Travel Log - Ireland

10 things you always wanted to know about Ireland but were afraid to ask
(or how we spent our summer vacation)
by Joe Rohner

Well, Ireland was not our first choice for a vacation in the summer of 2002. With 9/11 and all, we had decided to stay in the US and booked a trip with Backroads.com that was going to the Grand Canyon. But the trip got cancelled about a month before because of too few reservations. We could have booked the same trip on another date, but our kids had been going places at the same time and not wanting to provide Hollywood the inspiration for another sequel to “Home Alone”, we were more or less locked into the original dates. So with a month to go, Regina and I are pouring through the Backroads catalogue looking for another trip and narrowed it down to Ireland. The other available trips were either too short (we were looking for a 7 or 8 day trip), too easy (the wine country didn’t seem like much of a challenge) or we had done them before.

The Trip:

Backroads: Ireland Biking. Cork and Kerry Counties

The trip was about 250 miles in 6 full days of cycling if you did all the miles each day. Backroads had it set up pretty well to accommodate different levels of riders. The route support was great.

That may not sound like that much distance but 3 of those days had 3,000 feet of elevation gain. Then throw in time for sightseeing and those were pretty full days.

For more details see http://www.backroads.com/trips/BIRI.html.

Looking at the website Backroads seems to have reversed travel directions since we went but the hotels and the route are otherwise the same.

So we went, and had a great time. Backroads did an excellent job. The country was beautiful and the group we rode with was fun. Along the way however, I realized that Ireland was very different than what I expected. Here are some of the things that surprised us.

#1: Mark Twain never visited Ireland. We started getting organized for the trip and weren’t sure what to bring. Backroads gave us a pretty good list of clothing to bring, but we didn’t believe it. So we went to RBM and asked Rhonda what to bring. She said, “Bring everything you need to cycle during the winter in Dallas”. Mark Twain once said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”. We now know Mark Twain never visited Ireland. If he had he would have said “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in Ireland”. The lows were in the forties, one morning might have been 39. The highs were in the fifties. That tops San Fran. So we packed long underwear, wet weather gear, wool socks, warm gloves – and used almost all of it.

Regina on the ruins of an old fort, in the rain, in the fog.

#2: Palm trees grow in some pretty cold places. When we got off the plane in Cork, we were surprised to see palm trees growing outside the terminal. I always think of palm trees as being warm weather plants. Well, they are and they aren’t. The weather doesn’t have to be warm, just as long as it isn’t doesn’t freeze. The southwest coast of Ireland is warmed by the Gulf Stream, so it never freezes there. The northern part of the country gets snow occasionally, but not the south. So palm trees do just fine.

#3: It’s pretty much the same temperature year round. As we are listening to someone tell us about the palm trees, and I am doing the math in my head to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, I realize that the temperature couldn’t get much colder than it was without being below freezing. Being the astute weather watcher that I am, I was also reasonably sure that it was not warmer in the winter. A local cyclist who we met along the way later confirmed this saying that the only difference between cycling in January and cycling in July was that in January it was dark most of the time.

#4: Whoever said, “The sun never sets on the British Empire” wasn’t talking about the extent of the British colonies. He was talking about the fact that it never gets dark in the summer. Ireland has the same latitude as Alaska, which is famous for its endless days in the summertime. It generally got dark about 11pm and started getting light about 4am. In Northern Ireland or Scotland it never really gets completely dark in the summer, just twilight. Of course, since it was usually cloudy and raining it wasn’t really bright it was just light.

Sea View House in Bantry. This picture was taken about 10pm. See the palm trees on the right?

#5: It takes a lot of rain to make things that green. They don’t call it the Emerald Isle for nothing. It really is incredibly green. On the other hand it was also incredibly wet which explains why everything was incredibly green. It rained 5 out of the 6 days we were cycling and 9 out of the 12 days we were there. In fairness to Ireland, we heard that this was the wettest spring and summer on record. Okay, but even in a normal year the rainfall is about 3 times what we get here. Unlike Dallas though where we seem to get our rain in 1 to 2 inch downpours accompanied by lots of lightening and thunder, it was a steady and gentle rain that you could usually ignore as long as you had good raingear.

Glendalough region. See the leprechaun?

#6: Drink enough Irish whiskey and the weather doesn’t bother you. Considering how cold, foggy and rainy it was all of the time, I can kind of understand why the Irish have a reputation for drinking so much. Some Irish whiskey really felt good when you come in cold and wet from a day of cycling. Actually it would have tasted good even if we hadn’t done the cycling first. Ireland has 6 major distilleries; Bushmill’s, Jameson’s, Midleton’s, Tullamore Dew, Power’s, and Paddy’s. I tried them all, and the Bushmill’s 16 year old single malt was my favorite. They drink it straight and looked at me like I had a hole in my head when I asked for it on the rocks. As the bar tender in one of the hotels we stayed at put it: “Sir, we spent 16 years trying to get all of the water out of it, please don’t put it back in.”

Joe stopping in for some essential supplies

#7: Irish Cuisine is not a boiled potato and a six-pack. The biggest surprise on the trip was the food. It was really good. The menus emphasized seafood including fresh oysters, mussels, crabs, skate, salmon, swordfish, lobster, and shrimp mostly served continental style. They also served a lot of lamb, duck and wild game. There are few fast food places in Ireland. But there are pubs everywhere serving meals (a.k.a. “pub grub”) including sandwiches, soups, fish dishes, and stews. We never saw corned beef and cabbage on the menu once. Someone on the trip told us that corned beef and cabbage first became popular among Irish immigrants in Boston and New York not Ireland. They don’t eat much beef in Ireland. I can see why. I tried a steak once. Anyone from Texas would be disappointed.

#8: Stone buildings last a really long time. A general pattern in Irish history seems to be that whenever the Irish built something like a stone church or castle, then someone (the Romans, the Kelts, the Normans, the British) comes along and destroys it. Being somewhat stubborn the Irish then rebuild so they are ready for the next invasion. As there were a lot of invasions the Irish got a lot of practice building stone buildings. Since the roofs were usually wood and grass, the invaders just burned the buildings. When the roofs burned, the stone walls were left standing. Consequently, everywhere you look in Ireland you see stone ruins of churches, castles and houses, some dating back to the 7th or 8th centuries, many as recent as the 19th century. Why they didn’t just rebuild the roofs, is puzzling since the walls were so strong and well constructed that many were still standing hundreds of years later.

Eighth century Abbey

#9: Roads built for horses aren’t wide enough for cars. I had heard before that the roads in Ireland weren’t very good. That was an understatement. When you get away from the major cities the roads get downright scary. We were on some “roads” that weren’t any wider than the White Rock Creek bike trail. The roads had been there a

Regina pauses on a coastal “highway”. This was one of the bigger roads we rode on. Note the shirt.

while, some dating back to Roman times. The idea of building a road big enough to hold a bus or an 18-wheel tractor trailer wasn’t high on the priority list back then, and since the towns clustered along the roads, enlarging them now would be next to impossible. I was truly amazed to see the size of the vehicles that were routinely traveling along these tiny roads. Even the coastal “highway” shown in the picture was only one lane in each direction with no shoulders and they were only about two thirds of what we would think of as a normal lane standards. Fortunately the drivers were all very careful and courteous around cyclists, giving us plenty of room. After a while I stopped worrying about it.

How do you say “On your left” in cow? Er, should that be “On your right”?

#10: If you don’t like mountains, don’t go. We expected hills. We were really surprised at how much climbing we had to do. The southern coast is positively mountainous. We typically had to climb two or three thousand feet a day over the course of 50 miles, which would involve one big climb of a thousand or fifteen hundred feet plus several little climbs. There were two passes during the 7 days that involved two thousand foot climbs.

Joe and Regina at the top of Healy pass – 2,600 ft. Typical weather.