Liscannor

After staying the day with Richard and pitching our tent in an old famine warehouse we tried to hitch to Clonmel again. But it wasn't going too well....the traffic was bare and no one stopped. We waited for about thirty minutes before we said "Okay, let's get a bus." It is not that we can't take a bus, it is just that they are expensive to do all the time...but the longer the distance the less you have to pay. We took a bus to Clonmel, ate some Chinese food, sat and waited and then caught a bus to Limerick, from Limerick we caught a bus to Ennis and once in Ennis well....we didn't know really where to go. We started walking out of town, looking at the road signs and what have you and were nearly there when a lady stopped and said "Hey are you going somewhere?" I said, "Yeah towards Doolin or something near the Cliffs." She said she was going to Lehinch but that it was along the way and that we could probably find some place to camp there.

She was a retired school teacher and art and design major. She had been living in London for years but grew up in Clare County (the county we were in). She repeated everything three or fours times and talked like she had been born in Ireland. She didn't pay attention to anything we told her but kept asking the same questions over and over. Eventually Ivana and I just ended up talking to ourselves.

We got to Lehinch and she said she'd drive us to Liscannor just down the road. There was a lot of hotels around Liscannor but most important was a coast and a pier. Next to the fishing docks and clamming beach was a chunk of land owned by no one, she said this would be a good spot. She let us out; Ivana and I talked about our options. We decided to go to a bar and ask the best place to camp. The bartender told us there was a trailer park and that they might allow tents if we went and asked. We got directions and started to walk there, but we thought we'd get a second opinion from the gas station. The station attendant said no way, only for vehicles, and that they didn't know anywhere to camp. Frustrated we returned to the area we had been dropped and searched around there for a spot that wasn't in plain sight...failing to do so we pitched a tent beside a stone fence near the corner and ending portion of land.

It was ok, but we were both nervous about people messing with us. Not so much were we scared for our lives, but just our safety in this tent and not being able to see out of the tent made our imaginations run wild. The wind blew hard and the rain dropped like water from a faucet. We didn't get much sleep. We planned on waking at 6 to get an early start but when the alarm went off and we had only managed to get 1 or 2 hours of sleep we decided to push it back a few hours. At this time both the wind and the rain had stopped; it was peaceful. We got two hours of sleep before I said we'd have to wake up and get going.

We tried to hitch again but there was so little traffic and all of it was old people on vacation that it failed us once again. We went to the bus stop and decided to skip the cliffs and hope we'd have enough time another day to go. We waited about an hour for the bus to Doolin. Once in Doolin we jumped on the bus to Galway and felt better already, knowing we'd be in a warm comfortable place that night.

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Part of trip: Europe Trip 2

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