April 23 - Ring of Kerry

We are on another tour again today, driving the Ring of Kerry, supposedly one of the most beautiful drives in Ireland.  It is lovely although the weather is pretty bad…heavy overcast.  So between riding in a bus and the bad weather it was a real challenge getting good photos.  But regardless, the drive around the Ring Of Kerry was full of beautiful scenery...

One of the early towns that we drove through was Killorglin.  Every August they have a Puck Festival that features a goat.  So they had a goat statue in town.

We saw many lakes on the drive.

We had a mid-morning stop at the Kerry Bog Village where we saw reproductions of humble buildings like those used for many centuries by the Irish.  In addition to the furnished buildings...

they had some Irish wolfhounds.  Boy, are those dogs big.  But they were quite friendly.

The village was beside the Red Fox Inn where they were serving up Irish Coffee…whiskey, coffee and cream.  Sounds really yummy except for the whiskey and the coffee.

The next stop was at a working sheep farm where the farmer showed us examples of about a dozen types of sheep.  Some are raised for wool and others for the meat.  Don’t remember the names of any of them, 

except for the Jacob’s breed that had very distinctive horns. 

He then explained about the training and control of sheep dogs followed by a demonstration of how he controlled the dogs and how they worked the sheep.  The dogs are so very well trained…it was quite fascinating to watch.  Each dog was trained to know right, left, back and forward.  However, the verbal and whistle commands for each dog was different so that the farmer could control the two dogs independently.

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Video 1 of sheep dogs
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Video 2 of sheep dogs
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We stopped at a wonderful overlook for lunch.

Mid-afternoon we stopped at the small village of Sneem for a bit of shopping and for ice cream.

On the way back to town we went by the three lakes, Upper Lake, Middle Lake, and Lower Lake and stopped at Ladies View where we could see the small lakes/streams that connected two of them. 

The coastline was beautiful.

The vegetation in the mountainous areas looked very different from most of what we have seen around the island.