There is a lot of time to think while biking 10 hours.

I woke up this morning with no place to lay my head that didn’t hurt, after couple too many drinks with the Banagher locals during the music session. On top of that my sunburn forced me to have to take a cold shower. I packed up to head out at 9:30 and found the rain to be coming down nice & solid, back to the weather I remember here. I debated waiting 30 min to let it pass but instead suited up in my raincoat and was off with GO!

The next 20km (pictured) was probably the best sites to be had during my entire trip, which I made excuses to stop frequently to photo. The oncoming wind was so bad that even on flat ground I had to keep it in low gears when not under the protection of trees to block the wind.

After an hour of wind and rain it cleared up and the sun came out full blast and I took this picture which shows how much my freckles came out and multiplied compared to looking at pictures of me in Galway 2 days ago!

I put on my near-sunblock and kept going. My strength was definitely down from the day before, muscles not entirely recovered, and it felt like I was sitting on a wound everytime I sat down on the seat. I stopped in a very lively small town called Roscréa for lunch. When I came back out the sun was blazing and after an hour my skin hurt and started to look a bit purple. More lotion applied & kept going on GO!

It started to rain and be cloudy and windy again by late afternoon, and as I passed the sign welcoming me to the southeast I found it humorous with the comment about being sunny (pictured).

The hills had begun to get exceedingly more difficult and more often than not I stopped to walk up some of the steeper or quite long ones. I finally rolled into Kilkenny exhausted just before 8pm, and had completed the longest and hardest terrain of my entire ride, along with the worst weather. Despite drinking 2 refills of my 32oz water bottle and 3 powerade type drinks, I hadn’t had to stop for the restroom once… So I think I sweated near a gallon of fluid.

Kilkenny was probably the prettiest, most interestingly laid out, and enjoyable town I’ve been to in Ireland, second to Galway (putting Dublin in an entirely different league here). I found my hostel, showered, and talked to Lauren (USA) on the phone briefly, and by the time I got off I found that nowhere was still serving dinner at 9:30ish. After quite a search I had no choice but to dine at this fancy Italian restaurant. Susan called and we talked as I ate dinner, which was nice since it was almost like having company there, company that didn’t have to watch me inhale my food. Despite eating giant meals I could visibly see a difference already in my body and had gone down a belt size. Afterwards I went to the local pub and listened to some live Irish tunes for a short while only and went to bed for a 9 or 10 hour sound sleep. Someday I’d like to go back to Kilkenny with more time, and not by bike. My only complaint about the town was that unlike Galway or Dublin everything closes early, for a reasonably sized town. That was odd, at 11pm there were like 2 pubs actually open to choose from out of streets full.

During my long ride there I remembered the song I wrote years ago for Invincible Guitar, and thought of the next day to come & seeing the coast. Almost like it was calling i suppose... you have a lot of time to think of crazy stuff on a bike in the hot sun haha:

She never said come to me,

But we went for what’s worth following,

In the hopes that we’d find something,

We hoped to find anything.