On Friday, Leandra braved the crowds and went shopping early, then played golf with her family in the afternoon. Since I’m not partial to shopping or golf, I rented a kayak from Ray’s in Bradenton and spent several hours paddling ~5 miles upstream, then back down again.

It was an absolutely perfect day for kayaking with no wind, 70 degree temperatures, and very few people out on the water. Along the way I found some swamp lilies in bloom:

I also saw a number of animals including egrets, herons, hawks, a pileated woodpecker, turtles, and jumping fish. All in all, it was a very relaxing workout, and a great capstone to our Florida trip. It also makes we want to go kayaking again in the near future!

I ate my fair share of ploughman’s lunches (what is the deal with pickled onions?) and pub food during my last visit to Ireland and when the weather started to turn against us out on the end of the Dingle peninsula, we sought refuge in a small pub, Tig Bhric, in Riasc.

Eric had “the best grilled ham and cheese sandwich he’s ever had” and I thoroughly enjoyed my ham and pea soup with fresh brown bread and a pint of Guinness.

We grabbed two chairs in front of a peat fire and warmed out feet while listening to the locals at the bar speak Gaelic.

It turned out to be my last Guinness of the trip and it was delicious!

On our last day in Ireland we drove out to the end of the Dingle Peninsula for some amazing shots of the rugged coastline. There was liberal use of the available pullouts and quite a lot of jumping out and then quickly back into the car. We have several lovely shots from this day, but I couldn’t resist taking this video of Eric (from the comfort of inside the rental car) trying to take photos in what looks like hurricane-force winds. At least we saw some blue sky!

We’re enjoying Thanksgiving in FL, and last night we went to watch the sunset at Emerson State Park in Palmetto, Florida.

Riesling came with us and had a lovely time sniffing everything on the beach and getting her nose full of sand. :)

We had a very difficult time finding a good resource for waterfalls in Ireland before we left on this trip. Even when we asked locals, the most common answer was “Oh, how about the Torc waterfall?” The best we could do was a few snapshots of cascades using the images view on Google Earth. So, we weren’t expecting a whole lot.

Well!

There were waterfalls all over the place, which is probably why folks think nothing of it. Ireland received a tremendous amount of rain recently and all the rivers and creeks were flowing to capacity. I don’t think any of these falls are named, so we used our Garmin to note the GPS coordinates of each of them.

Enjoy!

These will be added to our waterfall database shortly!

Eric called this one of the top three most scenic drives we’ve done. Considering Chapman’s Peak in South Africa and Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park are both on that list, that’s saying quite a lot.

The trek consists of a (mostly) paved road barely wide enough for one car for about 22 kilometers. Each passing of a car going the other direction was an adventure (vast understatement) and in total, it took us about 2 hours. :)

I’ll let Eric’s photos speak for themselves!

More photos in our Ireland Flickr photo set.

Yesterday we started our drive down to Bradenton, FL, for Thanksgiving, and spent the night outside of Jacksonville at the home of our friends Beverly and Chris. Thanks for the hospitality guys!

Everyone was gone when we got up in the morning; well, almost everyone:

That’s Lucky, a super cute and somewhat sleepy chihuahua. He was rather happy to have us around (though not so pleased with Rieslings presence) and Leandra ended up having breakfast with Senor Lucky:

Lucky was one of the first dog portraits Leandra created last year – you can see his picture in her gallery.

We had to leave Lucky behind, but we’ve now made it to FL where we’ll be for Thanksgiving.

After driving through Killarney National Park we took a detour down to the Beara Peninsula to see Gleninchiquin Falls. I had emailed the private park a few days before we left but no one ever got back to me, so we had no way of knowing how much it was going to cost to get in.

Once we got to the turn-off, a small sign listed the “modest entrance fee” at 5 Euros. In general, we are not big fans of paying to see waterfalls and I think $6.25 per person is more than a modest fee but we decided to see how close we could get.

We had nice views of the large falls while navigating the narrow road past private farms, but ultimately we decided to turn around short of the entrance near the Uragh stone circle. Eric went traipsing uphill through a bog to get the following shot… and I am still trying to get the mud stains out of his pant legs.

After our stops at Muckross House and the Torc waterfall, the weather improved slightly as we meandered through Killarney National Park. The N71 took us past many small lakes and beautiful viewpoints.

We parked at this old church and took a short walk to some cascades. The fall color was lovely and the sun was just starting to peek through the clouds.

We had an amazing view of Killarney and the many lakes of County Kerry from Ladies View.

Plus, we got to see some punk rock sheep. One of the things that amused me during my last trip here was how all the sheep were spray painted in different colors. This guy has three color markings and was probably wondering why we stopped to snap his photo.

I sent a text message to my sister early yesterday morning so she would call me on her way to work and the following conversation ensued…

Me: [Call me!]

Her: calls me immediately, worried, “What’s wrong!”

Me: “Nothing, I meant [Call me!] as a casual request. Just call when you get a chance.”

Her: “Oh, because the exclamation point worried me.”

Me: “If it was really serious I would have texted [Call me.] with a period, I meant the exclamation point to be light and causal.”

Her: “Well, next time consider [Call me :)] with a smiley face.”

Me: “Of course.”