.  Nevertheless we rugged up and dodged the horizontal downpours as we climbed up to have a look at the Cliffs of Moher. Needless to say they are pretty damn impressiv...

Well today wasn’t quite what we hoped for. Our intention today was to tour the Dingle peninsula which is home to some of the quintessential Irish countryside - all those lovely green fields separated by hedges and stone fences with magnificent vistas out over the sea. But it was not to be - although we got glimpses of the coast and glimpses of the occasional field, most of the day was what in skiing parlance is termed “a whiteout”. Even the view of "our mountain" from our room was wet.  The wind blew, the rains sleeted and it was a most unpleasant day all up. We got to see bits and pieces of the countryside as glimpses through the various rain showers and mists that we encountered, but missed the full splendour of what we were hoping to see.  We drove from our overnight stay at Killarney after a very nice breakfast - lovely poached eggs and bacon for me - to the township of Dingle,  which is an old fishing vivillagthat still hosts a significant fishing fleet.  It has...

Our landlady, Triona, told us yesterday that if we could see the hills from our bedroom then we had a chance of having a great day driving the Rings - that is the  Ring of Kerry and the  Skellig Ring. Today, for the first time since we’ve been in Ireland, we saw the sun - I opened the curtains and there it was, and the mountains were clear as day. After a very nice cooked breakfast we headed out drive the Ring of Kerry and the Skellig Ring. These are well known and popular tourist routes, mainly because they have some of the most spectacular scenery you will see in Ireland. In line with many Irish roads we’ve driven, they are not very wide, not very good and you can’t see very well. Lots of cautious poking the nose around tight bends on pavements that are only about three metres wide with the very real chance of a car coming the other direction. In lots of places we had to pull over as tight to the side of the road as we could while another car squeezed pass. To complicate thi...