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This is the kind of scene you expect to see when you think of Ireland, isn't it? We had miles and miles of this when we finally went out to tour the Dingle Penninsula on Tuesday. (I'll wait a moment while you finish chuckling over the name 'Dingle Penninsula.' Done? Okay.) The sky was clear and blue, the temps were warm, the most gentle of breezes beckoned us to get out and walk whereever we went, and every picture I took that day was a post card -- I know you don't want to look at post card after post card. As pretty as these scenes are, they all kind of run together after a dozen or so. I'll offer you a few here, though, just so you can sort of get the flavor of the day. I don't remember where I took this, but I know it was on Dingle (Yes? What's so funny in the back, there?), possibly in the area of Slea Head, where we stopped several times to walk around -- or it might be in the area of Inch, our first stop of the day. Don't remember. Spent more time trying to soak up the sun and the sights than paying any attention to what I was taking pictures of.
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This, on the other hand, is typically not what I imagine when I think of Ireland. Looks more like Japan to me. But Ireland it is, honest. This is off a beach in Smerwick Harbor, on the north shore of Dingle. We were looking for the rolling heads. According to the guide book, there was a massacre on this site back when they used to do that kind of thing in Ireland, and to commemorate the event (I think that's the right word), an artist with a fat government grant sculpted dozens of severed heads and scattered them up and down the hillside. Or so says the guidebook. We saw no heads, and although this stunning view made up for it, we were still rather disappointed.
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Backtracking just a bit, this is a shot of Inch Strand, the beach at Inch that runs right round and out into the harbor. It's very, very long, very wide, rather tidy, and soft enough to invite you to run barefoot, with of course Tim had to do almost immediately. This was our first stop of the day and we couldn't have asked for a better place with better weather. There was even a tea shop on the beach. Tim started a shell collection here that I believe is still rattling around in his jacket pockets. The rest of us just collected sand. We stayed about as long as we could stand the tourists, then squeeked out between a pair of tour busses and an oversized camper. The main roads that you see on the map are just wide enough for our car to slither between an oncoming tour bus and the stone walls that flank the road on both sides, but only if I clamp both hands around the steering wheel and shut my eyes so hard that tears spurt out. Barb was doing the same thing with her eyes, so I don't think she caught on to what I was doing. It worked, right?
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I'll squeeze one more snap into this page to make your download really tiresome. Barb's nephew Alex sent us a 'Flat Stanley' -- a little cutout doll. Stanley likes to travel, the story goes, and he travels mostly through the mail. Alex sent him to us so he could get a little globe-trotting experience, and lucky for Stanley he arrived just as we were getting ready to head for Ireland, so he went much further than he knew he was going to go. We took lots of pictures of Stanley -- way more, it turned out, than the huge number I already thought we were -- but I'm not going to inflict that on you. This just happens to be a fairly good picture of Barb and I, and Stanley happens to be stuck to Barb's fingers. Stanley's also in the photo of Barb, Sean and Tim at the Leprechaun Crossing that you saw on the first page, by the way, but no way am I going to turn this into a 'Where's Waldo?' competition. (Winner gets a piece of stinky piece of cheese by return of post.)
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