Flashback Friday Travel Photo Memories 15 – Killarney

That’s the view from our suite at Aghadoe Heights, looking out over the lakes of Killarney.  We’re in Ireland, in County Kerry – look how green it is, incredible!

Killarney – October 2008

We arrived in the dark, which wasn’t planned – more of that later!  The concierge that showed us to our room suggested we leave the curtains open, ready for morning!  He reassured we were not overlooked!  Had we arrived in the daylight we wouldn’t have got such a magical surprise in the morning, but this view is just astoundingly good.  The hotel itself isn’t pretty from the outside – 70s retro – so I think we had it the best way!

The hotel is 5* luxe and we were spoilt to be able to stay there as we did.  It is a super base for exploring the area – a drive round the lake can take all day if you stop often to take walks at the prettiest spots.  The beach at Inch is gorgeous and up towards Dingle is lovely. The hotel breakfast is something you should take your time over, it is American spec and kept us going until supper time, although of course we had to stop here and there for a Guinness and a Bulmers and just enjoy the view!

Why did we arrive in the dark? Well – we had some excitement en route… We got the ferry over from Holyhead as we were towing a trailer with two racing dinghies on board.  Mr P was sailing later in the week after our stay here.  I drove off the ferry in Dublin and we pootled down the motorway to the south of Dublin.  I stick to my speed limits, especially when towing, and so at a maximum we were going at 60 miles/hour.  Suddenly there was a whole lot of noise from the trailer and as I took my foot off the gas to look in the mirror at what was happening, through the sun roof we saw one of the trailer wheels overtake us at high speed up in the air.  It bounced down the motorway and eventually landed at the top of the embankment along the motorway.  Very scary.  It appeared that all 4 bolts holding the wheel in place had come off at the same time… Call me a cynic but I would say that they may have been tampered with on the ferry as things like that don’t happen?  Well – we certainly know to check the bolts every time we tow a boat anywhere now.  Fixing the tyre back on took quite a while… but thankfully someone stopped to help and had a bigger jack which helped.  He also knew where the nearest breakers yard was so once we had 2 nuts on each of the 2 trailer wheels we limped to it and found some more of the same size – from a Vauxhall Astra actually!

So yes – we were so very relieved to arrive at the hotel, that in fact if the view had been even 5% of what we had, we probably still would have been thrilled!