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It rains during the night. I can hear the patterns on the window. I wake to clouds, and the rain comes again as I am loading my bike. Heavy rain clouds hang over Donegal while it is much lighter to the southeast where I am headed. But I have to hang around in the rain for the bank to open at 10:00 a.m. I have coffee out of the rain in a bakery as I kill time and anxiously watch the sky. Money changed, I hightail out of town in a light rain,
disdaining the poncho on the assumption that the rain will let up as I move south. And much of the time it does stop or lighten up. It is cold and windy up in the mountains, but the rain holds off as I slowly ascend for almost eight miles. Then I have rolling hills and
wonderful vistas for about ten more miles. The second half of the route is on the highway and there is no shoulder and fairly heavy traffic. Green, rolling hills dominate the last half of the trip. I stop for a lunch snack around noon. I pull into the Tourist Office before 2:00 p.m., and have forty miles for the day when I arrive at my B+B. It's on the edge of Enniskillen, and I can walk into town in about 15 minutes. This is not an old town by Irish standards. It looks to be generally a town developed in the early 19th century.
It's clean and pleasant to stroll, but the various streets downtown have steel gates that can close off the streets to traffic and any possible IRA hostility. Further evidence of the Troubles is the chicken wire-wrapped police station, so done to prevent fire bombs from being hurled at them. Otherwise one wouldn't realize that Enniskillen was the scene of a nasty IRA explosion in 1987 that killed 13 innocent people. The town seems to have all the signs of civility in spite of the fact that Fermanagh County is mainly Catholic even though it is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland. Tomorrow if it's dry out, I'll do a bike ride around Lough Erne. Dinner is ok pasta at an Italian restaurant. (466 miles) |
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