Oh, the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we’ve no place to go
Let it rain, let it pour, let it blow

We’ll be lucky to see the sun again this trip. Egad. But we soldier on and make the best of it. 

Too windy and wet to walk. But we did get into town (via le Grand Bleu) to pick up some needed groceries. And we finally saw Gráinne at her shop, the Coach House. She and Marion, her mother, our co-landlords, left us a HUGE fruitcake for Christmas. It must weigh ten pounds. 

Then we stopped for lunch at the James Long Pub. We have eaten there before at the outside tables. That was out of the question, so we sat inside. Elaine sipped on a pint of Smithwick’s while I had a Killarney Golden Ale. (I don’t drink Guinness with food – Guinness is enough food in and of itself.) Elaine had a ham and cheese on toasted sourdough with tomato and onion with fries while I enjoyed a great Irish lamb stew with mashed potato.

Then it was a quiet afternoon at home. Dinner was leftover chorizo and penne. We ate a bit earlier than usual because tonight is one of the three concerts we will be attending while in Ireland. This one is a Christmas Concert by the Dingle New Music Choir & Orchestra in Saint Mary’s Church. Here is the group’s official photo from their web site.

The concert was grand. Bach, Chopin, Saint-Saëns, Mozart, and some traditional Christmas music. Camera were discouraged but I got a shot in before the concert started and one during the curtain call. There is also a brief recording I did during the curtain call.

Dick Mack’s pub across the street from the church looked inviting after the concert, but we demurred. Home to bed.

Rain

Wind. Fierce wind.

No walk except about town after driving in. Today was Christmas shopping day. The trip is our Christmas present, so we don’t give each other big gifts. The rule is one gift and it has to be bought in Dingle. So we split up and did our separate shopping. I cheated – three small gifts but all from the same store, so I counted them as one. To be opened Christmas eve.

One photo op while walking:

After lunch at home I went into town for the daily pint while Elaine chose to stay home and read. The Dingle Pub was closed. ??? So it was back to Curran’s Pub. Nice chats with locals whilst sipping Guinness. The Dingle Pub was open again as I walked past.

The highlight of the day was dinner at the Half Door, one of our favorite restaurants. I had oysters (finally!) followed by John Dory and Crème Brûlée. Elaine had Duke Confit followed by Cod and then Panna Cotta for dessert. The wine was a German Pinot Noir. All yummy good.

Finally a stop at the Dingle Pub for a nightcap and some night scenes of Main Street in a quiet Dingle.

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I promised a picture of le Grand Bleu. Here it is parked in front of 18 Ard Na Mara. There’s also a shot of the street.

We awoke to a cool (cold?) but mostly dry morning. There was even a rainbow.

We decided to do a walk. It rained on us a bit, but we soldiered on and it stopped. Scenes from the walk:

We stopped at St Mary’s to light some candles. See our reflection in the door?

Then we continued our walk by the harbor and back home. See the sun in the picture of the harbor. It was taken at noon and that’s as high as the sun gets at this latitude.

After a lunch at home, we ventured out again for a pint or two at Curran’s Pub. Scenes from the pub:

After the pub we got home to see sort of a sunset (at 4:30 pm). Any sunset is a rare sight in Dingle.

Dinner was at Solas, a tapas restaurant and wine bar that we first tried on our last visit and liked it. It was elevated into a favorite. A lot of our favorite restaurants in Dingle (Ashes, Out of the Blue, and Fenton’s) are closed in the winter. Dinner at Solas was grand, and we had a great chat with the owners. Amongst other selections, we had grilled sourdough with confit tomatoes, chorizo and menchego croquettes, scallops ceviche, fig tempura with goats cheese, and pork belly. The wine was a St Emilion from France.

After dinner, a quick drink at nearby Flaherty’s Pub. No music, but busy with an office party.

NOTE: I have been made aware of and experienced a bug in viewing galleries when you are using a chromium based browser (Chrome, for example). The arrow buttons and the close button (X) are not working. There is no time frame for a fix. If you do click on a gallery, you can move from picture to picture using the arrow keys on your computer and close the gallery by pressing the escape (Esc) key. 
THIS BUG SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN FIXED. FINGERS CROSSED!

Cloudy with occasional rain but mostly dry Monday. We slept late – 7:45. Sunrise is at 8:30. Then we bopped into town, mostly for shopping. Back to SuperValu where we picked up the non-essentials like food. We already had the essentials like alcohol. We also visited the Little Cheese Shop for some appetizer cheeses – a blue, a brie, and another hard cheese. Then we visited the Dingle Library for some reading materials. We have Dingle library cards. I like to read up on Irish history when I am in Dingle.

Then it was home for lunch. Elaine decided to stay home this afternoon while I made my first visit to Curran’s, one of my go-to pubs, the other, of course, being the Dingle Pub. Chatted with Johnny, the longtime bartender and the four or five locals who happened by. After two pints of Guinness, I headed home.

Dinner was at home. Elaine concocted a chorizo and penne main with tomato sauce served with fresh salad and garlic bread. It was all quite delicious accompanied by Oyster Bay (New Zealand) Pinot Noir.

Just a few pictures today (click to enlarge)

So it was a quiet day – there will be many of them. Tomorrow will be our first dinner out and we have a local concert booked for Thursday night at St. Mary’s church.

Later! (I forgot to get a daylight shot of le Grand Bleu. Today maybe.)

NOTE: I have been made aware of and experienced a bug in viewing galleries when you are using a chromium based browser (Chrome, for example). The arrow buttons and the close button (X) are not working. There is no time frame for a fix. If you do click on a gallery, you can move from picture to picture using the arrow keys on your computer and close the gallery by pressing the escape (Esc) key.

It’s Monday, 7 AM now. Still pitch black out. Won’t get light until 8:30-ish. And darkness arrives again at 4:15 PM.

Sunday we had a great buffet breakfast at the Crowne Plaza in Dublin before setting out for Dingle at about 8:30. Easy drive, no traffic. There was brief rest room and diet coke stop at Barrack Obama Plaza on the M7. Cloudy most of the way, but, no surprise, it was raining by the time we reached Tralee and the start of the Dingle Peninsula. The Peugeot 3008 is a great car. Great color too. Deep blue. It took me about an hour to figure out the cruise control. All good after that. It’s a French car driven by Americans in Ireland. I’ll get a daylight picture sometime later. In honor of its color and heritage, the car has been named Le Grand Bleu (Big Blue in English and Gorm Mór in Irish). Fiona is still the voice on the SatNav (GPS).

Once in Dingle, we went first to our house for half the stay – 18 Ard Na Mara, the same place we had in the spring.

Once we unloaded all the luggage, we headed downtown to see Grainne, our co-landlord (with her mother, Marion). She wasn’t in her shop (the Coach House), so we’ll catch her and Marion tomorrow. Then we picked up a hamper of Christmas goodies that we had pre-ordered. Then lunch (fish and chips, naturally) at Flannery’s Fish Box. Next, the obligatory stop at the Dingle Pub for the first Guinness of the trip, We chatted with Tom, the owner, and Tommy, the bartender. Next stop was SuperValu to buy essentials (wine, vodka, gin, tonic water and some other non-alcohol related items). Finally it was back to the house to unpack and unwind. We were both pretty much exhausted by this time. Cocktails were good as we killed time watching tv to avoid going to bed before 8:30. No dinner necessary after the late lunch.

See you tomorrow (or so).

Friday

So we woke up Friday morning in Venice Beach and had all day to kill until our 8:20 flight to Dublin. So, what to do? We decided to visit the Getty Center Museum.

I programmed the address into the GPS and we headed out. We got to that address and there was no Getty Center even vaguely nearby. So, we switched to Google Maps and eight miles later we arrived at the Getty Center.

The Getty Center is truly an amazing place. You could spend a week there and not see everything in all the museum buildings. It’s on a hillside and the views are beautiful. And a good restaurant and café too. We had a great lunch. Here’s a potpourri of pictures, starting with lunch. Pho for Elaine. A huge beef burrito for me. Followed by views from the exhibits and of the Los Angeles area from the hillside. Mianne would like the William Blake section, especially his views of religion (see photo below).

Then it was supposed to be a twenty minute ride back to the Alamo drop off point. It took 1½ hours on the dreaded I-405. We turned the car in and settled in at the airport for our flight to Dublin. It left an a hour late with great views of LA at night.

The ten hour flight was as good as a flight can be after a nightmarish experience at LAX. Avoid LAX! We arrived in Dublin and picked up our Enterprise Peugeot 3005. It will be named tomorrow. We drove to the Crowne Plaza about three miles from the airport, checked in, refreshed, had drinks in the club lounge, and then had dinner in the bar/restaurant. It was good!

Tomorrow morning we drive to Dingle. Please excuse misspellings and other errors in this post. I didn’t have the energy to proof read.

Thursday

We’re off! To avoid Boston (or other east coast cities) and the possibility of getting snowed in, we are getting to Ireland via Los Angeles. (Yes, it happens – on our last trip to Ireland for Christmas, pre-pandemic, we got stuck at the Logan Hilton in Boston for four days because of a massive snowstorm.) So today we flew to LAX to spend a night in California before our non-stop flight to Dublin tomorrow night. The American Airlines flight was uneventful and on-time, and we were in our one-day car rental by 1:00 pm.

Funny story about the flight. We decided to invest in Tile luggage tags which track where your luggage is. We checked three bags, each with a Tile device in it. At the airport in Phoenix, the Tile app on my phone showed all three bags also at Phoenix Airport. So far, so good. Once in flight, I checked again. Two bags tracked as “nearby”, meaning they were on the plane. The third bag was “location unknown”, last seen at Phoenix Airport. It was my big bag that was “location unknown”. I spent the hour flight figuring out what I was going to do with no clothes on a three week trip to Dingle. We landed. All three bags were on the luggage carousal. And the Tile app saw it now too. No idea why it didn’t know it was on the plane with us.

Once in the car, we drove the 10 miles (or so) to Venice Beach and found our hotel. Too early to check in, so we drove the mile or so down Washington Blvd to the beach. We parked and had a look around and had a nice little lunch at Mercedes Grill right by the beach. Draft Pacifico beer! After lunch we walked on the pier before heading to the hotel.

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After our walk we drove around Venice Beach a bit. We saw Abbot Kinney, a famous funky street with lots of interesting businesses. And we drove through some interesting neighborhoods. There are lots of scooters and skateboards in Venice Beach. Our hotel, the Kinney, has a garage which is nice. We checked in and the room was delightful. No view, but big and comfortable, and the bed and pillows were perfect.

For dinner we walked ten minutes down Washington Boulevard to 26 Beach. Funky and good. (Funky seems to be the norm in Venice Beach). Excellent gin gimlet. Nice bottle of wine. Excellent chicken wings for an appetizer. We ate three before I took the picture. No pictures of the mains. Too anxious to eat, I guess. I had very good Greek lamb chops (excellently served rare) while Elaine a turkey chipotle burger with poblano peppers. No desserts. We walked back to the hotel and went to bed.

See you after we land in Dublin on Saturday.