Dingle (Day 2)

Monday, 26 August 2019

Another nice morning to sleep in.  Around noon we all decided to get out and see the town.  Barbra and Christine decided to see the town by shopping and Tim and I took Rick Steve's walking tour in the guidebook.  Although we saw most of the town durning last night's pub crawl, we didn't stop and see and learn about the other sites around town.  Here are some of the highlights:

One of the streets have a river running down it.  Some house are built over the river.

A river runs along one street

A Celtic holy well

There are many pubs in the town.  More than we went to last night.  Here are a couple with cool exteriors.

Foxy Johns is a hardware store and a pub.

There is a nice modern (1865) church in town.

Here is Fungie the dolphin.  He is believed to be one of the 6 dolphins released from "Dolphinariums" on the southern coast of Britain because he doesn't mind being alone and his comfortable around humans.  He hangs around the mouth of the harbor where tour boats troll around looking for him.  With Fungie getting old, the town is beginning to worry what they are going to do when he isn't around anymore since there is a lot of money being  made from him.

Fungie

Here are some of those other EU nations fishing boats and trucks taking fish off the Ireland coast and returning it to mainland Europe.

 We grabbed a quick lunch and headed to the Dingle Distillery where we took a tour.  Dingle distillery produces gin, vodka, and whiskey.  The gin and vodka paid the bills while the whiskey aged for the first 3 years.  Since then, the gin has won world awards and is standing on its own.

With the high cost of starting a distillery, the founders found people to give them €6-7,000.  For this money, each people each got a barrel of whiskey.  Here are some of them:

These copper vessels are where the distillation takes place.  Dingle does a triple distillation in copper making the alcohol smoother with less nitrates.  According to the tour guide, the less nitrates cuts back on the chance of having a hangover.

This year they release their forth batch of Irish whiskey.  Here are bottles from each of their first four years.  Dingle is a very small operation with no automation.  Even the bottling and labeling is done by hand.  A current bottle of whiskey costs €65 and is only available in Ireland.  The gin and vodka is distributed elsewhere including the United States.

Here is where they distill the gin and add the botanicals that make gin, gin.

It was a great tour.  It cost us €15 each, but we each got two drinks, a choice of vodka or gin, and a whiskey.  Since I don't like whiskey and Tim doesn't like gin, I got two gins and Tim got two whiskeys.  It worked out great.

On the way back to the apartment we passed a fish store, so we popped in to see what they had.  As soon as I saw the smoked mackerel I knew what I was going to have to dinner.

Dinner

We arrived back to the apartment just after 5 PM with thoughts that we would eat dinner in and then go out for a pint.  However, after dinner everyone decided to just call it a night since we want to leave by 8:30 AM tomorrow morning.  I was OK with this as well since I had some blogging to catch up with.

So it is now 11:45 PM, and I am just finishing up today's blog.  However, I still haven't done the blog from 2 days ago.  Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to get to that one.  I need to get to sleep, so until tomorrow...