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Saturday 6/23 – Chris’s 60th birthday

 Our bus sang Happy Birthday to Chris, and Robin presented a box of chocolates.  I had a card circulating on the other bus but was unable to retrieve it until Sunday since we didn’t meet up with that group until evening.

I enjoyed scones for breakfast and lunch.  I ate four in three days.  The hotel was nicely located across the street from Killarney National Park, http://homepage.eircom.net/~knp/ and we had two nice walks where we saw a dipper, swallow, wren, chaffinch, wood pigeon, song thrush, coal tit, white wagtail, and hoard of rabbits. The dipper was larger than the American version and had a distinctive white bib.  Mary Kennard took advantage of the park to jog each morning.  We could see the second highest mountain in Ireland (~3000 feet high).

That morning we took another wrong turn en route to Muckross House, but eventually got there for a guided tour, which was ok, but I would have rather spent time in the gardens looking for birds.  In the house was a fossil of a prehistoric deer with giant antlers. John Mecom later told us on the bus that the deer's extinction is an example of evolution gone bad. The deer developed huge antlers during an ice age. When the climate changed and the tundra turned to forest, the deer could not survive in the woods.

We then began our drive around the Ring of Kerry.  Our group bought sandwiches at a small grocery store because the few restaurants always had two tour busses there and would have taken two hours to be served.  We ate our lunch sitting on a wall at a school yard overlooking the sound. The other bus kept passing up restaurants and didn’t eat until very late. Reddish clusters of heather were visible on rocks along the roadside.  This trip had a few beautiful stops such as mouth of Dingle Bay but was disappointing overall because we couldn’t see the water very often, considering the length of the trip.  The return over the mountains in Killarney National Park was spectacular as we looked over the Upper Lake, Muckross Lake (Middle Lake) and Lough Leane (Lower Lake).

Back in Killarney, we took a horse and trap ride in the park with the Wilsons and Kennards and enjoyed our driver’s jokes as we went to view Ross castle, which has been used form filming movies.  A hoped for boat trip was cancelled because of the threat of rain.  Dinner was Irish stew with the Wilsons and Kennards.