I’ve never really enjoyed driving. It’s just not my thing; I’d rather sit in the passenger seat and fiddle with the radio. And it’s been pretty easy to avoid while I’ve been traveling — I generally stick to larger cities, where there’s public transit available to the airport, and even when that’s not true you can always catch a cab.

I found out, traveling around the Hebrides, that all that really only applies to cities. And while I was able to get around using buses, it’s far more difficult when the buses mostly run twice a day and sometimes you need to call ahead and ask for them to be there.¹ And car rentals can be really cheap, as low as 20€ a day, which even if you factor in petrol starts to get rather competitive with other transportation options.²

So I bit the bullet and rented a car in Düsseldorf to avoid a 4 hour train trip a couple months ago, and managed to avoid hitting anyone or anything. And then I decided to visit Ireland for a week, and further decided to visit Dingle, which is right near the Ring of Kerry which everyone claims you have to do, and while there are bus trips scheduled they do mean you need to be on their timetable, and I already have a great guidebook which explains all the sites.

So I rented a car³ in Kerry. With the gearbox on the wrong side and everyone driving the wrong way round. And I somehow scheduled it just as the sun was setting, so everything was going dark around me, on all these narrow unlit one-lane roads with greenery blocking your view around the curves and high beams that only stayed on if you held the paddle down using the same hand you needed to use to shift.

And I again managed to avoid hitting anyone or anything. I’ve been driving all over the place, all around the Ring of Kerry and then down to Dingle⁴ and finally around the Dingle Peninsula. The trip odometer said 440km when it was all said and done. And I may have scratched up the side of the car a bit on the foliage a couple places, and I was hitting my right hand against the window whenever I thought I should adjust the rear view mirror, but other than that it took about five seconds to adjust to the side of the road I was supposed to be on and I was fine.⁵

The Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula both feature these spectacular treks down the coast of Ireland, punctuated by various pubs and villages and archeological sites. You’re constantly being invited to pull over for some ridiculously gorgeous view. And I did stop, quite a bit, whether just for a pint or to see some point of interest.⁶ Of the two, the Dingle Peninsula is a great deal shorter but less touristy, with the same kind of things that make the Ring of Kerry so great. I’m glad I did both, but if I were limited to one, I’d stick to Dingle.

I had paced myself around the Ring of Kerry so I spent the night in Portmagee, which is the traditional jumping off point for Skellig Michael,⁷ which I had been ridiculously excited about visiting ever since I realized I’d be in the area. It’s best known, now, for being where many of the scenes on Ahch-To were shot for The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.⁸ But it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where a small group of hardy Christian monks founded a monastery sometime around the 7^th century.⁹

They carved stone stairs all the way up to the top of the island, and that’s where they built their monastery. It’s remarkably well preserved for something 1,500 years old and an hour’s boat ride out to sea. And there’s something deeply moving about being so isolated, so remote, with the wind and the water and sheer drops fifty stories to the rocks below. The island truly is otherworldly.

It’s a seabird sanctuary, with gannets and storm petrols and most famously puffins.¹⁰ I missed the puffins by about three weeks; they clear out by early August. Puffins aren’t doing so well, like most everything else in nature, between overfishing and global warming. If you want a glimmer of hope, the puffin colony at Skellig Michael is strong and growing. You can still see them come early summer. And I may not ever be back, but give me the right travel companion and I could probably be talked into it. That view was worth it.

I spent the second half of my stay in Dingle, which was charming. I’ll admit my first awareness of the place was all the way back in December, when I stopped at Murphy’s Ice Cream in Dublin and ordered the Dingle Gin ice cream. The city’s developed a pretty big reputation as a tourist destination¹¹ and you can decry the prices and the sheer number of B&B’s in the area, but it’s still retained a lot of charm.

I could have spent more time driving around the area, maybe seen the Blasket Islands or actually stopped at the Dingle Distillery that makes the gin and whiskey and vodka you’ll see around, but I really only reserved a single afternoon for touring the peninsula. I was otherwise happy just staying in town, where the real attraction, to my mind, is the music.

Dingle’s got a surprisingly large musical tradition, grounded in Irish folk music, but expanded rather eclectically. I saw jazz and rock and swing advertised while I was there. With only a few days — I crashed in my room Sunday night, leaving only two nights to hang out late — I was a little pickier. Monday I booked a ticket to the long-running Eoin Duignan Concert Series, held in the 600-year old St. James Church.

I figured out the real magic on Tuesday, though. Virtually all the pubs host musicians every night of the week, generally starting around 9:30 in the evening. So you can go for dinner around 8pm and then head to one of the two Murphy’s Ice Cream and have your Dingle Gin or Irish Brown Bread or Salt Water¹² ice cream. And then you just wander down the main drag, and listen to all the music bursting out from the pubs, with people laughing and dancing and drinking, and you can wander in and have a pint or just stand outside, light patter of rain hitting the street, and bask in that glow anyway. You can afford to be choosy. You have all the time in the world.

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Footnotes

¹ The bus service to Glendale involved transferring from the bus to a guy in his car to run you the final 10 minutes to the town.

² When I was staying in South Uist, the nearest pub was an hour’s walk away. The only bus route saved you about 20 minutes of that. I gladly sprang for the taxi.

³ Well, a Škoda, which technically qualifies as a car

⁴ “The Next Parish Over is Boston”

⁵ Okay, fine is relative. Despite never zipping down the road on the wrong side I would have been a lot more comfortable with a passenger managing the navigation and yelling “STAY LEFT!” every time I pulled into traffic. And the Škoda is equipped with a gearbox with all the snap and verve of a warm loaf of bread. I make no apologies for grinding the gears a couple times failing to put it into first, especially since I had the clutch fully disengaged when I did and I’m still trying to figure that one out.

⁶ Derrynane House, with my having just last year been wandering up and down O’Connell Street in Dublin, was particularly neat. And oddly, they had just received O’Connell’s death mask that very day. There’s something very unsettling about driving off and hearing a news report about the place you’ve just left on the radio.

⁷ And then managed to get booked on a charter out of Ballinskelligs, of course.

⁸ Although to help preserve the site they apparently also built a replica near Ballyferriter. There were plenty of Star Wars puns and T-shirts around, although I didn’t run into anyone selling blue milk, so I think they’re a little behind on the whole merchandizing thing.

⁹ This turns out not to be all that noteworthy; nine of the islands in the area feature monasteries. The austere inaccessibility and remoteness set Skellig Michael apart, though.

¹⁰ I assume by now everybody and their mother knows the whole reason for porgs in The Last Jedi was the sheer impossibility of removing via special effects all the puffins in the background of the shots.

¹¹ In no small part due to the dolphin that hangs out in their harbor, known as “Fungie”

¹² Okay, so I’m partial to a scoop of the Gin and a scoop of the Raspberry. But the Dingle Sea Salt Ice Cream tastes like sea foam and ocean spray and the cream you might sip while watching a storm out in the Atlantic.