When I first started researching our Ireland trip, something that caught my eye was driving the “Ring of Kerry”.   It is a road, about 112 miles looping in the county of Kerry through some pretty amazing and dynamic landscape.

Image courtesy of The Moorings

We got a hotel in Killarney which is the northernmost part and also the biggest town.

Here are some of our views from the drive:

Cliffs of Kerry

Cliffs of Kerry

Watching some surfing action.

Rolling hills of green

House overlooking the Atlantic Ocean

Loved the many little islands

Beautiful panorama

We were warned that there would be tour buses galore and it would get annoying driving down the roads.  However, we only saw three tour buses all day, so we really lucked out with the mild weather and unpopulated roads.    We only had to watch out for these guys :

Sheep in the road

In my reading, it said you could take from a full day to an entire week to do the ring of Kerry.  We only had a full day.  By the time we’d stopped at a few gorgeous places, we were running short on time and had to keep trekking back in order to get to our hotel at a reasonable time.  However, since we’d driven from Liscannor, we only started the ring at noon, so didn’t have a full day to start.

We stopped for an awesome seafood dinner at this “beach bar”

But to those going, I’d encourage you to break it up and try to do it in two days.     One, you can do it more leisurely and see more.  Two, if you are like me, I got so overwhelmed with how gorgeous it was that at the end, I couldn’t take in any more.  I had “panoramic shock”.

If you do it in two days, note that there were plenty of cute B & B’s along the route that would be lovely and advertise only 25 euro / night rooms.

Our tips:

–Do two days if possible

–Do the Skellig Ring add-on.  Our favorite!

–We also heard people liking the Skellig islands but we didn’t have time

–We ran into some recent grads from UGA and they said the cut through path in the middle of Ring of Kerry was pretty incredible too

–Don’t try to go too far off road. We almost got our rental car, Patrick, stuck in the middle of nowhere:

Yup, we drove down this road.  Gabe’s idea.