We had a surprisingly good breakfast at Hillgrove so that we had plenty of time to get packed up and over to the distillery for the tour booked at 10am. Our host recommend we take the Connor Pass road over to get to Tralee as the views were great. He warned us that the road was only one way in places and he was not wrong!
The distillery tour was really interesting although I wasn’t that excited about tasting their gin and vodka at 10am!! To be fair their gin is excellent and I will try and get some at the duty free before leaving.

We hadn’t realised but the production of Irish whiskey is in revival only really in the last decade. Apart from one or 2 producers of scale, the small distilleries had largely died out. Dingle is one of those now making a comeback, albeit with the assistance of a Scotsman as their whiskey maker.
Their main product is gin and they won a “world’s best gin” award 2 years ago. That’s because they can turn out a shipment of gin in about 4 days but it is at least 6 years for their first release of Whiskey.

The fermentation vats all get emptied out and cleaned by hand and some poor soul has to go in there with a water blaster. Bags not!!

After the tour we got a whiskey tasting and complimentary gin and tonic. Even for us 11.30 was too early!

unfortunately the drive over Connor Pass was mainly in cloud and rain. You could tell the scenery was spectacular. It reminded us of the drive over the Pyrenees the day we went to Andorra (that rather unattractive landscape of endless duty free shops. Hopefully more inviting in the snow – Andorra that is, not the Pyrenees).

The traffic is 2 way and everyone is pretty good about pulling over in advance and letting oncoming traffic get through. In places it is definitely one way.

We also passed Ireland’s longest beach. It looked pretty long!

We didn’t notice people out swimming but there probably were some. We stopped at this village called Castlegregory for a coffee and to locate this chair maker’s workshop (we didn’t find it). I had seen a number of signs for the GAA club so asked a man what a GAA is. It’s evidently hurling – Gaelic football. They have GAA stuff everywhere!
We drove through the centre of Tralee and were impressed with its continuous traffic jam and overall lack of charm. That was not assisted by being millimetres away from colliding with a van whose driver hadn’t seen us in his blind spot. To be fair, getting out of a parking space and into the traffic jam is not easy, particularly if you don’t indicate (as he didn’t). We didn’t see any roses in Tralee but they do have lots of very pink hydrangeas.
We decided to stop in Limmerick for coffee and a bite to eat. That was about an hour and a half from Tralee. In the end we stopped in Adare and not Limmerick. Adare is a cute little place just south of Limmerick. We found an excellent cafe there and Mike and I had their rather odd soup of Leek and watercress. It tasted good but was very green.

The colourful floral displays in the streets were also very evident.

We drove along the motorway to get to Galway City. It’s 120km/hr on most of their motorways.

It was wet when we got to Galway, and rush hour traffic but we navigated our way to the apartment complex ok and eventually found the entrance to the car park. It was more difficult actually locating the lift out of the car park but we got it sorted eventually. The apartment is an Airbnb and is on the second floor of a block overlooking a busy one way road. There is a courtyard in the other side which the 2 bedrooms overlook. There are 2 bedrooms of acceptable size although the one with ensuite also adjoins the main bathroom which is not the most helpful layout. It does have a good kitchen and a washing machine so we’ll be good for the 3 nights. Steve and Fiona have the room with ensuite which is fine for me. I’d rather have the slightly larger bathroom.
We decided to find a pub for a pre dinner beer and then locate a grocery shop to get some crackers and cheese etc to eat at home. No sooner were we outside the courtyard than we discovered the building on the side of the courtyard opposite our bedrooms is a distillery. It also had a bar and looked very nice. How convenient.

Unfortunately we didn’t realise until we’d sat down that they don’t really do much other than gin and they had the weirdest selection of flavours you could imagine (seaweed, chocolate mint, fennel, chilli….). They also had no tonic other than pre mix gin and tonic that comes out of a tap ( they make their own tonic on site but had run out) and no food of any description, including crisps. I don’t see it surviving unless they get rather more organised.

We eventually headed off down the road to find the grocery shop and purchased a variety of odd bits and pieces that did for food. There is clearly much to the older part of Galway, which is just down the road. There are lots of pedestrian streets and places to explore. Such a pity the weather looks set to rain the whole time