The Tralee Blog

 It’s that time of the year again with the sun shining and the birds singing, and one more thing to note: the Kerry Bicycle Festival will be back! Starting Thursday, 13th of May, we will see more bike related events than ever. After the huge successes of the festivals in 2008 and 2009 I certainly won’t miss this years event! If you want to know please visit http://kerrybicyclefestival.org. See you there!

After several months without any major news from Tralee I today decided to call the blog back into action, for the tourist season is about to kick in here in Kerry and some things of interest may indeed happen here over the summer months. I think I will start with some updates on the ongoing efforts to make the town more attractive both to guests as well as citizens.  [»]

After having heard about the exciting project first at last year’s Kerry Bicycle Festival it seems that the new walk- and cycleway between Tralee and Fenit is now in the final stages of planning and may even be finished very soon. Although I understand that some discussions are still going on with owners of properties adjacent to the track I no longer doubt that the ambitious new way can and will finally become a reality. [»]

As announced a few days ago the Tralee and Dingle Light Railway is back in operation, after it had had to cease scheduled travels in the midst of the 2006 season due to massive technical problems with the solitary steam engine. While 5T is still out of service the train is not, because the guys from the railway now managed to source a diesel engine. And today at 10:40 (two hours ago) the small train made its first journey from Blennerville to Tralee after almost three years downtime. It will now continue to travel between the two stations hourly, starting on the full hour from the Aquadome in Tralee and at the half hour from the Blennerville Windmill. [»]

Today we spent the best part of the day watching a pod of ca. ten pilot whales in Sandy Bay near Castlegregory. While this may sound like a nice activity it has infact been a quite distressing experience, because this particular bay is at best five metres deep, and pilot whales are a deep water species. They can easily become completely disorientated in a shallow environment like that. Worse still, the same pod had already stranded once yesterday evening only a few hundred metres further up the bay, but the whales could be successfully refloated. [»]