Blood relatives

Another bright sunny day greets us in Athlone, along with a sumptuous 4* breakfast buffet. Not wishing to appear greedy, I only have the four rashers of bacon....along with the two sausages, scrambled & fried egg, mushrooms, beans, hash browns, black and white pudding, toast and a couple of tiny danish pastries! Shucks, I forgot the juice and coffee!

Suitably fuelled up our first stop is just round the corner, to fuel up the bikes once again. I had based our fuel stops on Dudley's baby bottle sized tank. He reckoned he could get about 150 miles out of it, so playing safe I built the fuel stops in for around 120. We weren't using fuel at the rate we thought though, so some of these stops were more like a Formula One, splash and dash, that a full fill up.

Second stop, was Lough Rea (pronounced Ray). Another one to add to our list, we stopped to take some photos and have a coffee. Least Biggsey and Dudley had a coffee. With half of the Radisson Blu's breakfast buffet inside me, there wasn't room for anything else, so Grizzly and I took the photos.

Lough Rea

Over breakfast we had been discussing Biggsey's ancestry. Apparently, he is related (great, great, grandson or something) to an old war hero, General Sir Bindon Blood and it turned out that he was buried (or so we thought) in a little town called Ennis. Fascinated by this, we decided, in the sake of research, to abandon the planned visit to Galway Bay and instead stop in Ennis to find the good General. We were passing through it anyway. A bit of Googleing and we had his location mapped into Tomtom. So, our stop after Lough Rea, was St Columba's Church, Ennis.

We parked up in Bindon Street, right outside the church and set off in search of the General's last resting place.