Day 1

Saturday, August 6th
Dunadry to Portaferry
77km

On Friday afternoon, Dad drove me from Niagara Falls to the Toronto airport where I met Ryan and Jenn.  Ryan is a close friend and has been my roommate for the past 5 years and Jenn is his girlfriend, who I have known for the past two.  Together, the three of us will cycle from Belfast to Cork where we will meet with a Bike Adventures tour before cycling across Ireland from South to North.

Our flight was uneventful.  Ryan and I rested our eyes but didn't get any sleep.  Jenn noded off a few times.  We would be awake for about 31 hours straight before sleeping on Saturday night.

Ryan provided some unintentional comic relief when describing the clothes he had packed.  He has only 2 shirts...one of which is bright orange.  We told him that orange was potentially a dangerous color to wear in parts or Ireland.  He told us that his jacket was bright orange as well.  (Ryan like to match.). The best part was that we couldn't remember which parts of Ireland would be "safe" to wear orange and which parts would be more risky.

After landing at Belfast International, we took a short taxi ride to a B&B in Dunadry, where we will leave our bike boxes for 2 weeks.  At 6:30am local time we began assembling our bikes in the parking lot.  They had all arrived unscathed, but I broke my rear brake caliper while trying to adjust the brake.  One of the other B&B guests, who was far more mechanically inclined than I, managed to fix it using one of my allen keys, some zip ties and tape.  (He literally used the allen key as part of the brake.). It worked better than it had before this trip!  Ryan's speedometer computer was also broken...but otherwise our bikes had survived the flight.

After a big Irish breakfast at the B&B, we started riding along gradually  climbing country roads towards Belfast.  We decended into the city with sme lovely views of the mointains and Irish Sea in the background.

Found a bike shop in the city.  Good news: they had new brakes for me. Bad news: they couldn't install them until Tuesday...despite my best begging.  Good news: a stranger in the shop ofered to help me install them.  This guy spent about 30 minutes getting the new brakes just right.  I was completely impressed.  Not only were the Irish mechanically minded, but they were overwhelmingly friendly and helpful.

Ryan bought himself a new cycling computer at the bike shop, so all of our bikes were fully functional again.

The ride from Belfast to Portaferry was thankfully pretty flat.  We were all suffering from lack of sleep, and looking forward to soft beds.  I had to force myself to concentrate on the road as my mind wandered to thoughts of sleep.

We were lucky to only get a few intermittant drops of rain throughout the day.  Nothing even serious enough to consider rain jackets.  Hope it lasts.

We arrived in Portaferry, forced down some asian food for dinner and went straight to bed...completely exhausted from our travels.