Beautiful sunny day
A bit of reflection...We originally planned our trip using “The Dingle Way” by Sandra Bardwell. This is a good guide to the route, but doesn’t contain any information on places to stay.
Before we left, we downloaded another Dingle Way guide from HikeBike Travel.com, which has been very helpful in pointing out stores, accommodations and places to eat along the way.
While in Dingle, Jim purchased a very large, detailed map of the Dingle Peninsula. The upshot of this is that now we have three conflicting versions of where we are going each day.
Each morning we “consult the oracles”, comparing our two narrative guides, then checking them against the map. For the first few days they were pretty much in sync, but now chaos reigns!
Evidently, some rerouting of the Way has gone on recently, and, especially since we left the Way several times to split up our long days, who knows where the heck we are?
We left the hostel this morning for the short (less than 5 mile) walk to Ballycurrane. According to the map, we should be walking along the water, but the road turned immediately inland. At the crossroads, there was no Dingle Man, but a little white hiking man instead. Should we follow him?
A lady walking her dog happened by, and we asked for directions. She said the route was all changed, “and they ought to do something” about the signage. She gave us directions, and said the B&B we were looking for wasn’t even in Ballycurrane, but in Cuas!
We found the Dingle Man (who had lost his head), and took the path that headed across a field, which Bardwell said was boggy, hummicky, nearly impossible to traverse and should be avoided. HikeBike said it would be muddy, and gave different directions. The lady with the dog said it would be lovely. It WAS lovely.
We crossed several stiles, met some donkeys as well as our daily allotment of sheep, and were at the An Bothar B&B by noon.
We wanted to have an afternoon of rest, before tackling Mount Brandon tomorrow. 
Our hosts Maurice and Aileen run a beautiful place, with the nicest accommodations we’ve encountered, and run a pub as well.
We washed out some essentials, hung them out on the line, put up our feet, and took a nap. There was no town, nothing else to see and nowhere else to go, so we relaxed!
There was a menu in our room that led us to believe there would be culinary excellence for dinner, but it turned out to just be pub food, and nothing to write home about, so I won’t.
Our hosts spent time with us after supper, answering our questions about hurling and Irish football, and assuring us that hardly anybody dies going over Mount Brandon!
