Saturday, October 18, 2008

2008 Ireland Trip -7 Sep 08, Part 1

One of the fun things to do on this trip to Ireland was to figure out the shower fixtures at the different B&Bs. This is the one at Coill An Roîs - a lovely shower, but a bit of a challenge to sort out initially. Those knob-looking things on the bottom aren't knobs at all, but are shower heads that shoot water at . . . ahem - this is a family blog, so let's just say it washes the lower portions of one's anatomy.

More about this B&B a bit later.




After a lovely breakfast Michael and I started our day's sight seeing at Dingle. The marina was bustling with activity as a group of young people were taking to the water in these small sail boats. There's a sailing school at the marina and these kids were really excited to be going out on the water.




The sky was pretty dreary looking, but the water was beautifully calm - a perfect sailing day.











Dingle is a fishing town and the marina is full of working boats as well as pleasure craft.










I really enjoyed seeing all the bright sails on these little dinghies.










Dingle is built up onto the first couple of hills, but you can see farmland beyond on the spine of the peninsula.










This would be a great place for paddling a kayak, too.












I lost track of the number of sail boats, but it was more than a couple dozen.







We toured the peninsula for the entire day, with our first stop at Ventry beach.












I don't remember the name of this ruined castle, but you have to pay to get in to see it up close. We opted for the roadside view instead of paying 5 euros each for a walk in a pasture.









The next stop was an impulse one - the Celtic prehistoric museum and art shop. That was too good a title to resist. It turned out to be one of my favorite stops, and I'll talk more about that on my post for Sept 8th.







A stone carver displays and sells work here.











When you walk into the main shop, this nest of fossilized dinosaur eggs is the first thing you see. I knew we were in for an interesting visit.








The museum takes up much of this place, but there's also a nice gallery shop and the proprietor is a very interesting chap by the name of Harris Moore - a hammer dulcimer player. As I said, more on this visit on a later post. For now, I'll just show a few images from the museum.














There's a nice selection of artifcats from neolithic and bronze age eras from around Europe and parts of the middle east.









Most of the displays have good information to explain what you are seeing.









Harris has been an avid collector of these types of artifacts for the past 30 years and I very much enjoyed looking at the collection.










I wish I had photographed the info card on these fertility symbols.










These are bronze age artifacts,












as are these, and . . .











these,










and ditto. I think the Star Trek Ferengi idea must have come from the middle figurine.

1 comment:

The Quacks of Life said...

its called a bidet