Limerick Friday 29 August

Since my last post we've had a night at Derry and two nights at Sligo. We had a tour of Derry with a most interesting town guide, who showed us some of the sites of troubles there and explained the history of the troubles, looking way beyond the religious front that usually hides the real problems of poverty and lack of opportunity. He was excellent.


We arrived at our hotel in Sligo to discover that because of a lot of heavy rain we had no water in our rooms. The fire brigade were there pumping water in to clean out and refill the system, the water was brown when we eventually had some, and the hotel provided bottled water in all the rooms and extra on each floor. Adventure of travelling!


We had a fairly quiet day on Thursday which we all enjoyed - we had no wake-up call and didn't leave until 9:30 am, a great luxury indeed!


This morning we had a bit of excitement on our way from Sligo to Limerick. There was a detour for a bike race, which sent us on a little excursion across country on very narrow roads, it really was good fun! It turned out that the bike race was the Tour of Ireland, so although we missed the Tour de France we had a bit of a consolation prize in this one. We saw the riders in the beautiful little village of Cong, I think it was probably the most exciting thing in Cong for a long time!

First came the Gardi and the marshals ...

Then came the riders!

Have you noticed the colour of the sky? Yes, it's grey. There is a little bit of blue outside just now, but it's been grey for days! We have hopes that it will improve, will keep you posted!