Day 2: Tagoat to Clonea

66 miles

Last night wasn’t the perfect preparation for a long day on the bike that I’d hoped for. There was a weeping and wailing teenage girl in the tent next door. It was an unbelievably histrionic performance, and I must admit that the phrase ‘snowflake generation’ did go through my head.

Girl: “I HATE this! I HATE this!” – sob sob – “I want to go home”

Dad: inaudible but reassuring mumbling

Girl: “And you can just f$£%ing shut up too! I hate you too.” – sob wail sob

Dad: mumble mumble sounding a bit less comforting now

Girl: (screaming and hardly able to breathe with grief) “I said f$£%ing SHUT UP!”

Mum: higher pitched mumbling, still reassuring and cossetting

Girl: “F$£%ing shut up! This is TERRIBLE! I just want to go home NOW!”

It was raining a little bit at the time, so I guess it was like literally a total nightmare. This went on from 11.30pm until sometime before 1am, getting more and more incoherent but not any quieter. I don’t know how she kept it up. It would have taken less energy to walk home.

When the parents stopped indulging the girl, the dad then snored like the Fishguard ferry foghorn, so I hardly slept. Next time I’m not going to pitch then tent where I’m asked to, I’m going as far away from snowflakes and snorers as possible, for my sanity.

I want to mention again the Irish attitude to rain, which I love. Last night at the campground it rained for a bit, enough to get pretty wet if you were out in it (I was washing up and under a roof). If this happened in England I’m pretty sure that most people would have run for cover, but not here. I looked round the site and it was just as if nothing had changed. A man shelling peas from a deckchair outside his tent stayed exactly where he was, not even moving the chair under his tent’s awning. Two women in t shirts just carried on gossiping near the shower block, checking on their kids from time to time who were still playing table tennis with a full size football, as mentioned yesterday. I even had to put my hand out to check that it really was still raining. Then this morning the woman cleaning the shower block asked me if I minded the rain with such a long ride to do. I slightly lied and said I didn’t mind, and she said

“Ah, that’s right now – just get on with it!”

So that’s what I did and hey presto the sun came out. Occasionally. It’s so warm though, and the air feels so gentle, it’s just perfect for cycling.

And I found the great cafe I stopped at last year, the Lemon & Lime Cafe in Wellingtonbridge.

Then on to Passage East to take the little car ferry over to County Waterford.

Followed by a longer spell into Waterford, where I was greeted with the first proper downpour of the day. After getting one photo of a favourite Wall Art painting…

…I pressed on to the Waterford Greenway, which starts after the city of Waterford at a railway buffer and runs for 44km often close to to one of Ireland’s great rivers, the Suir, all the way to my destination today, Clonea near Dungarvan.

At one point the train I raced last year appeared, full of very friendly tourists – I was much too mature to race them this time, being a whole year older, but took this video instead.

There were regular downpours, but the greenway has many bridges to shelter under, and you often end up talking to others doing the same thing. Today it was mostly mums with their little ones in buggys . No crying kids, despite the weather, just lots of giggling and eating crackers and saying ‘There’s a man with a bike!’ and pointing at me.

On one occasion I was trapped for about twenty minutes alone as the rain flooded the underpass.n Unsurprisingly, no-one else appeared.

Then Slightly less charming was the serious bike racer type, an older and sour looking man, who was fiddling with his phone and blocking almost the entire greenway with his bike, making mums and dads stop to shepherd their kids past him. I decided to be proactive.

‘Would you mind moving your bike a bit, so people can get past?’

He looked up from his phone and scowled at me.

‘Aw, FECK off!’ he barked, sounding just like Father Jack from Father Ted. The kids were all struck silent, I was so shocked I just laughed, but came up with some much better responses sometime later, of course.

But with the sun out it was glorious. Possibly the two highlights were the verdant, dripping rock wall after a long tunnel, and the moment you suddenly see the ocean ahead, just before arriving at Clonea Beach.

As I set up the tent, leaving most of it hanging from a tree to dry out a bit, several mums came over and each offered to charge any devices or lend a foot pump or whatever, making me feel very welcome. I’ve just booked a second night here so I can have lazy day in Clonea instead of pressing on again.

Fish and chips at the beach ‘chipper’ and I could eat it all over again this evening.

I got chatting with a lad called Billy, whose mum Aileen had just lent me a table and chair for my evening cuppa and book-read, and he said he used to play the ukulele at school. So I unpacked the red sticker-covered touring Uke and he had a refresher lesson on C, A minor, F and the tricky G7. They all left to pick up a daughter from gymnastics in nearby Dungarvan at 9pm, so when I returned the camp furniture I left the Uke on the chair.

My reward was that instead of listening to someone crying and wishing they could go home, I was serenaded to sleep by Billy and others in the family quietly strumming the new chords and showing each other how to play them and singing and humming tunes that seemed to fit.

A special shout out to a new friend of this blog, Nicky Sweeney, who coached me in a few pronunciation issues when we were recently working together, esp this for place, Clonea, where she loves to swim. It’s not Clon-Ear, as I’d been saying, but Clon-Ay. thanks Nicky! Hope I got that right.

Signs That Are Funny