Tuesday: Wexford, Rosslare/Fishguard to Builth Wells and Home

Up early today for our ride back home, we met a guy and his wife from New Zealand in the hotel car park. He was a biker too, rides a KTM was interested in where we had been on our travels. He lives in the South Island and passed on his contact details in case we ever travel to NZ on an adventure out there, insisted we look him up and stay over. What a great guy, and that's one for the bucket list?

We made the ferry in good time for a breakfast in the cafe on board. The ride home from Fishguard via Lampeter on luxurious Welsh roads was fairly uneventful even though a sudden rise in temperature to 30 degrees was immediately noticeable after we disembarked.

 

ZZzzzzz .... ugh.. more gravel... zzzz   

I quite enjoyed the ride up the A 475 stopping occasionally for a brief rest. Unfortunately though, on the way I adjusted the route to bring us across Lynne Brianne for Mark to see who had a real desire to visit as he'd never been there and we thought it would add some more interest to our ride home on this sunny day but the Garmin had other ideas and took us gravel hunting up back-lanes much to Mikes concern as he had to ride up to Wigan this afternoon. In the end we abandoned that idea and I put us back on the main road, where Mark carried on to the reservoir on his own. Myself and Mike met Mark again for lunch in Builth Wells before saying fair-well to Mike there, leaving me and Mark to ride home and part ways at the OK Diner in Leominster.  

No more chicken strips

Superb trip, thanks guys.  Many thanks to Mark for booking the first two hotels at a discounted rate and for his route amendment suggestions, and for Mike finding a great hotel on the last night. A great team effort where we soon learned to ride together very well with no real GPS mapping problems (keeping the rider without GPS in the middle helped on this), also the additional attention to waypoint routing/syncing when planning between Basecamp and On-line maps for our different GPS systems,  and using the 'buddy system' as a fail-safe on this one really paid off.

 The routes, weather, company and nights of fun made Ireland and the Wild Atlantic Way one of the best. In the end I covered 1010 Miles home to home, my tyre stayed inflated, Mike lost his Chicken Strips and Mark kept the creases out of his jacket!