Ireland

UK was 'enjoying' its wettest quarter in a long time, lurching from hose pipe bans to severe flood warnings and from the need for more reservoirs to flood defences, in a matter of weeks, and a kink in the jet stream was to blame.  What a fine time to tour the southern half of Ireland on the Harley!  It started when I left home on a day when one month of rain was expected.  It was pretty grim, but I managed to avoid the worst of the surface water and my wet weather gear did its job.  Unusually, I picked up Jean in a dry Swansea, but we had been well doused again by the time the group of 13 of us on 8 Harleys had met up and got to Fishguard.  Ireland was the same with wild winds and pouring rain when we arrived at Rosslare in the southeast corner of Ireland.   It was a short ride from there to our first stop, thankfully with such wild weather, in Wexford.

Next day, after a gypsy fight in the hotel car park woke some in the early hours, but not us, and we encountered some sunshine as we headed north for Curracloe Beach, where the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan was filmed.  I was impressed to see how this relatively small beach had been made to look like the much larger Omaha Beach in the film with clever cinematography.

Then it was on to Wicklow Gaol, a rather grim penal facility and staging for deportation to the colonies, and to Glendalough, one of the most visited scenic places in Ireland, before we stopped in Bray.

We took a day trip from here, in the rain, to Dublin where we revisited some sights and found an excellent smoked salmon on soda bread lunch in a pub, which I enjoyed with a pint of the black stuff.

Leaving Bray, we returned to the Wicklow Mountains and passed through the Gap, where the weather was changing, but we could enjoy a stop and the view.

Then, we headed west, across the centre of Ireland, to seek scenery over the Slieve Bloom mountains and found rain, cloud, roads with a knobbly spine down the middle and cambers falling away to both sides, and saw nothing of the mountains at all!  We did see quite a few peat bogs, however, lower down.  We stopped in the drizzle to visit Birr Castle, where successive Earls of Rosse have designed and built astronomical telescopes, a 72" one of which remains in the gardens, and visited the museum.

After a rather tiring day of wrestling with these rough roads and the foul weather, we got to Galway for a 2 night stop.  We took a day to ride around Connemara, but cut our route down some because of yet more heavy rain and poor visibility.  We did, however, visit Kylemore Abbey, previously a very grand private home which was lost in a card game at one time and is now a nuns' retreat.

Under the cloud at Kylemore Abbey

From Galway, we rode south over parts of The Burren, a limestone expanse with almost no plant life and what green you can see grows in the cracks between the rock, and onward to the dramatic Cliffs of Moher at over 200m high and Killarney.

The Burren in the background from a stop in the sun

The people on the top are just barely visible, giving scale

!

It was a sunny evening, which was just as well as it gave us a glimpse of the mountains of the Ring of Kerry.

Next day, we rode the Ring but the weather had turned again, so we missed some of the best of the scenic views, although we did see the Lakes reasonably clearly at the end as we completed the 80 miles back to Killarney.  It was rather abound with coaches doing the same thing, and a few tractors and trailers that had made the most of the mowing opportunity the previous day, which made it very slow in places.  A bonus, while on the Ring, was to meet up with old C&W friends Russ and Gail Covey in Kenmare, for the first time in ages.  Russ seriously questioned my sanity when we dripped our way into the pub, but it was good to see them and we enjoyed lunch and a catch up before heading east for Cork, in the rain again.

From there, we called in at Blarney Castle to climb the castle's spiral stairs and for Jean to kiss the Stone.  I had done so before when on a HOG rally in Killarney in '06, and some say I am already a bit blessed with the Blarney anyway!

Jean kisses the Blarney Stone, barely aware of the drop below

Then it was onward to Waterford Harley Davidson to enjoy a chat, coffee and buy yet another T-shirt for my already too large collection, before stopping near Rosslare for an early ferry the next day.  Dry conditions prevailed until shortly before Swansea, when the heavens once more!

The memories of Ireland are rain, rough roads and scenery, in that order, but the craic of the group and the friendliness of everyone there more than made up for it.  They're already changing order as time goes on.  Besides, it's in the nature of biking that you have to accept the riding conditions you encounter and that we did, laughing about it in the post mortems at the end of each day!