To The South Pole.
And at last I was off, with a Ryanair ticket. I wondered what airport they would deliver me to. Southend? Southampton? South Of The Border? Down Mexico Way?
No, it was Cork.
And just beyond Killarney lay my destination.

The pub that Tom built.

He was born here:

- and is a true local hero. He's everywhere, including on the stairs of the B&Bs.

And in the garden opposite the Post Office.

I headed off along the 'Anascaul Straightaway' towards the house where he was born.

Taking off above the South Pole Inn (blue building to the left behind a tree).

The Straightaway is so straight it would make Einstein proud.

Photo taken from close to Tom Crean's birthplace - just as the sun came out. Anascaul is in the bottom of the distant valley.

Maybe this was why Tom Crean came to like marching in dead straight lines across Antarctica. And good enough at it to save the lives of his companions.
Notice the slight kink in the lane, caused by the force of gravity exerted by the Guinness brewery in Dublin. Just as Einstein calculated.

Then I found this:

The secret ingredient of Guinness.

They feed old bicycles into the muck spreaders to fertilise the barley fields.
No wonder 'It's good for you', and its gravity is strong enough to make bends appear in the roads on the other side of the country!
You read it here first in McCrankpin's Meanderings.

There's more than just emerald green in the colour of the countryside here, even in dull old November.

A little west of the South Pole Inn is the town of Dingle, and beyond that the Dingle Peninsula.
At Dún Chaoin you reach the furthest west you can go on mainland Europe.
But wait! There's a ferry to a group of tiny islands even further west.

Today the weather is fearsomely bad, not good for taking photos let alone a ferry - it's difficult to stand up in the wind:

Dún Chaoin Bay.

Further round towards the pier for the Blasket Islands Ferry.

No, there are definitely no ferries today to the Blasket Islands.
So a right blasket case this excursion turned out to be....

Today, the Atlantic weather is so fierce it's even stopping the rivers in their tracks:

If this little stream thinks it's going to reach the ocean it's got another think coming.

"No way José! You'll need a hose to squirt you through this wind and into those waves."

Further along, this farm gate had become a leaky lock gate.

Maybe an oil tanker will come cruising down here in a moment, its GPS mistaking Ceann Sraithe, just up the road, for Canal Suez. Better move on.

Back in Anascaul there's a local industry specialising in Black Pudding.

The landlady in the B&B tried to convince an Amercan couple how good it is with the cooked breakfast, but made the fatal mistake of giving an honest answer to the question, "What's in it?"
So that's alright then, I'll have theirs.

Up in the hills above Anascaul is Lake Anscaul, with some deep reflections in the still waters.

And some colour by the lane to the lake.

Then it was off to Killarney by way of the sunset at Inch Beach in Dingle Bay:

- for a performance of Aidan Dooley's one-man play of Tom Crean's life.

Eight or nine years ago Aidan Dooley performed this play in the South Pole Inn, to an invited audience that included two of Crean's daughters, both in their 80s at the time.
Well, this performance went down in history as being a particularly emotional one. It was the first time his daughters had ever heard of their late father's heroic exploits.
(When Tom Crean retired back to Anascaul from the Navy, in 1920, his Antarctic adventures were long behind him, and he never told anyone, including his daughters, what he got up to down in The South. And he kept no diaries. So it wasn't until long after his death in 1938, when Antarctic historians started to delve into the diaries of his companions, that his life story started to see the light of day. His first biography wasn't published until about the time of Aidan Dooley's performance in the South Pole Inn).

I'm sure it'll be just as good a performance in the theatre in Killarney this evening. In my research I've never found if Tom Crean has any grandchildren - maybe there'll be some in the audience.......