A Quiet Early Evening Visit to the Gap of Dunloe, Killarney (Ireland)

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After visiting Ross Castle and having our jaunting car ride in Killarney National Park, we headed over to the Gap of Dunloe, a mountain pass road on the edge of the national park. I was told that this was a beautiful place to visit and checked out some photographs of the gap online before my trip to Ireland last summer. Unfortunately, as you know from my previous few posts about Ireland, we were not too lucky with the weather. However, there was not a lot of fog, and we had pretty decent visibility to snap away.

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We drove to the Gap of Dunloe to find that all of the jaunting cars had left for the evening. The Gap was actually pretty quiet; the last of the people seemed to be heading away.

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We felt like we pretty much had the place to ourselves, except for a couple of wooly friends to keep us amused. Despite everyone being gone, we noticed a large parking area outside the Gap of Dunloe and could see that the place does appear to get quite a few visitors each day.

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We drove the car down the narrow and winding road to enter the gap. As we'd been having quite a bit of rain off and on, we saw many beauiful waterfalls cascading off of the mountains.

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As we drove further along the Gap of Dunloe, we admired the winding and narrow roads and the lakes along the side of them. The lakes are quite close to the roads, and a couple of stone bridges take us over the lakes between the mountains.

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At one point, the road grew even more narrow when we discovered two large boulders virtually in the road.

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We climbed a little higher...

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And then we crossed the stone bridge between the lakes.

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I got out of the car to take some photographs, but I did not like it much as the water looked a little scary between the bridge.

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We did not go much further into the Gap when we decided to head back down as the time was getting late and we'd had so many busy days and nights; don't forget that we drove up really early in order to get to Portmagee that same morning.

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We drove past the beautiful views, and I really wished that we had sunny weather so that I could enjoy it more and see the reflections of the mountains in the lakes.

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We met back up with our sheep friends, who were grazing the green grass on the side of the lake. 

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Viewing these beautiful photographs makes me wish that I could go back to the Gap of Dunloe (and hope for nicer weather). 

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When we arrived back at the Gap of Dunloe's entrance, we stopped off at the pub named Kate Kearney's. This pub caters to the tourists and does Irish-style food and drinks. There's also a gift shop selling souvenirs inside for visitors. The food was pretty decent, but the service was the slowest that I think I've ever experienced. Before we had even received our meals, we just wanted to get back to the hotel to sleep. Anyway, keep coming back for the next Ireland road trip installment.

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