No breakfast in the no frills Travelodge and off into torrential rain …soaked us both through ….boots and socks soaked, wet weather gear and into my adventure jacket. My riding pants completely soaked as well as my gloves….basically a sodden mess. Vince wanted to just ride all the way through on the M9 …so we didn’t stop until we reached our B&B in Dublin ….no one home! So we took time to get some lunch..the waiter took pity on us and turned the heater up for us as we dripped all over his tiled floor. Lunch was tasty and hot …I went to the ladies to thaw out my hands under the hand dryer… as my fingers were hurting and didn’t work. We went back to the B&B and Paul, our host, was home and made us a hot drink each to warm us up. We booked a double for 90 pounds (cheapest we could find in Dublin) but later when we got back from our dinner with Alex) found it was just two single beds put side by side with a throw rug ove the top …single bed linen underneath…we were to tired by that time to care! We unloaded the bike and put our wet things around the room to try to dry them out….a hot shower to warm up and get into dry clothes…then catching up on emails etc as we have wifi here. Tonight we plan to catch up with Alex ( a rider we met on the ferry to Skye) who lives here and have a pint! NB: we did this …had a lovely evening and meal with our new friend Alex….very enjoyable!
and Vince says …. got deliberately blocked by an ignorant BMW driver who prevented me from making a lane change approaching our Dublin off-ramp, so had an extra 10 minutes/10km pissing around to get back to where we needed to be to find our B&B. At the end of a long, wet and windy ride it would have been nice to take the more direct route to Zion Guest House, but instead we had a scenic detour around Dublin – thank goodness for the automatic route recalculation on the GPS! The roads here are pot holed and have deep manhole cover pits, and there was a lot of standing water covering the roads, so the detour was not really a welcome diversion, but it was a better option than trying to force the issue with the car driver and losing the point. And up to that stage the ride had been very enjoyable despite the hard rain. The first part of the ride I sat on about 100-110kph on the 120kph M9, but the bike seemed to handle the occasional cross-winds better at 120, so I just cruised up the motorway sitting at that speed, sometimes managing to peer through my foggy visor to check where the road was leading. We had the motorway almost to ourselves, overtaking the infrequent truck, and sometimes being overtaken by a little buzz-box.
