My husband and I, after a harrowing drive from Irish coast to coast, rented bicycles on the Dingle Penninsula and went for a ride.

After sharing the narrow road with careening trucks, bushes of attack-nettles, and painted sheep; after visiting ancient ruins and modern-day beauties of nature; after having our muscles cool enough at each stop to make getting back to bicycling miserable; after navigating a round-about at the end of a steep hill without helmets to protect us from what was sure to be a catastrophe; we arrived in the town of Dingle for fish and a beer and an exhausting dead sleep.

Really though - bicycling is the way to do it - we would never have seen most of what we saw if we had been driving. The coast was BEAUTIFUL.