So... I'm back from my Ireland trip.
Got back Saturday night rather than Sunday as planned. The plan was to get the afternoon ferry from Dublin to Holyhead and then camp in Snowdonia, then on the Sunday meander down through Wales to take in the scenery. What actually happened is various issues culminated in me & my buddy deciding that we’d had enough of camping for one week so rode straight home instead.
The problem here is that our plan was less than ideal for that. Ferry got in at 18:20 but it wasn’t until 19:00 that’s we’d cleared the chaos of ferry disembarkment and were on local roads.
So, as the great man once said
(or would have if he was on our trip) “There's 287 miles to Chard, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark out, and we're wearing sunglasses”.
We took the A55/A5 down through Wales as we still wanted to see some of Snowdonia and sample those lovely roads whilst it was light, but also just avoid M/ways as much as possible. We did however want to be on the M5 before it was dark, so time was against us. We made good progress over to Worcester and as darkness fell we jumped on to the M5 and let the mind numbing begin. One stop for food & coffee and I got home just before 1 am. I was pretty tired but not as much as I was expecting to be. The 1190 Adv is a great bike for this sort of thing. It soaked up the piss poor back roads of southern Ireland, felt like a sports bike on the faster twisty stuff and chewed up the miles on the motorway. Also having an intercom playing music helped pass the time.
Ireland was great, stunning scenery and some very good roads, also some piss poor roads, an adventure bike is a pretty good choice for what is there, though a 1200 is overkill, but I do like overkill…
We didn’t see too many sports bikes whilst there, a few nakeds, some tourers and even some Harleys and Goldwings, but on the whole not too many bikes. I would class SW Ireland in general as a lower speed biking holiday, not like the Alps for example. The weather was kind, some light rain during the day but nothing too serious, just chuck the waterproofs on at the first sight of rain and 30 mins later it's dry again. There was occasional rain over night, and twice it was full on torrential for hours but for the most part it was dry when setting up or breaking camp, tent was mostly wet though which makes it a little more unpleasant. So in general we were spared and by the sounds of it the weather was much worse here.
Six of us in total but due to doing different things we split into two groups and rode slightly different routes.
So the trip... caught the ferry into Rosslare and rode to a campsite at Clogneen.
Next morning we headed south through the Vee pass over a small mountian and then dropped down to the coast via Cork.
We then headed west following the Wild Atlantic Way and eventually headed north up to Killarney, which would be our base for 4 days.
From Killarney we did day trips to explore most of the peninsulas to the west, did the Ring of Kerry and various passes, all good stuff.
We then headed up the coast towards Galway but turned and headed back across Ireland before getting to Galway.
Next area of interest was the Wicklow national park, the mountains were spectacular.
...and that was it more or less.
Full trip distance - 1626 miles.
Here a short highlights vid from one of our group
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B79OB2v8MfM
