The Pier Hotel has a very good location, however, there are less than 10 parking spaces, with only two left when I arrived at around 5:00pm and due to poor parking, there was only one left. The room was in poor shape, the door frame was obvious damaged, there were tiles missing from the washroom, good thing we only stayed for one night.
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| The Pier Hotel breakfast menu. |
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| The Pier Hotel Full Irish Breakfast. |
Breakfast was included and it was the traditional Irish breakfast, however, it didn't taste very good compared to other ones, it might be due to them keeping the food heated up since they do have a lot of guests here compared to the B&Bs we had been staying at.
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| Coat of Arms! |
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| Bunratty Castle. |
Our goal for today is Bunratty Castle and Folk Park and we got there at 9:40am and there were already a few tour buses here. We spent about an hour at the castle and we lucked out that when we arrived, there was a short English tour. The castle was really neat to see, however, there stairs are tight and there is no room for people to go up and down, so it was confusing when you would run into people when you are trying to go up or down.
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| Bunratty Castle Interior. |
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| Bunratty Castle stained glass. |
The Folk Park area was okay, it reminded me of Black Creek Pioneer Village. They have some really old buildings which were actually buildings before and they were relocated to Bunratty for the purpose of preservation and to show you how things looked and were in the past based on an individuals job and status.
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| Scenery from Bunratty Castle. |
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| Playground at Bunratty Castle & Folk Park. |
We finished by 1:00pm, so we were here for roughly 3 hours. Lunch today was at The Creamery right across from Bunratty. We ordered two specials which were the Bunratty Chicken and the Grill Sea Trout. The lady warned us that it would take a little while since the sea trout was a bit portion and when it came, it was SURPRISINGLY big. Roughly the size of 3/4 of a keyboard. The portions were very generous, the sea trout was appreciated by Allison, the chicken had a very nice creamy sauce that reminded me of cream of mushroom. I would recommend the place if you are hungry and in the area. It cost us just under €30 for both.
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| Sea Trout at Creamery. |
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| Bunratty Chicken at Creamery. |
With Bunratty finished, we left The Creamery at 2:00pm and we drove to Dingle and got there at 4:40pm. We stayed at Hillgrove Hotel, which is actually connected to a night club but since it is a week day, we were okay, make sure to check if the night club is open when you go. Plenty of free parking on site, no breakfast included. After checking in, we made it to Tourist Information just before it closed and got some restaurant recommendations. We checked out the recommendations and ended up at Anchor Down.
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| Inch Beach. |
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| Inch Beach. |
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| Scenery. |
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| Dingle. |
We ordered the Langoustine bisque, pan fried hake, fish cake starter, mussel starter, and the oyster starter. It cost us €37 for everything and it was more than enough food. The seafood was really fresh and we would highly recommend it.
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| Dingle. |
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| Fish Cake top left, mussels top right, bisque on right, oysters bottom left. |
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| Hake. |
Next up, ice cream! Murphy's is a well known Dingle ice cream shop the ice cream here is really good. It is a bit expensive at €4 for the small, but it is really good. We wandered the downtown area a bit and we ended up doing a part of the Conor Pass which I highly recommend. There are very narrow roads here, but only really one section that is a issue but it should be okay.
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| View from Conor Pass. |
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| So where does the other car go? |
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| Beware of sheep! |
Tomorrow, we do the Slea Head Drive, visit Killarney and Cork as the final destination for the day.
