I have been, of course, exceptionally remiss. I always am, around the middle of the trip. But to a great extent, on this trip, the photos speak for themselves. The second half of the bike trip was a lot of biking, rather a lot of rain, and small towns with one commercial street. It was beautiful, of course, and I was with good company, but it was also a lot of riding and a lot of hills.
Tuesday – I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve blogged – was a day of riding around the Dingle peninsula. I think I must have written about this. There are some ruins on the peninsula, and some smaller towns than Dingle, and many shops and B&B’s and small restaurants or tearooms catering to tourists. Wednesday was a rest day in Dingle, which I actually did spend resting – I think I must have blogged about this as well.
Thursday was a very long bike ride. The first half was quite tough but also went quite well. The lunch stop was not very nice – just a little store in a gas station with tables in it. There was a tea stop in the afternoon and that was very nice – it was this small, local establishment that you might have seen in Western Massachusetts, organic and sort of hippy-ish. But the ride still went on and on, and I was very tired, and there were still twelve miles to go. There was traffic – by this time it was rush hour, and while drivers are quite polite on the back roads, in towns they are less forgiving of bicyclists – and the roads are narrow. At some point the people I was biking with went up on the curb, to get out of the traffic, and I tried to go up on the curb as well, but I was tired and not thinking clearly and went at it from the wrong angle, and I wasn’t ready for the impact and the bike skittered out to the side. It all happened very fast, too fast for me to react. I got one hand down, sort of, but mostly I landed flat on my face on the sidewalk, which hurt so much it almost didn’t hurt at all. There was blood all over the sidewalk and I couldn’t think for a few minutes and I was very scared. But I came away lucky – a cut lip and a cut hand and some scratches on my nose, a few bruises and scrapes to add to the collection on my legs, but the only permanent damage I sustained was a badly-chipped tooth, which I’m told the dentist can patch up entirely. With the chipped tooth and the still-swollen lip it doesn’t *look* all that minor, but it could have been a lot worse – I didn’t break my nose or even my glasses, my eyes are fine, I didn’t hit my head, and while I’ve lost rather a lot of tooth, the root is still intact and as long as I don’t try to bite directly into anything I’m not in any pain. The others in the cycling trip have been very nice about it, and when I came back to the hotel all battered up they did everything they could to make me comfortable, making me tea and bringing me band-aids and assuring me that I don’t look completely ridiculous and that my teeth can be fixed and someday not too long I’ll laugh about my war wounds from the trip.
So, surprisingly, losing half a tooth didn’t ruin my vacation, or even my day. That night I went to dinner with everyone else, and had some pasta and an Irish coffee and was perfectly cheerful even though my lip was still quite swollen and periodically would start bleeding. Yesterday was another long bike, and I wanted to do some of it – there was supposed to be a great view at the beginning, and I also didn’t want to let the injury be the last thing that happened on the cycling trip (which yesterday was the last day of). So I decided to go slowly – by that point I didn’t have much choice, as my muscles were quite fatigued. I went with two others who I’d spent a lot of time with on the trip, and we took it very easy. Before we even started up the big hill, we stopped for shopping and a cup o tea, which was lucky since it rained for quite a while, and instead of biking up a mountain in the rain, we were in the cottage, drinking coffee and Guinness and eating chocolates and warming our hands by the fire (yes, they have fires in Ireland in August, for very good reason – it’s chilly here, and nothing is heated adequately). Then we set off up the hill, and to be honest we walked a good bit of it. None of us had a lot of strength left, and I wasn’t using my clips anymore (which was a good thing, since it was so wet and of course I was leery of falling, but which did reduce my ability to power up hills) and I was less willing to push myself than previously. But the whole area was gorgeous and we saw some spectacular views, both on the way up and on the way down. However, by the time we got to the bottom it was getting onto the middle of the afternoon and we still had about ten miles to go before the lunch stop and then, in theory, another twenty after (I had not planned to do this last part). I was hungry, especially since I hadn’t felt wonderfully that morning and had hardly eating anything at breakfast, and getting very tired, as was one of the people I was biking with, but the other was quite – almost annoyingly – chipper and getting impatient with us. I’m not usually the person with less energy in a group, which made me feel even worse, but I told myself that she was probably tired as well and just trying to keep the group’s spirits up and make her last day as good as it could be.
The way it ended was that we got lost, and spent about an hour going the wrong way, figuring out that we’d gone the wrong way, and trying to figure out what the right way would be. We saw some interesting country and a herd of sheep being herded, which I’d only ever seen in movies, and then we found the right way and continued on. At that point our guide, who’d been looking for us because it was nearly four and we weren’t at the lunch stop, found us, and we all ended up deciding to end our ride there. I was very happy to climb in the bus, be driven through thirty miles of scenic country, and then go to my hotel, have a long, hot shower, and lie on my bed reading before dinner.
For dinner I had bangers (sausage) and mash (ed potatoes), a nice change from the chowders and soups I’ve been eating. It was quite good, actually (and, in keeping with all Irish food, quite substantial) and the dinner itself was a lot of fun, with everyone in good spirits and getting a bit nostalgic about the trip, talking about what their next cycling trip might be and insisting that we all keep in touch and call if we’re ever in each other’s cities.
This morning I awoke early, repacked my bag in an increasingly doomed effort to make everything fit, had a hearty breakfast in the B&B, and caught the 9:00 bus to Limerick. We’re just about to arrive, and I’ll switch to the bus for Galway, which is where I’ll spend the next two days before returning to Dublin to head, a bit sadly, home.
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