Ride outs
Colourful ride out
Last Sunday, thanks to the time change and that Monday was Bank Holiday and we could have some more sleep 🙂 , we got up early to watch MotoGP. The truth is that lately we are watching very few MotoGP races as they are mostly boring. We watch some afterwards when there have been some positive comments on the race (that is to say: 5 or 6 passing in the last 3 laps…)… We prefer to keep with road racing (unfortunately very few can be followed live).
But that day there was Pedrosa pole position and as it’s almost the end of the season we decided to watch it. The race had its lot of excitement and controversy. As the controversy bores me, I’ll keep with Pedrosa’s strong race and victory, at last he got back to his best level. Fingers crossed for next season.
That said, the race and its result ended up waking us up completely, and as it was still early and the day did not look too bad, we decided to go for a ride-out.
We had to delay a few minutes the departure as a cloud decided to pour rain at that moment. But it was only a few minutes.
The idea of the day was to make the most of the ride out taking pictures of Autumn colours. I always loved them, and it is a complicated task as they “arrive” overnight and they are gone in one week or even less if there is a lot of wind or rain (both being quite usual in Cork…). So if you miss one weekend, the next there are no more leaves and no more colours…
As we don’t know yet many places here and that in Ireland there are few forests, we decided to go to a place where we went in June (report here), in Gougane Barra, about 70km and 1 hour ride from home.
The road to get there is very pleasant, the first part quite quick and then it’s a more narrow road and a little bumpy but nicely twisty. In Autumn it’s beautiful, the hedges had their autumn wear on and as it had been raining a scent of wet leaves and wood filled the air. I opened the visor to enjoy it better.
The view around the road was amazing, the mountains that in summer look like green velvet were now coloured in reddish, yellowish or orange brown, the trees along the fields became yellow and the gardens coloured in red, yellow, orange or clear green, a trees rainbow.
We stopped for a first time along the road to take a picture and went on.
With so narrow and twisty roads I can’t stop as much as I’d want to take pictures because there is no room for it (and Juan is quite happy about that 😀 ).
At last we arrived to Gougane Barra. Some trees had already lost their leaves but the colours had nothing to do with when we were there in June. The sky was mainly overcast (it actually rained a little when we stopped) and as it happens sometimes, the light was difficult for taking pictures. But I took them anyway 😉 .
After a while arrived a dozen of Porshe 911 of almost all ages and parked along the lake. It was a nice image 😉 .
When we arrived there Juan was quite hungry (it was after 10am and we had had breakfast at 7am…), and we thought we would have some Irish Breakfast on the way. But the hotel and the bar in front of the lake were both closed. So we had to wait…
After the pics session we went back (the road ends on a paying car park which is also the starting path for hiking around the park). At the next crossroad we decided to turn right to Bantry, indicated at 22km, and to stop as soon as we found some place to have breakfast. That part of the road is also very nice. We were about to stop in a pub indicating “parking at rear” but we missed the entrance and were not in a good place to turn, so we went on.
We went to Bantry, got lost in its streets. The village was crowded with cars: it seems that there was a car rally going on and it was a chaos to go around. And you won’t believe me but we couldn’t find any pub open!
Of course my bike decided that it was the best moment to give problems… My bike has one and only recurrent problem, every time it rains a lot (quite often here 😉 ), as the front mudguard is too short, some water enters in the front sparkplug hole and it stops working and the bike ends up on one cylinder only. So at low speed as when you are stuck in traffic jams, it just stops every two minutes.
As we couldn’t find a place to eat we decided to go back. We got lost again, turned back again. I had seen a pub after the last cross coming from the nice road to the main road so we tried there, but the restaurant was closed until 5.30pm. So we decided to go back to the pub we had first seen on the road going to Gougane Barra. This time we found the parking at rear and the pub was opened and served food! With all those turns and back it was already noon. We both took a lamb dish with fresh vegetables and mashed potatoes. It was quite good. Juan finished his meal with an ice-cream as usual 😉 and we went.
Now that we were not hungry anymore we could take our time again to stop to take pictures 😀 .
We stopped 2 more times. The truth is that the colours were incredible in spite of the difficult light.
We literally escaped from the second stop as there were very dark clouds rushing towards us.
At last we got back home at about 3.30pm, we just had some rain for a few minutes back on the main road, but when we arrived we were dry.
25th of October: a colourful ride out. 😉
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