Day 87
December 29, 2021:
Little bit of water seeped up from turf overnight, but this wasn’t too much of an issue.
In the morning, it was extremely windy, so I put my tent away before having breakfast. The patio area behind the bar was a very nice place to hang out. I plugged in my computer there and ate soda bread with blackcurrant jam. The owner of the pub came out and was surprised to find me there, but I explained I was the guy who had camped in the back, and he didn’t mind. The door from the patio to the back kept swinging open and shut in the wind, making big clanging noises. I tried to arrest its motion with a bucket of rope and chain first, but that didn’t work. It just pulled the bucket over. The latch didn’t fit into its hole. I finally figured out that dropping the iron rod helped. It didn’t have a hole to slide into, but the corrugated surface of the concrete below prevented the gate from moving too much.
I left a bit later than I had originally planned, maybe around 11 am. I made sure to close the gate behind me. I headed back out towards Downpatrick Head first to follow the coastal Wild Atlantic Way road. The road to Ballina took me alongside the coast past Lackan Beach and Killala. When I got to Killala, I first mistook it for Ballina, and thought I’d next head up to Enniscrone. Not so. It took me a lot longer than I had expected to reach Ballina. Pronounced Bah-lih-nah.
Ballina has a nice downtown area, and like many Irish cities, is built along a river. I stopped at a bike store there, where I got new tire levers, bike oil, two new spare inner tubes, and bike lights. He had a few different types of bike lights. One set was USB-rechargeable, and I think I like that option better than replacing the batteries. Sure, it’ll save me a few bucks with time, but the biggest reason is I can recharge them from my power bank as opposed to having to get batteries at local stores and having to carry the extras with me. In hindsight, carrying batteries does have the advantage that if I do carry extras with me, I can use the lights even during long stretches of no power - like if I cycled across Australia or central Asia. That said, it’s pretty easy to remember to charge them, and the charges seem to last a long time too. They’re also more self-contained, which - while that may make them harder to fix - might also mean they won’t corrode as easily as my last set did. In any event, I got the USB ones, even though they were a bit more expensive than the other sets. Stopping at this shop was super, and it took care of many of the issues I had had.
By the time I was done at the bike shop, it was already past 3 pm. I wouldn’t be getting to Enniscrone today, so I’d need to find a place to stay. Checking local prices yielded few options in the way of hotels or B&Bs. So I checked maps on my phone for good clumps of trees I might be able to stay in. I found the sort of clump I was looking for to the southeast of the city, and it seemed to have roads with good access to the wood without too many nearby estates. I cycled there, finding a few trails already carved into the wood. I dove in.
I found the perfect spot. Nestled deep within the trees, not visible from the road. Trees are farmed in Ireland, so normally, there are big ruts for water canals between lines of trees. In this case, one of the ruts was filled in with soft tree matter. It looked like it had been this way for years, maybe decades. It was soft, dry soil with a layer of moss over the top. It was a secretive, comfortable, sheltered spot. I even had a little bit of a data connection, and watched a little Dimension 20 off of it.
