Close Encounters

Well, these crazy roads weren't done with us yet.

On Wednesday, we left the Dingle Peninsula to head for Connemara--our longest driving day of the trip a repositioning day.  We knew it would be a bit of a slog, with several cities to get through and little scenic diversion.

We were leaving in a pretty heavy rain, but we knew we got to start the day with a scenic highlight--Connor Pass, the second of Ireland's rather famous passes (Healy Pass being the other).  We had driven it on our 1987 trip and remembered it as not intimidating at all, just a curvy road climbing up a wide swath of a mountain flank and coming out to a beautiful view of beaches along Brandon Bay.

I'm afraid our rather dusty memories were also rather faulty.  This is one very hairy road!  It has some sheer drop offs and narrows to one lane in several places.  And when one says "one lane" in reference to Irish roads, we're talking even narrower than the already narrow roads and usually enclosed uncomfortably with stone walls on both sides, no turn outs at the ready.

On top of the rain, we found ourselves in a cloud bank at points, so the only views we got on this stressful drive were of the wet road in front of us and some breathtaking "slopes" below us.  So we played "dodge 'em" with numerous cars and were very thankful when we reached the other side. 

So much for our memories of routes of the past!

The rest of the drive was uneventful, though the weather was pretty awful.  The winds, which had been very blustery on Dingle, we're trending toward galing on the north side of the pass.  The three cities had ring roads that allowed us to skirt much of the congestion, and we even had a freeway/toll road for about 50km that saved us some time.

On Thursday, we planned to drive some more of the Wild Atlantic Way.  (Once again, our inn is on the WAW.  Though we had read of the existence of something called the Wild Atlantic Way, it was mostly in reference to the northwestern part of Ireland.  We had no idea how much we would be bumping into it or following it--even in the southern part of Ireland--and we hadn't realized that several of our inns were located on it.  It's just all part of the fun of discovery when one travels.) We were going to loop inland through the rather barren stretch of Connemara and take the WAW along the coastline back to our inn.

At the last minute, we took a detour north to visit Cong, where The Quiet Man was filmed in 1951.  It's located on an isthmus between two large lakes--Lough Corrib and Lough Mask.  

We made a loop out of this detour by taking a "green" road (i.e., a scenic road) back to our starting point.  

We beetled along through a pretty area of hills and lakes, but suddenly found ourselves on a very narrow little goat track of a road and once again climbing steeply uphill.  We kept wondering if we'd somehow gotten off the "real" road, but we'd never noticed any options.  We remarked that thankfully there didn't seem to be any traffic.

And then the real fun began.

As we were coming downhill from this unexpected pass, we suddenly came face to face with a tour bus. (!!) The bus was going nowhere to accommodate us, so it was up to us to make room for it.  In this instance, that meant backing uphill until we could find a wider spot.  I could see such a place in my side mirror, but Jerry could not see it.  So he had to back up on faith and with me telling him which way to aim the car and how far he could go.  We got into the "wide" spot, and the bus driver indicated we still needed to bring around the nose of the car for him to be able to clear us.  Happily, he went by. While we collected our wits, we let a car go on past us from uphill, then we ventured on. 

Just a few hundred feet later, we saw that car veer off into a steep uphill track that approached a farm gate.  Then we saw why: here came yet another tour bus!  We did our best to pull off into the same spot, but hit a crater-sized pothole that stopped us in our tracks.  Jerry did some quick thinking and got us out of that predicament and enough off the road for that stinking bus to get by.  After it passed and the other car departed, we got out to assess damage. The tire looked intact and we could see no damage to the car.  Whew!

The rest of our drive was comparatively easy and uneventful.  We stopped off to have a well-earned Guiness (for Jerry) and Smithwick (for me) and were very happy to pull into our inn and park the trusty car for the day.  Oh my!