blasket island centre

Happy Thursday! Are you taking time to check-in with yourself and give yourself the care, love, and attention you need? If not, it’s perfectly okay to set aside time for yourself to do whatever you want/need to do during ‘me time.’ I admit that it's been a difficult couple days, losing my Nana on Tuesday, but paddle boarding, working out, writing, and talking with loved ones is helping immensely. Maybe your thing is yoga, meditation, running, reading, tending to a pallet garden you built, sewing some pillowcases for your home decor, making a dress to match your homemade mask, paddle boarding, or even playing animal crossing with family and friends, but whatever you want to do during your assigned ‘me time,’ make sure you’re doing it and giving yourself a break.

If you didn’t get a chance to read yesterday’s post - “Dear Nana” — you can click here to catch up. Otherwise, let’s continue our adventures in Europe and head to back to Dingle! I previously wrote about Dingle for Star Wars Day, but today we’ll spend some time exploring some of the lesser-known magic of Dingle, the Great Blasket Island.

My college girlfriends and I ended up doing a nice coastal hike while we were in Dingle but not before we spent time visiting the Blasket Centre. The Blasket Islands are the most westerly island group in Europe located off the tip of the Dingle Peninsula. The Great Blasket Island, the largest of the three, was inhabited until the 1950s with its residents living like they were in a totally different world. The Blasket inhabitants would take a boat to Dingle in order to trade fish for livestock and other goods, but they did not have electricity or many modern conveniences. It was truly like living in a frozen period of time. As the weather in Ireland tends to include lots of storms, there were periods of time where inhabitants were cut off from the mainland, needing supplies they were unable to receive.

The island’s population eventually gave up on their home and moved to the mainland in the early 1950s due to the unsafe circumstances of living on the island in primitive houses and without access to safety and supplies. The tiny island did, however, produce some well-known Irish writers who kept record of their experiences on the Great Blasket: Peig Seyers, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, and Tomás Ó Criomhthain. Nowadays the Great Blasket Island is home to a couple caretakers and functions as a destination for tourism, allowing visitors to stay overnight and to enjoy historical tours. When my gal pals and I visited the Blasket Centre on the coast of Dingle, we spent a lot of time walking around the museum, looking at photos, reading residents’ reflections, and watching a short film about life on the Great Blasket Island. It was surreal to imagine such primitive living circumstances not that long ago.

Have you ever heard of the Great Blasket Island? Would it be a tour you’d be interested in taking? Let me know! Subscribe in the e-mail submission box below and reach out, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and reach out to me on the “contact” page. I’m so happy you're here and that I’ve been receiving a lot of really incredible stories, questions, and feedback from a community all over the globe! Other people’s stories that I’ve gotten to read via e-mail, text, tweet, DM, etc. recently bring me such smiles, and I am so grateful for all of it! I hope I get to hear all about whatever stories you’ve been thinking about as we’ve been on this virtual journey together! Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you have any restaurants/eateries/pubs/coffee shops/ice cream joints/theatres/lookout spots you would recommend in other countries or even in your current home town or city, I'm absolutely 100% all ears!! I couldn’t do this without you! So THANK YOU! From the bottom of my heart, truly, thank you.

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Sincerely,

Johny

P.S. - If you want to catch up from the beginning on this series of travel adventures, here's a cheat sheet to the posts (in order in which they were published):

1. Won't you join me?

2. grateful for starbucks and sandymount strand

3. Once Upon a December in the National Gallery

4. plant a smooch for that gift of gab

5. may the 4th be with you: Dingle style

6. cinco de mayo: the best Mexican food in Dublin

7. pizza in roma

8. mussolini’s window and the philosophers’ metro stop

9. father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife

10. it's the vatican, not the vatican't

11. spoiler alert: i did not lose my hand

12. more pizza and gelato and Neptune, oh my