The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
The Road to Kenmare
First of all, I apologize for the delay in getting this posted. It takes about four hours to put the daily report together,
much of it sifting through photos, picking the ones that best tell the story of the day and editing them to be as pretty
as possible. Then there's the creative process of figuring out what to say and how to say it to explain what the photos
mean. I'm not complaining -- I volunteer for this -- but on travel days, it's more difficult.
I usually do all these author-like tasks in the evenings and early mornings. We are five hours ahead of the east coast and eight hours earlier than the west coast, so I can usually have the previous day's report posted before you wake up in the morning. But the mornings of the days we change locations are always occupied with packing, cleaning up the place and generally getting ready to move, so it I don't have it all done the night before, it won't happen until the next time we are in one place for a bit. And if that one place is just an overnight stop, the same issue arises again.
The part I like best about renting an apartment for a couple of days at a time is that it allows time to slow down, spread out, settle in a bit, avoid the constant packing and unpacking, and, yes, stay current on the daily reports. We may see a bit less of the area this way but the experience is more pleasant. Is this because we're getting older ... or perhaps just getting smarter?
The downside of the apartment idea is that we may not meet as many people. Not always the case, of course, but we certainly don't have repeated interactions with apartment owners like we have with B&B hosts and we don't have passing exchanges with fellow travelers over breakfast. There's a lot to be said for both. Still, I think I prefer slow travel where we have more of a feeling for what life is like in a particular part of the world. To me that's much more meaningful. I'd rather come home with stories than with pictures of buildings!
After a week in the rural reaches of Kinsale, it's time to move on, so we said goodbye to our genial hosts, Peter and Rita Cunningham, and set out for the western reaches. As we rolled along the southern coast and turned north, the landscape shifted from soft rolling green hills to more rocky and rugged, reminding us at various times of Scotland, Utah and Arizona. Not surprisingly, as the terrain became more rocky, rocks showed up more often as a building material.
Our overnight home in the town of Kenmare is the Avelow House B&B. It's not much to look at from the outside, but it's very comfortable inside ... all the more so thanks to the effusive hospitality of Pat Downing, the ever-helpful proprietor. Pat is a force of nature who can be the life of the party without the need to become the center of attention. it's a rare skill and one every restaurateur and hotelier should strive to emulate.
Our big meal of the day was lunch at Casey's Bar & Bistro, just a few steps down the road from Pat's place. Casey's is the restaurant attached to the Brook Lane Hotel, Kenmare's only four star property. It lacks the old Irish feel of the pubs but the food was excellent and their take on Beef Bourgignon was just what we needed before we wandered on into town. We weren't even slightly hungry for the rest of the day.
Kenmare is a picturesque Heritage town on Kenmare Bay on the route around the Iveragh Peninsula known as the Ring of Kerry (as in County Kerry). It is a center for traditional Irish music and, in fact, a big trad music festival begins tomorrow, the day we move on up the coast. Such is life. Kenmare is also the site of the largest stone circle in southwest Ireland. Stone circles were built during the Bronze Age (2000-200 BC). The stone circles we have seen in County Cork and County Kerry may have some relationship with the more famous construction at Stonehenge. History this ancient is another reminder of what cultural lightweights we are in the new world!
© 2014 Restaurant Doctor
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