Biking Day 6

This was one of the hardest days of my entire bike ride because the wind was blowing straight back at me. Because of this wind, it was near impossible to get up the hills and extremely hard to even get down them. This day was more of a psychological test than physical. It was all about not giving up. It helps when you have no choice but to go further (there was nowhere to stop even if I wanted to) and I had to get to Mullingar to meet up with my family.

I called May McCourt, my grandmothers cousin, when I was 10km outside of Athlone. I told her I would be quite a bit later than I expected. She inferred from my tone of voice how tired I was and so she got in her car and came looking for me. She then called her husband to tell him to come looking for me and he in turn called his daughter and her family (it was not a hard task to spot me, as I was the only 20-year-old female on a bike filled with packs and wearing a shock yellow windbreaker.) I was so relieved though when I came up the hill to the edge of town and saw Kevin waving to me (again, not hard to spot him either as he is a cute old British man with a thick head of gray hair). The search party was called off and they took me back to their house for a nice cup of tea and a warm shower.

Later Kevin and May took me out to dinner with the family. It was so nice to finally be with a nice family after traveling alone for a week. After dinner, my cousin Niall took me over to the pub across the street to meet up with two other cousins, Laura, 21, and Phillip, 18. They were celebrating with their other friends from the town band. When I say town band, everyone always thinks rock band. But no, it was a town marching band and this is actually really popular in Ireland. Go figure. Well, we had a great time and ended up going to a club at the end of the night. When it was time to go, the last song the DJ played was an Irish jig. It was great because everyone just starting hoping up and down and they all made it look so natural?!