Day 13, Skeheen mountain – Knocknalougha mountain

Weather: ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️
Picnic: 🌯🌯🌯🧱😴 (3 out of 5, in the sunshine, sitting on a brick wall and even time for a nap!)
Track: ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️(5 out of 5, beautiful and diverse scenery, lovely waterfall trail, great countryside and tough but rewarding trail through the mountains with amazing views!)
Campsite: ⛺⛺⛺ (3 out of 5, sheltered, flat and in the forest)
Campfire:🔥🔥🔥 (3 out of 5, hard work to keep it going because of the damp wood, to tired to sing, but still a campfire!)
Name of followed trail: Blackwater way

Yesterday’s campfire was really good (4 out of 5), with some nice singing and a good glass of whiskey to bring a toast to Jacques , Marks dad, who passed away a year ago. Before he passed away, we promised him that we’d go on our ‘hike of a lifetime’, so it felt good to honour him with a toast by the campfire more than 300 km in!

This morning we rose again at sunrise, and boy was it good! Amazing colors in the sky, promising a bright sunny day. Time to put on our shorts! It’s March in Ireland after all!😅🤣

We have a breakfast appreciation moment after the resupply in Cork. Its a big improvement on the ones we got in Baile Bhuirne. The shop there was one of ‘smaller assortment, bigger prices. So we had to do with what’s available. In Cork we had a lot more choice.
We leave at 8 and start with a rerouting of the trail, to make it go past the Ballard waterfall. Excellent choice I’d say! After that we walk a lot of lanes and tracks in the Irish countryside. It looks lovely here!

We find a nice wall to sit on for lunch in the sunshine. After some relaxing, we sit against the wall for a little nap. Such a relaxed part of the day!

We continue our trail a few kilometers until we see a lady at a house where we ask to fill a bit of our water. The lady is called Eileen and gives us a bottle of water and also invites us for some water inside.

Refreshed we continue, which greatly disappoints Sam, the Labrador who thought he’d found 3 new playmates..
Now we’ll get to the mountains we need to cross today. Just before that, 11 km from our campsite, we fill up our water at a watertank, this works better than expected, and we are happy with it, because there isn’t going to be any other (reliable) drinkwater source today.

The track through the mountains is stunning! Amazing views, great tracks and only some mud! We start to realize what a couple of dry days can do to the trail conditions. This makes the trail-conditions we had in the beginning a lot more understandable.

We enjoy the scenery on our way up (and slightly curse it on our way down on the more boggy side of the mountain). On top the 360 view is absolutely fantastic!
Going down takes more time for Mark and me, where Rein takes more time going up. This makes us a steady but slow hiking team 😅

The final few kms feel like they’re taking ages, but we get to our campsite before dark. Mark is feeling sorry for trading his backpack with Rein for a day, so Rein could try out his…

Dead tired of a long day that started so relaxed! We still manage to make a fire, with quite some effort from Mark and Rein. We bring a toast to hiking with friends, on Reins (for now) final night with us. We had a great week together!