tidy town....

Day 5, Saturday, takes us to the Beara peninsula for a coastal hike which begins at the ‘tidy’ town of Eyeries. This small village, near the southwest coast of County Cork, has won the silver award for being tidy for several years - it is very neat and tidy! But the sad news is they used to get the gold award but have somehow been displaced. Could it be the little bit of bird poo on that roof? There are no dead heads in the flower pots even!

Very pretty, very picturesque, the trail takes us to an old coast guard station and there are 11 modern, metal stiles to

climb up and over fences safely. We are hiking the coastal area and get a chance to stop for anyone who wants to dip their feet in the Atlantic Ocean. I get my hands in - it feels quite warm but I don’t want to take off my boots - too much hassle getting your feet properly dried off with no sand in your boots after! The planned hike is actually cut short by a few kilometres at the end due to extreme erosion - there is no trail left! We end up taking the nearest road back to where the bus is picking us up. 

We stop at another small village, Kenmare, for a little shopping and coffee break. Janet finds a nice winter hat and scarf set and wouldn’t you know, I find a version of that Celtic pin I’ve been searching for. This one is a a stall of local street vendors and is handcrafted of hammered silver - I couldn’t walk away without it but I think I made a bad deal. It was €42 and I was thinking about the VAT deal and

thought it would be cheaper because of the rebate but didn’t realize the vendor may not be legal. I paid cash and asked for a written receipt and she gave it to me but it had no details on it, no address or tax number or anything. When I questioned her, she took the receipt back and quickly penned in a number that she said was the tax number but I am not confident that I will be getting VAT back...

Dinner this evening is just a short walk around the corner from our hotel to Murphy’s at the Kenmare Inn. Robert has given us the menu options earlier so we can make our selections for a 3 course meal. I opted for the beetroot and quinoa salad, which was quite large and I could have been satisfied with just that. My next course was sirloin steak which I chose hoping it would be medium rare - I’ve found that most meat is very well done here, especially if it was a roast and I don’t particularly enjoy that. The steak comes, delicious and just as I ordered, and trimmed with deep fried onion rings. The side dishes, served family style to the table, include boiled new potatoes, scalloped potatoes au gratin, big, thick cut French fries, mixed roasted vegetables, peppercorn gravy and the obligatory Irish soda bread with butter. OMG! So good! I have been trying to develop a strategy not to eat dessert but it’s not quite working out. Bailey’s cheesecake - how could I pass that up? I left the dollop of whipped cream off the top...