The Burren Way: day one

Our next adventure was decidedly outdoors in nature: we were going to hike down part of the western Ireland coast, on a trail called the Burren way. Unfortunately, the weather turned against us. We landed in Dublin, and next day took a bus all the way across Ireland to Ballyvaughan. Dublin was sunny and moderate. Ballyvaughan was windy  and rainy. But we were fresh from Oslo, and were not perturbed. We had good coats that were rain resistant, and nylon shirts/pants that dry almost instantly. We could handle this! Plus Jymm seemed mostly over her cold so we were in high spirits. After a tasty but somewhat small breakfast at the B&B we stayed in, we were ready to take off.

First adventure: what to pack for lunch. No Lidl or Tesco here. The corner shop was only slightly larger than a gas station convenience store, and was the only option for miles. Luckily they had fresh bread and full-fat mozzarella cheese - not exactly what we were planning to buy but a delicious choice nonetheless.

The host at the B&B had made our planned hike sound short and easy - oh, you can hike the Burren way in a day if you want, she says (we planned 3 days!), so we elected to make our first day a little longer by adding a extra little loop in Ballyvaughan. Good idea, and at first we had no problem finding the path, which was mostly low-use roads (mostly used for farming access, we understand). But at some point we missed a turn (signs were not a strong point, despite what we had been assured). It was still very pretty, much like the photos shown here, but now the roads got a little bigger, and a lot more busy. A lot more.

Almost every single road we walked along was lined by stone fences, usually allowing about 1-2 feet of unpaved shoulder on each side of the road. Often there just wasn't any way to get off the road at all. Understandably this made us a bit nervous, as cars wized passed. Later we learned that this is pretty much standard for the entire area over there, and that many (most?) people drive down the middle of the road anyway( until they meet another car coming the other way, at which point it's not unusual for somebody to have to pull almost off the road to let them pass, kind of like the roads in my home town!). In any case, everybody seemed quite prepared to give us plenty of room if they weren't already in the middle of the road when they came upon us.  But for the first few hours it was kind of stressful.

Throughout all this there was intermittent rain. Never very much, and usually not lasting for more than a couple minutes. Mostly it just made us impressed by how well dressed we were in our REI finery, and entirely ready for this kind of thing. Then at one point Jymm points off in the distance and said, oh, look at the fog coming in. I pointed out how the 'fog' was coming down in think sheets.  Yes, it was rain, though at first we didn't really think about what that would mean personally to us in the very near future. A few minutes later, the first rain drop. 30 seconds later, a real downpour. Lucky, we were right next to a gate in the ubiquitous rock fences, and could climb into a nearby field and take shelter in a patch of trees that could not have been better located. And get out our actual rain gear (poncho for Jymm, trash bag for Alan - can you guess which one held together the longest?). If not for those trees we would have been drenched.


Eventually we got to the next part of the walking trail and got away from the traffic, which was nice. And we started to be able to recognize the oncoming storm, and pull out our rain gear before the first drops would fall.  The wind was so great, though, that no storm lasted more than 10 minutes. Likewise, the calm between the rainfalls. I may be making this sound less pleasant than it was. We were triumphing over the elements and learning how to read mother nature. It was fun, if a little damp, and our clothes kept us plenty warm. Plus, the scenery was really great - truly different than anywhere else I've been.

And so the rest of the day went. We eventually came to realize that the so-called hiking trail was really just a collection of roads, the whole way though. Most, however, were farm roads and we would see 1-2 cars an hour. The scenery made up for it, though. We have way more pictures than we really can show here, and none of them can capture the wide-open vistas.

The one big change as the day wore on was the wind, which really started to pick up. It's kind of hard to photograph something like the wind, but perhaps the picture gives a hint of what it was like. I don't think it ever knocked us over, but it came close plenty of times.

Our last little adventure of the night was trying to find our next hotel (bed and breakfast, to be exact). We had remembered that it was in the town of "Fanore", and my handy smart phone that can't make phone-calls showed it on the map I had downloaded of all of Ireland. The built in GPS even told us we were getting close to Fanore. But eventually we realized that Fanore was not so much a dot on the map as a widely scattered collection of houses, with no stores and very few people out. The few we found had never head of our B&B. We couldn't even be sure if we should go north along the coast, or south. Stressful, indeed. The website had shown the location on the map, but the closest crossroad wasn't even visible on said map. Very helpful! Luck and talking to several people eventually got us there, tired and dirty, but in pretty high spirits overall. Boy did that hot shower feel good, too!