Dingle Peninsula

Along the way to Dingle, we made a little stop. It was one of those things you do to placate one of your kids on vacation, except this time it was awesome!

Aidan collects those tourist fliers that hotels have in racks off to the side of their lobby. He passes right over the ones for hot air balloon rides or castle tours and goes straight for thee water parks and the bouncy houses, the bowling alleys and petting zoos, you get the idea. He had one that was for a tin soldier factory. It was sort of out in the middle of nowhere and we didn't give it a second thought until we passed a sign for it, and the sign looked kind of cute. So we decided to take the detour to the Prince August factory and visitor centre without telling Aidan.

You know it's gonna get good when the front of the building looks like this:

And there were these in the parking lot:

I don't even think I know anyone who is a "gamer" or anyone who collects figurines, but this place was a ton of fun.

It is a family run business and they have some amazing craftsmen and artists working to create tin figures from every possible time in history that you could imagine - including mythological history. Egyptian or French Royal Court chess set? Yes. Tin soldiers from every war ever? Yes. The original one-legged tin soldier? Yes. All hand-carved and then cast and painted and shipped all over the world.

They will host parties where you get to cast your own piece of tin and then paint it, if you arrange it ahead of time. The owners are delightful and it was a lot of fun. Aidan and Riley picked out some things to take home to paint. (They have dragons too.)

We made our way west and made the fist of many beach visits. The one below is Inch Beach. There is a surf culture in Ireland. Not just the California brand Quicksilver Boardrider shops, but local board shops and such. It is a lot more like surfing in Washington where the water is cold and rough. There are summer surf schools and camps as well.

Here we are socked in low clouds at Inch Beach. But they don't last. Riley is happy here because it reminds her of home. She is unhappy because it reminds her of home.

We proceed to the Castlewood in Dingle, it's as lovely as it looks, like most things in Ireland. We check in and go off exploring the town of Dingle itself, which, as you can guess, is lovely. Old buildings, cute stores, great pubs with live music. Even Murphy's ice cream shop where they make their own flavors like Irish "brown bread." Fun fact. Dingle is the runaway capital of Europe. Lots of disaffected youth roaming from hostel to hostel with everything they own in a backpack.

Ireland takes the green right up to the ocean's edge...

We spend Saturday roaming the western edges of the Peninsula, toward Slea Head, stopping where we could to soak up the locals. We went to a totally off-beat Celtic and Prehistoric Museum. Run by this eccentric guy who made a lot of money as a musician and then decided what he really wanted to do in life was collect old things. And I don't mean antiques, I mean like mammoth bones and stone-age and bronze-age relics. It was the strangest thing ever. All of this real, actual, historical stuff just sitting out here in the middle of nowhere.

We went for a short hike to explore the beehive huts.

We got up close and personal with sheep, because the roads are just that narrow. The black on the bottom of the picture is the car door, and we are on a cliff that goes straight down to the ocean. That is a very nimble sheep.