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Some time around the turn of the century, Barb's great-grandfather, Arthur Marshall, left his family in Tarbert to emigrate to the United States, and for some time now she's wanted to kick around the old ancestral land. Since our first full day in Ireland was wet, we decided a long car trip to Tarbert would be just the thing. We had no idea what we'd find when we got there. The town hardly gets a mention in any guide book, and then only because they have a jail that they've turned into a museum. As it turns out, about the only thing in Tarbert worth showing anybody is my lovely family posed by the sign on the edge of town. They look happy because they haven't seen Tarbert yet. The place amounts to a t-junction with several pubs and a shrine to the Virgin Mary. I'll leave you to think about the implications of that juxtaposition.

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We managed to squeeze all the wild excitements of Tarbert and drive all the way back to Killarney in time for lunch. As we still had plenty of daylight, we all piled back into the car to have a drive into Killarney National Park to see the sights. The first sight we saw was a cave I don't remember the name of and which I don't have pictures of anyway, so why do you care, right? It was a cave. Think of Batman.

The pictures I do have from that outing, though, I took while we were having a bimble up the valley that Torc Fall cuts through. Nobody on earth could have designed a waterfall more perfectly laid out for tourists that Torc Fall. There's a big car park right beside the road, and the falls are only about a hundred yards up the path. I imagine in the height of the tourist season this place is thronged, but today the rain discouraged them, so we didn't have to fight through much of a crowd. They were thickest when we were already coming back down the hill, where I stopped to snap this shot of the boys with the falls behind them. That's Sean to the left of the couple holding hands, Tim to the right. Like you can see them.

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We lucked out just about everywhere we went that day. Every time we stepped out of the car, it had just stopped raining. While we were having a walk around, no rain. Then, each time we got back to the car, usually just as we were opening the doors, it started to rain, and kept on raining until just before we got to our next stop. I can't explain it, but I'm not complaining.

As the weather was being so kind to us, and there were quite a few pathways to explore in Killarney National Park, we took a short hike up the valley to see the source of Torc Fall. Never found it. We did find this view, which is a great deal more spectacular if you're gazing upon it in person with your own wet eyeballs, and not staring blankly at a web page on a computer monitor, but this is the best I can to do for you, sorry. The city of Killarney is in the distant right background, beyond the lakes of Killarney National Park. A gorgeous mountain range is immediately off the left edge of the picture. Too bad you can't see it.

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One more shot from Killarney National Park, this time a photo of what they now call Ladies' View, so named because Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting were so utterly dazzled by this sight they could hardly tear themselves away. It must have been pretty dull to be a lady-in-waiting. I imagine they had better weather, too. We stopped here for quite a while, had a tramp around the rocks, ducked into the Ladies' View tourist shop, and so on, but the majesty of the place didn't quite strike us the way other places did. Might've had something to do with the thirty-knot headwind or occassional showers. And that's just about all we saw around the national park; we spent the rest of our time chasing tourist busses in our car, and I know you can't wait to hear about that, so if you're still with me, let's click on to the next page ...

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