Weather: ☀️🌤️☀️🌤️☀️
Picnic: 🌯🌯(2 out of 5, wraps in the sun while drying the tent)
Traction on track: 🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌(6 out of 5 bananas, slippery as f..k)
Gear destroyed: 1 hikingpole, broke after sliding down in the mud
Campsite: ⛺⛺⛺⛺⛺ (5 out of 5, sheltered yet spacious, dry ground, next to a brook + great view)
Name of followed trail: Beara way
We leave the campaign a sunny day, after a great night with no wind!
First we go up the hill towards Castletownbere. Towards the top the grassy pastures become wilder and more rocky. What a beautiful area this is! It is rather wet though, which makes it slippery (again). Frome there we look back on the Atlantic ocean one more time, before we descend on a gravel track down through the woods. In the distance we can see the town of Castletownbere, but we ain’t there yet! A difficult yet beautiful track through the rough and boggy hills follows. We have amazing views with great weather! Progress is very slow though, due to the slippery track. Mark and the ground do not always agree, so there is some struggling involved…
Once we get down from the hills into solid, paved, ground, we first have lunch and dry our tent. Frome there we have a speedy walk into town. It is getting late and we are never going to make it to our planned camp spot! So no stopping at McCarthy’s pub (sorry Adrian, we’d have loved to come for a pint again!) but a quick resupply at the supermarket. We fill up our water bottles and leave the village. Into the beautiful, boggy hills again. The trail is hard and we are getting tired. Mark slips down and I hear some unfriendly words. He broke his hikingpole. So now we have 3… I continue with one. When we reach a peaceful spot next to a stream, we decide to call it a day. It’s been a long day and we can use some rest. We’re 5 km from the planned spot. Day 2 and behind schedule. But better safe than sorry, so we stay here. And happy to do so, because even among our many campsites, this is a very pretty one!
After a proper dinner of noodles with fresh veggies and even some roasted chicken, we go to bed.
So lucky to get blue skies and no rain
After Beara the walking gets much easier. Hopefully this beautiful landscape and the seaviews remain in your memories – in the 2000 km we walked on the E8 it was by far the best