Day 5: Blarney back to Youghal via Cork

46 Miles

I’ve reached a very familiar point in this trip, where writing the blog each evening after a long day of cycling has become progressively more blurred. This may mean I post too much, or that it doesn’t entirely make sense, but my judgement always deteriorates along with my aching limbs. It’s just that so much seems to happen and I enjoy sharing it. Either way, I think you’re all probably used to it by now. When I began turning the USA trip into a book, it was such a relief to turn it into more coherent thoughts.

Before we get to today’s business, here’s another lack of sound judgment: a recording I made of the song in Mt Uniacke yesterday. I could say ‘by popular demand’ but that would be a bit of a stretch. It’s Riding My Bicycle Home, a reworking of Maurice Chevalier’s Walking My Baby Back Home (1930), two years late as the launch to my US trip, but please bear in mind that there was a very busy farm right next to me, and that I have absolutely no professional music training whatsoever.

Despite the strong breeze blowing all night, my clothes weren’t quite dry on the line after their daily wash, so I brought out the ‘in-ride’ clothes drying system for the first time this trip:

After the very long climb last night to reach Blarney, I claimed every single one of my ‘free miles’ for the long and steep downhill return to Cork, for breakfast and a look round. I stopped at the famous St Anne’s Church, currently under scaffolding, where you can ring the bellls yourself if you cough up a pile of euros. Great idea, but not on Sunday mornings for obvious reasons.

This pub was right below St Anne’s bell tower. A man said ‘Howarya?’ to me as he walked by, then knocked on the door, and when it was opened he said loudly ‘Good afternoon!’, to which whoever was inside said ‘Drink?’, shutting the door behind them again. It was 9.45am.

When I got to the English Market, the world famous food and drink location in the heart of old Cork, it was shut.

Closed Sundays. Oops.

Luckily I did have a back-up plan, so just followed the map to Paper Boys brunch restaurant down a little alley. The menu was mouth watering and the food when it arrived was just as delicious. I found it very hard to leave this place with its soundtrack of cool world music and young and chatty staff and customers. Highly recommended.

I found the best vending machine I’ve ever seen at Marina Market on the way out of Cork, a gigantic barn full of restaurants and bars and coffee shops and people…

This was it…

I present the Mystery Book dispenser. You choose an anonymous green-wrapped book, pay 5 euros, and out it comes. I chose the thinnest, lightest looking book I could, for obvious bike-touring reasons. Here’s what I got:

https://youtube.com/shorts/jpAuTExHMCw?si=9RSZd46lzejEGpqd

You might remember that the first day’s ride had a car ferry at Passage East. Heading from Cork to the greenway also had a great ferry, at Passage West.

Just Saying…

This is for longer standing blog followers. I don’t think I have to add anything, do I?

Look Who I Bumped Into On The Greenway:

We were going in opposite directions, me towards Youghal whilst John had just climbed the same monster hill I was so surprised by yesterday, before connecting with the greenway. .

‘Man, that wasn’t a hill, that was a mountain pass!’ he said, shaking his head but still smiling.

Although he carries far less stuff than me, honed down over many, many years on the road, his basic bike lacks the ‘Hand Winch That Could Lift A Grand Piano If You Can Wait That Long’ setting provided by my lowest gears. He was feeling physically much better, still chomping on the garlic, and in the hot sun he looked like an extremely cool rancher from a Cormac McCarthy novel, with his lean look and blue bandana. He said he was planning to reach Kinsale tonight.

’Then what?’ I asked.

‘Oh I don’t know, stay a few weeks?’

His schedule is so different to mine. He’d done some research since we last met, and actually said to me:

‘Hey Ben, your blog is famous! You didn’t tell me!’

That was the highlight of the entire summer so far. I told him he was famous now, and that everyone wished him well with his teeth and his cold and his garlic.

The day ended with a search along the coast towards Youghal for somewhere that would take a tent, or at least existed. One place said caravans only, another just wasn’t there. Finally I got lucky at Clonvilla Camping and Caravanning, who let me pitch my tent comically between two empty static caravans, because I know there’s heavy rain and 45mph wind due overnight and I wanted more shelter! Will I still be here in the morning? Will you? Let’s find out tomorrow.

Quote Of The Day

On the greenway this afternoon I saw two lads, about 9 and 5 years old, and they looked like brothers. They were climbing around in the wooded verge of the trail, and the older one was teaching the younger one an important lesson in life:

“When you’re little, you don’t think about what might happen, if you do something. But when you’re bigger, you think about what might happen if you do something. It’s different.”

I don’t think you can fault his thinking. In fact I may have these words printed on Incidents of Travel t-shirts, as encapsulating this blog’s world view.

A Very Brief Cork Street Art Collection

Not quite at the Waterford level, but very welcome whenever you stumble upon it.

Signs That Are Funny

Very much a hybrid of Irish and North American today:

Has Anyone Seen Barry?

This gets in because of another road sign I once saw in North Carolina, which appeared to be answering the question ‘Has anyone seen Barry?

And a final North American link. Today I saw this:

And immediately thought of this, taken – to bring the whole post back full circle to where we all came in – in Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia :