Day 4, July 2, 2012

I'm having trouble posting pictures so I  may post some in Facebook until I figure out how to get the pictures posted in this blog.

Today was on first day of cycling. It looked like the weather was going to be rainy, but it there were fair skies throughout much of the day. We had an excellent breakfast at our B&B. After breakfast, we had a lot to do to get everyting packed up and our bikes prepped for riding. We didn't even start riding until after 11:30 in the morning. (We hope to get an earlier start tomorrow.

We left Donegal Town and headed for the fishing town of Killybegs. The weather was improving rapidly and we saw a lot of blue sky. We continued along the coast and then headed for the Slieve League, which are high cliffs that go down to the ocean. They are the second highest sea  cliffs in Europe. The road up to the viewing point was very steep in places. Some of the road grades were around 20% slopes, so it made for some tough pedaling.

We saw sheep everywhere. You could see them on practically every hillside. A lot of times, the sheep would be on the road. At one place there was a flock of about twenty sheep in the road.  Pagl, my fellow rider,  whistled and the sheep started to run for all they were worth down the road. He continued to whistle and eventually they sprinted off to the sides of the road.

The scenery was beautiful today. Ireland is very green this time of year due to the amount of rain they  receive.

We did a lot of hill climbing today. We ended up riding 58 miles but in tose miles we climbed a total of 5000 feet. We've got more climbing tomorrow so I need to get some rest soon. I did get a kick out of one of the road signs I saw. It read "Traffic Calming, 400 meters". I had visions of all the drivers at that point switching their radios to the classical music station and serenely listening.

On the last ten miles of the ride, we had to go over a mountain pass. It was lightly raining and the road was getting slippery. The road was extremely steep on the backside of the pass with hairpin turns. As I went around one of the turns, my tire slipped and I fell in the road. Fortunately, I wasn't going very fast but I do have some road rash to show for the experience.

We checked into our B&B, got cleaned up, the went out for a nice dinner in the town of Adara. That's all for now. Thanks for reading my blog.