Youghal, pronounced Y'all

Saturday morning dawned. This was to be our last riding day together. Once more the weather was dry and sunny, as we rolled out onto the street. Grizzly was leading once more, this time to Cork Lough, a childhood venue for walks with his aunt. This lough is more like a park lake, than any of the previous loughs we have visited but by necessity it has been hemmed in with concrete. Not very big, Grizzly assures us there was once a thousand swans on the lough. There's not that number now, if anything they are outnumbered by Canada geese. The lough is also home to some damned big carp, that broke the water's surface as we walked round.

Irish swans. To be sure, to be sure, to be sure!

Our next stop was only about 30 minutes away, in Cobh (pronounced Cove) formerly known as Queenstown. This place is famous for being the last berthing place of RMS Titanic, before that giant ice cube halted her progress across the Atlantic. We were in Cobh to visit the Titanic Experience. A small exhibition, it is housed in the original ticket office and as you pass through the exhibition, you can view a piece of the original jetty, from which the passengers would have boarded the tender boats to take them out to Titanic in the bay. Your entrance ticket has a passenger name on it and you can check this at the end of the visit to see if you survived the sinking. Only Biggsey survived, so beers on him!

We had ourselves a coffee, then I checked our euro lottery ticket in a newsagents. We won!!, €4. Grizzly persuaded us to cough up some more cash to enter the Irish lottery that evening. If we won, we'd need to rely on him claiming the winnings and not disappearing to Chicago, without telling us!

Original White Star Line Ticket Office, Cobh

 With another fuel stop under our belts, next stop was Youghal. First though, we stopped to take photos of the last lough on our tour, Lough Aderra. I had got just a bit of stick off of our Irish friend, when I had pronounced Youghal to sound like the dog from the Magic Roundabout. Say what you see! It's actually pronounced Y'all. This was our lunch stop, The Moby Dick, to be exact. The Moby Dick's claim to fame is that the cast of that famous film of 1954 (Gregory Peck, Richard Baseheart, et al) stayed there during filming. There are lots of black and white photos on the walls of the stars and John Houston, the director. All I can say is, I hope they didn't have to wait as long for lunch as we did. From being ahead of time, we lost time waiting for four ham and cheese special toasted sandwiches to arrive, some onion and tomato being the 'special' ingredients!

It started to rain as we were about to leave, so I decided to put on my waterproofs. Immediately I did, the sun came out again. Not far down the road though the heavens opened. The first real rain we had seen since we left Loch Lomond, was pelting down, hammering against my visor and clothing, making visibility quite poor. By the time we reached our next stop at Waterford though, the sun was out again. Biggsey had opted not to bother with waterproofs, so sported a nice line in wet denim!