Retirement trip - Day 34

 Left Glengarriff in drizzly weather with a clear plan - I would ride the Ring of Beara in the morning and the Ring of Kerry in the afternoon. These are routes around peninsulas on the west coast and are famed for their scenery.

I started round the Ring of Beara and took a side road to see the unique cable car that connects Dursey Island to the mainland. I had seen a YouTube video about this which mentioned tht it would be closed for a year for maintenance. At the end of the road there was a sign saying the cable car was closed to the public and was only running for testing. When I arrived the cable car office was locked up and nothing was moving.

At this point my still camera completely stopped working and I think it's not dead. I took a couple of photos on my phone, but as it adds a yellow cast to the pictures I have to convert them to black and white.

I was speaking to some people there and the locals seemed to think that the cable car would be running that afternoon. There were people queuing at the island side, so it looks like they thought the same thing.

I carried on round the Beara peninsula and passed through some beautiful villages and spectacular scenery - sadly the rain was getting heavier and visibility was poor at parts.

The road on the north side of the peninsula was much narrower and winding with poor visibility, so speed was down to crawling at some points. I realised the ride was taking much longer than expected and that a ride round the Ring of Kerry wouldn't be possible in the time I had. Looking for something else to fill the day, I decided to ride over the Healy Pass. This was a very good road, but the heavy rain made visibility a bit difficult.

See, it's not all riding around in glorious sunshine!

 I had taken other videos but they were so poor due to poor visibility, rain on lens, etc that I couldn't use it.

The pass took me back to Glengarriff and I actually rode past the place I had stayed. The rain wasn't getting any better, so I rode n to my destination for tonight, the small town of Killorglin, Co Kerry. The place i was staying said I couldn't book in until 18:00, so I rode fairly gently and stopped at a cafe for about an hour to use up time.

One of the reasons I'm in Ireland is to go to concerts tomorrow night and Friday night. I'd bought the tickets through Ticketmaster ages ago and today got an e-mail from them saying they had changed the way you can show your tickets. You can now only use a 'live' system on your phone and they won't accept a screenshot. You also have to download a new version of Ticketmaster's Irish app for it to work. I tried downloading the new Ticketmaster Ireland app but as I've got a British phone I got a 'not available in your country' message. Ticketmaster UK couldn't find my tickets as they are at a venue outside the UK, so I had to spend ages loading and reloading apps to get it to work. I then had to download the Google Wallet app to store the tickets. All in, this took me 3 hours, but I think I got it to work. Nice of them to do this the day before a concert!

All reactions