A beautiful day in Galway, and now doing some driveway camping!

It was a gorgeous sunny day yesterday here in western Ireland! 

Wednesday night, we had been parked a few miles east of the city of Galway. I found us a good free parking spot just north of the city, but it would mean a 3.5 km walk just to get to the central area. But with hardly a cloud in the sky, we decided that was our best option.

Travel planning and the weather

As full time travelers, we do a lot of our planning around the weather. The ideal for us is to have shorts and t-shirt type of weather with daily high temperatures between 18C and 25C (64F to 77F).

The problem for us is that we also want to visit countries that are outside of those parameters! So we sometimes have to bite the bullet and put up with temperatures or weather conditions that are less than ideal.

Cliffs of Moher, part 2

Up and on the road early again, and we drove right away into the touristy town of Doolin. Every second building is a bed and breakfast or hotel or guesthouse. 

Doolin is the starting point if you want to walk to the Cliffs of Moher from the north heading south. It's also where the ferries set off from if you want to visit the Aran Islands.

The Cliffs of Moher. Worth a visit, however...

There's a beautiful walking trail at the Cliffs of Moher, but the challenge is finding free parking at what has become a very popular and touristy natural attraction.

But we are resourceful, and we don't mind walking!

From one graveyard to the next

Sunday morning, we hung around the graveyard for a while. It was such a nice peaceful spot. A local farmer walked by with his dog and was tending to a herd of cows across the road. Ruth went out and spoke to him, and he apologized if his cows bothered us in the night!

Really nice guy, and we had a good chat with him. Everybody we meet here in Ireland is so cheerful.

We met Max two years ago today!

We were reminded this morning that today is our second anniversary with Max. He has been a great travel companion, so I thought we should show some of our highlights with Max over the past two years.

We picked him up in Dulmen, Germany on June 18, 2021 right in the middle of the Covid pandemic. 

Boy, did we ever get dumped on!

Well, we managed to do 90 kms (54 miles) worth of driving yesterday, but it still feels like we didn't get very far. 

We started off heading to the beach town of Ballybunion where there are some colorful cliffs and sea caves that we wanted to see. We didn't check the tide schedule beforehand, and simply got lucky... the tide was all the way out!

I figured I had better go get this looked at

Long time readers will remember when we had our eye surgery in Turkiye. Time flies, because believe it or not that was two and a half years ago!

And for that period, we have been totally happy with our eyes. Well, until a few weeks ago I noticed that one eye was a bit funny. 

Gorgeous scenery

We figured we had better get a move on if we're going to make it around Ireland and back to Dublin by the middle of next month. We've already decided that our onward travels on this particular trip won't include Scotland. It would just be too rushed for us.

Instead, we're going to make our way back to Dublin by mid July and take the ferry from there to Holyhead, Wales. 

The most westerly point in Ireland

We woke up yesterday morning to heavy fog. It's kind of pointless doing a scenic coastal drive under those conditions, so we did the short drive into the town of Dingle and parked at the local Lidl grocery store and waited for the 8:00am opening.

We did some grocery shopping (once again, cheaper than we expected it to be) and sat out the fog until we noticed it starting to burn off around 10:00am.

Made it to the Dingle Peninsula

I was looking at some of our website statistics the other day, and noticed that 35% of our readers use a mobile phone to access Travel with Kevin and Ruth. That's higher than I thought it would be. Given that, I thought I would pass along a little tip.

When you visit us on a desktop or laptop, you see the full version with the nice header picture. But when you visit us on a smartphone, you will typically see the abbreviated "mobile" version.

Tough hike to the highest point in Ireland!

We got up at 6:30am and drove the narrow single lane road up to the parking area for the hike up Carrauntoohil... the highest mountain in Ireland.

We had our breakfast at the parking area, then packed our backpacks and set off at about 8:20am. We had read that the 12 km (7.5 mile) hike would take between six to eight hours.

We're going to get an early start and go for it!

We got up at 6:30am Sunday morning, and the first thing we did was to drive the short distance to the parking area at the Gap of Dunloe. It's a popular spot, and we wanted to make sure we had somewhere to park Max, especially on a Sunday when it would likely be busy.

And the plan came together just like that. We got a good parking spot for Max, and yes it did become busy!

Hiking up Torc Mountain, Ireland

When we were in the parking lot for Torc Waterfall the other day, I had seen a trail leading up Torc Mountain. We didn't have time to do it then, but decided to return yesterday to do the hike.

Weather conditions weren't great... but we needed some exercise! The temperature was pleasant, but there was some wind and it was overcast, although there was no rain to speak of in the forecast.

The trails are absolutely beautiful

First stop of the day was to head up to the parking lot for Torc Waterfall. From there, several trails lead in various directions. Most of them seemed pretty quiet, but there were quite a few people on the short waterfall trail. 

You can stay overnight at the waterfall parking lot, but there is no cellular access.