Wanderung 34

Cavan, Ireland

As The George wanted 12 Euro for breakfast, we instead had a morning snack of coffee and some leftover scones before setting off for Northern Ireland. As I was planning our route, I encountered the unfortunate political division of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, because I had to choose "United Kingdom" as a new country before my new GPS would locate our final destination in Derry (UK: Londonderry). After fiddling around and finally setting up that route, we finished packing and managed to get all our stuff into one backpack and one 22" rolling suitcase each, but the process of cramming all our stuff into our luggage was getting ever more difficult!

Then it was time to bid adieu not only to Limerick, but also to Linda and Jerry as they were going to stay over another night and then take the VERY early morning intercity bus from Limerick to Dublin airport in order to catch their flight home. It was sad to say good-bye, and the car surely felt empty without them and their baggage.

We headed out of Limerick at 8:30, and after a short distance on the M7 motorway heading towards Dublin, we turned off northwards at the town of Nenagh. I saw a sign for a historical castle, so we followed that into the center of town where I found an open Tourist Information center. The nice lady there told me that the castle would open for tours at 10 o'clock , but that would have meant waiting almost an hour to see the inside, and it was doggone cold that morning.

We walked over to the castle grounds, however, and the gate was open so we just walked inside and looked at the huge, round castle built around 1200. For being over 800 years old, it looked in remarkably good shape.

Besides being round, the castle was larger than the square stone tower-castles built all over Ireland in the 1300s, but it's function was much the same. It was a focal point of fighting amongst contending chieftains during the Williamite Wars. One impressive feature of this castle was the thickness of the stone walls at the base, over 3 meters thick! Even the curtain wall, of which a small section remained, was at least 6 feet thick, and that's a lot of stone to assemble! If anyone reading this ever visits the inside of that castle and takes pictures of its interior, I would appreciate seeing them.

But by that time we were already chilled, so we walked briskly back to the car, climbed in, and continued on our way North. Despite being a 2-lane road, The driving was very pleasant and relaxing, something that I had not typically experienced in Ireland except on the large, modern, limited-access motorways. The reason was that we were on a secondary highway that meandered northwards but avoided major towns, so we just had to slow down when we passed through small villages but never had to actually stop as I would have when passing through any actual city. Also, the truck traffic was minimal, probably because the highway was quite narrow and had no shoulders to speak of. As a result, I only had to occasionally move over for an oncoming truck, and only once in the entire day of driving did I have to actually pass a truck.

The middle section of Ireland that we were driving through is not really a tourist destination, I think, which helped keep the traffic down. The landscape consisted of gently rolling hills covered mostly with pastures separated by hedgerows, although I did see a few areas where row crops were planted. I surmise that the soil is thick and rich enough in those areas to support the increased demands of growing either cereals or vegetables, compared to the lesser demand of just growing grass for pasturage.

We saw on our Ordnance Survey map an icon for a "Mott and Bailey" just outside Graban, but did not see any sign for it when we drove through town. Well, I was intrigued enough to spend time and retrace our route through the town to the church on the western edge of town that had a suspicious-looking hill beside and above it.

Although no signs pointed the way, we kept focused on the church and hill and worked our way up nearly to the crest of the hill, where we stopped to take a look. I'm pretty sure we did find the site of an old, Stone Age or Bronze Age hill fort, which the Celts were known to construct in prehistoric times. But it was currently in the local farmer's field as we greeted by a curious and apparently lonely cow, who came over to moo at us.

Since the cow seemed friendly, I briefly considered climbing the gate to the field and taking a closer look at the hill crest. But the gate was padlocked and there was no official stile to cross the fence like they have in the Lake District of England, plus I wasn't sure about the trespassing laws in Ireland, so in the end I didn't. (Tresspass laws vary greatly in Europe: Some are very strict like in the USA, but up in Sweden they have a rule called "Friedmannsrecht" where you can legally cross anyone's property as long as you don't damage it or take anything.)

We continued northward to the small city of Cavan fairly near the border with Northern Ireland. Monika had found the circled "i" sign indicating an Information Center on our map, so we drove into town and searched for one, hoping that they could direct us to a nice B&B for the evening. After a bit of fumbling around, we found it in the town library right next to a government center that included the county courthouse, I think. There was paid parking in back of the government center, so we parked there and walked around to the library.

The Information Center didn't open until 2 o'clock, so we walked into town for a few minutes just to see what it was like. I found a couple of unusual shops, one that was apparently selling "Insomnia", which seemed like a hard sell to me, and one that was selling "Jokes", which seemed to be much more down my alley. (The "Insomnia" shop turned out to be, for those who are curious, a coffee shop!)

Returning to the Information Center, we found a friendly lady at the desk who gave us the business cards for 5 or 6 of the local B&Bs. She said she really couldn't recommend one, but she did call and put us in touch with John, the owner of the Drumbo Lodge B&B, who obligingly drove into town to guide us on the drive back out to the Drumbo Lodge. That turned out to be a very nice place, so we signed up for a night and toted our backpacks up into the room. Then we had coffee (Monika) and tea (Bob) and played around with our iPads a bit while we rested.

Tired from the driving, I also laid down for a bit, but recuperated enough that we essayed another trip back to the south side of town where we had spotted a Lidl store on the way in. We took the wrong exit at the roundabout on the south side, but that turned out to be a big blessing as we found a big Aldi store instead of the Lidl, and it had all kinds of ready-to-go sandwiches and salads. Monika got an egg salad sandwich and I found a pepperoni and cheese sub. Those sandwiches plus a fruit salad and potato salad, which we shared when we had dinner back at our B&B, made a perfectly satisfying evening meal.

I was intrigued that my fruit salad came with the absolute smallest usable fork that I have ever seen: it's a plastic fork about 2 inches long that has a stubby handle made to fit the curve of your thumb. Instead of holding the fork normally, you pinch it between your thumb and forefinger, but it works perfectly and must weigh mere grams. For our travels by bicycle, such a tiny implement would be ideal, so I am considering how I can use this mini fork to make steel copies of it back at home to use on future trips.

Across the street from the Aldi, We serendipitously found another Mr Price store and picked up a box of bandages, a bottle of 7-Up, and 3 cups of instant beef soup and noodles, similar to the Nissan noodle soup we eat at home. I also tried to get an SD memory card for my camera, because my camera had refused to take a picture earlier in the day because it claimed that it was "Out Of Memory"! Mr Price didn't have those, but the sales clerk suggested the Argos store just down the strip mall.

That turned out to be a curious store, because when we first went in, the store was basically empty except for a display of some nice watches, and I had been expecting some kind of camera store, so I was totally confused. It turned out to be a new-fashioned type of instantaneous buying catalogue store, something like what Sears could have become if they had successfully changed and adapted to the Internet age. So you use terminals to search their database of products or a physical catalogue, and then you order the product using one of the terminals, pay for it, and wait for it to be brought to the front counter, which in our case was only 2 minutes. We paid 14 Euro for a high speed 16 gigabyte SD card, and when I tried it in the camera that evening, it worked perfectly. I'm back in business!

On our way back, I found a couple of amusing things. First was a car in front of a "Carry Out" place with an absurdly large pile of carpets on its roof, ready to be "Carried Out"!

Second was a car solidly parked right in front of a "No Parking" sign. That picture is destined to those funny pictures that Ian had shown us in his shipboard presentation.

The third was the first Kentucky Fried Chicken joint I had seen in Ireland. That was funny because I immediately though of Jerry and the running joke we had about NOT ever eating at a KFC! In fact in all of our driving around Ireland together we never did encounter another KFC! We really did miss chatting with Jerry and Linda as we had dinner and settled in for the night, and I just hoped that their plans for taking the early morning bus to Dublin and catching their flight home would work all right. (Postscript for the Gentle Reader: It all went perfectly and they arrived home safely and on time.)