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July 18 Tuesday overcast, rain Bicycle touring Ireland In Ireland, a day without rain is like a day without sunshine -- or something like that. Sharon is paranoid of rain now. I think she has been traumatized by the experience of bicycle touring in the Irish rain for so long. Any little sound she hears now she thinks it's raining. The wind rattled our upstairs bedroom window. "It's raining," Sharon said, snuggling deeper under the goose down-filled comforter. Looking out, I said, "It's just the wind." Sometime later, Sharon thought it was raining again. I looked out again. This time I saw the river gushing by -- "as high as in March, during the spring runoff," the landlady would tell me later. "It's just the river," I said to Sharon. Still later, Sharon commented that it was surely raining. But it was only the sound of tires from traffic on the street below. Since I couldn't sleep anyway, between all the weather reports I was giving, I decided to get up and go downstairs to read. At least it was dry down there. Breakfast wasn't until 8:30 AM, but the tables had already been set. I ate the Cornflakes while waiting for everyone else to show up. The landlady came down and saw me sitting in the dark reading. Flicking on a light, she asked if I would like an Irish breakfast? I asked, "Is that a Guinness?" When the rest of the crew showed up for breakfast, we received an Irish breakfast. A tiny glass of orange juice, one tired fried egg, a sausage so skinny it would have made Twiggy look like an overweight Sumo wrestler, a miniscule bit of ham, one slice of bacon, two pieces of bread with a dime-sized dollop of strawberry jam and a little pot of tea that reminded me of something from a Barbie play tea set. I guess B&Bs aren't used to feeding the appetites of touring cyclists. As we are getting ready to leave (we had to go somewhere to eat), the landlady shouts at me: "You broke my shower!" "See what happens when you don't complain," Sharon says. "You get blamed for things that are already broken." Our previous agreeable landlady turned more than a little snarky. She insisted that I pay for the broken shower hose. I again told her that it was cracked and broken before I ever got into the shower. Even if I had broken the shower hose (which I didn't), one has to realize these hoses are made of rubber and anything made of rubber eventually deteriorates and cracks or springs a leak -- especially so if hot water is run through it. When she again insisted I pay for the shower, I told her to go ahead and call the cops, but I wasn't paying for a shower hose that was already old and cracked and spurting water before I ever got anywhere near it. And she lied about there being lots of hot water, too, I added. The day is grey and overcast, but our clothes are reasonably dry. We stoically mount our touring bicycles and cycle off into the dimness. We bicycle along, following country lanes past windswept cemeteries and grazing sheep. We arrive at a church ruin near Burren. It was built back in 1109 (and is probably referred to as "the new church". By some weird demographic planning the Pope is the Bishop for this area. Several other touring cyclists have converged on the site at the same time as us. We will continue to see them throughout the rest of the day. Four elderly people from a bus tour ask Sharon and I questions about past and present bicycle tours we have been on. When they learn we are bicycling around the world by bike, one of the women enthusiastically expounds, "Why aren't you clever!" Actually, just yesterday in fact, I had an entirely different word in mind. As we bicycle to a dolmen, a megalithic tomb with a large flat stone laid across upright rocks (it resembles a large rock table). Dolmens are found mainly in Britain and France, but apparently also in Ireland. This one was erected by worshippers some 4,000 years ago. The landscape became more and more barren, eventually turning into a desolate moonscape. At the dolmen, an area had been transformed into a miniature Stonehenge formations. It looked to me like the scene from the mythical rock group, Spinal Tap, who had requested stage backdrops of Stonehenge for their tour, but had put down inches by mistake instead of feet. These miniature Stonehenge formations were all about eighteen inches high. The amount of rock in this part of Ireland is incredible. We pull our touring bicycles to a stop at a "fort." It is actually not much more than a ring of rock about fifty feet in diameter with rock walls ten to twelve feet thick. It looks less like a fort to me and more like a sturdy sheep enclosure. With the frigid wind and steely grey sky it is a cheerless place. I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to live here, let along defend the godforsaken place. We bicycle along farther and see some areas that have been cleared of rock to make a strip of pasture for sheep. Fences, made of rock, of course, have been piled up on both sides of the road to make a strip of field about fifty feet in width. It looks like an awful lot of back-breaking labour for a little grass to feed a few sheep. A rain cloud that has been following us all day finally caught up with us. A light mist begins to fall. We discuss the non-merits of ducking into a low cattle shelter. Instead, we turn our touring bicycles around and head back to a farmer's lane. We huddle under a tree for an hour, waiting for the rain to pass. It doesn't look like it is going to pass anytime soon, so we scout around for a camp spot. Between the ruts and cow pies we can't find anything suitable. I pull on my cycling rain gear, including my rain pants, and we bicycle off into the gloom. At a gas station, we stop and fill our water bottle. With all this rain, I would think that we wouldn't want to see any more water, but we still need it to cook with. As I get off my bicycle at the gas station, I don't realize that somehow the Velcro holding up my rain pants had come unfastened. After two steps, my pants plummet down around my ankles. An old woman in her car was getting gas at the pumps. She gleefully rolled down her window and cackled, "Too bad you had something on underneath!" Yeah, yeah. Very funny. After pulling up my pants and filling our water bottles, we cycle off into the mist and drizzle for another couple of hours. Finally, an open gate into a grass field by a rock wall lures us inside. It begins to rain in earnest while we race to set up our two-man bicycle touring Kelty tent. Why couldn't it wait another five minutes? |
