Day 10 - Rest Day

TL;DR Nothing happened today.

In a dormitory everybody has a common purpose, to sleep. Sleeping in groups can actually be soothing. I’ve slept in dormitories hundreds of times and with few exceptions have slept very well. Last night was one of the exceptions.

We had just turned off the lights and a few of us were in bed and “can somebody let me in” was heard. I roused myself slightly, happy to open the door if somebody forgot the code, but there were no more importations, no tapping at the door. Then the door opened and a heavy set youth marched in grumbling (if he had the code why didn’t just use it?). It was a minor thing, somebody preferring to disturb everybody else as a matter of course rather than just finding his code, and I would have forgotten it if it hadn’t primed my opinion of him.

He was out like a light and then the snoring began. Not the mild tolerable kind of snoring, but loud snoring. Really loud, followed by guttural gurgles, and that was that for the rest of the night. Nobody got any rest. I put my ear plugs in, and they did not reduce the sound to a level that could be accepted. There were occasional periods where the volume decreased and I drifted to sleep and to dream only to find my myself concious again and slowly becoming aware of why I was woken. It was like sleeping in the same room as a savage beast.

At 8am I got out of bed and went to get breakfast. A continental help-yourself breakfast was laid out and after that I did nothing.

A day of trying to pass the hours, I’ve been feeling restless. I tried working on a programming project, but it ended up with me getting deep into some intractable refactoring problem which just left me staring at the screen for hours and feeling intellectually inadequate.

I visited the mountain cycling 5km there on the bicycle (Slievemore), thinking I would climb to the top, but when I got there there was no official, marked, track to the top and it was cloudy and I didn’t have the motivation to go up, but instead walked down the beach before returning.

I booked the wrong hostel for tomorrow. The hostel I had selected was marked on my map, I looked it up on Hostelworld and booked it, and it was only afterwards I realised there were two similarly named hostels, the one I booked was an addition 12k to the south, whereas the cycle route went west around the peninsula. It’s not a big deal, I should make it in time, and it means I should be able to make it to Galway the following day as it cuts my distance down.

Accommodation seems to be more available now - maybe because the weather is worse (or better in my case, it’s cloudy) or it’s just this part of Ireland, but I’m feeling hopeful that there will be more options going forward.

Tomorrow I’ll try and leave immediately after breakfast, I’ll need to cover 110-130k tomorrow depending on the exact route and am theoretically constrained by the check-in window from 5PM-9PM. On past experience I should make it easily.