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July 6 Thursday 25º C sunny hot - rain cool Bicycle touring Ireland At 7 this morning our little two-man Kelty cycle touring tent felt unbearably hot. We packed up our tent and bicycle touring gear and continued on our detour side road which looped and reconnected with our road from yesterday. The stretch we are bicycling is marked scenic on our Michelin map, so it is not a great hardship to do it twice. One section we have even cycled for a third time as we had backtracked while looking for a campsite. We cycled into Dungarvan, Ireland, before most people had gotten up. We bought doughnuts from a local L&N grocery store and took up residence on a park bench overlooking some small boats in the harbour. Even at this early hour, the sun was uncomfortably hot. We left our well-appointed bench and bicycled off to go to the Dungarvan post office to mail my latest journal home. At first we couldn't find a post office, because we were looking for Britain's red building, having momentarily forgotten that Ireland's postal buildings were green. It cost just over £4 for surface and over £11 for air. Only half-jokingly I said to the teller I would have to get a part-time job to pay for postage. I affixed the stamps and shoved the packet through a slot for the regular mail ... maybe no one would notice the missing £7 postage and it would go first class. As I left the post office, it started to rain. First just sporadic gobs, here and there. Then, coming down for a short time in earnest, as we began to ride out of Dungarvan. We ducked into a covered alley way and waited until it had nearly stopped before venturing out once more, just in time for it to begin raining harder again. We ducked under an overhang of a local church housing and dully wondered if it would be like this all day. We were bicycle touring in Ireland after all. Where had the hot sun gone? Deciding it probably would rain all day, we cycled out onto route N25 and into a strong headwind. We opted to bicycle route N25 rather than the coast. We figured a strong wind inland would probably mean a gale force wind on the exposed coast. We also thought N25 would be flatter than the bicycle tours we had so far along the coast. But, in a couple of miles out of Dungarvan, we were greeted with a long, steep climb. Labouring to the top, I noticed tears in Sharon's eyes, even before she complained of her aching back muscles. She attributed her sore back to too many steep hills combined with too high of gears on her touring bicycle. The high gears were causing her to pull up on her handlebars to exert more leverage while climbing. I thought perhaps that her sore back could be from helping me lift my bike over a waist-high barricade our first night of free camping in Ireland. A short distance later we called it an early day for our Irish bicycle tour and wandered into a forest to find a camp spot. |
