After breakfast, prepared by Maria of Orchard House in Killarney, we set off to explore the 179km Ring of Kerry welcomed by our first sunny and rain free day in Ireland. We stopped off in Kenmare for lunch and then off to Blackwater, Sneem, Castlecove, Caherdaniel, Waterville to St Finans Bay along the Ring of Kerry. It was very pretty along the coast, but quite sedate in terms of actual riding. The roads in Ireland are very bumpy in general but otherwise uneventful. Looking for something a little more adventurous we took some of the Mountain passes ( Mullaghanattin , Ballagah Beam, Molls Gap and the Gap of Dunloe back into Killarney National Park) whilst tame by some of the other roads we have been on (Raiders Road in Scotland and Torr Rd in Northern Ireland) still a nice ride. During the pass we met Jean Pierre from Paris, who was touring on his own (we had passed him earlier on the Ring of Kerry) and it was interesting to here about his travels and he was envious of us being able to take a 12 month trip. Whilst riding the pass we had to stop along the way for Vince to do the boy thing and have a pee break … Surfice to say my SheWee has now been christened successfully! An interesting way to see the Killarney National Park is via the Jaunting Carts….it was lovely to see the horses and carriages in the Forrest.
And Vince says … that the N70 that runs west from Kenmare and marks the southern section of the Ring of Kerry is sealed, but is rutted in some sections – the left-hand track has subsided in places and is a good 3-4 inches lower than the rest of the road surface – where the rut ends and rises up to meet the road there’s a steep, sharp lip, and I can imagine that hitting that at speed would be quite disconcerting, especially as the rise was often at angles to the road – a good opportunity to lose your front wheel sliding across the lip. I choose to stay in the right wheel track and avoid the dramas 🙂 The ‘steep climb’ out of Catherdaniel described in Colette Coleman’s “Great Motorcycle Tours of Europe” was a complete non-event – we’d finished the climb and pushed on for a while when Karen asked over the intercom when was the climb coming up, as she was looking for something exciting to occur 🙂 And our usual preference is not to ride the same road twice, but I did backtrack 14km from Ballinskelligs back to Waterville so we could get away from the coastal route and go explore the mountain passes…Â
