Ireland: Waterford

After my stay in Wicklow, I drove to the south coast. Really close. My host here is Patricia and I work in her Bed & Breakfast. Madeline and Francis also live in the house, a friendly couple who are waiting to move into their own house. All three of them are super sweet and we laugh a lot with and at each other, as it sometimes has to be. The work at the B&B is not too much but tiring enough, because unlike the B&B in Devon with three rooms, Patricia has four rooms and is in the process of preparing two large rooms. This makes a total of 22 sleeping places and many beds to make, many bathrooms to clean and a lot of breakfast to prepare. And since Patricia serves a Full Irish Breakfast, with everything that goes with it (sausages, ham, mushrooms, tomatoes, toast, beans, hash browns and eggs), there is a lot of work in the morning. In addition, there are still extra tasks to be done, so I cleared out my second attic (since the beginning of my travels), accompanied Patricia on a pillow shopping trip, cleaned a mattress with George (Henry is the vacuum cleaner, his brother George can also clean wet...), tidied up an office and created a guest information folder. That took the longest (George is fast), but at least I was able to contribute something to Patricia's growing business, which I am pretty proud of. She lives near Dunmore East, a ten-minute walk from the sea. Every day I go to the nearby bay Portally Cove to sit and read for a while. Sometimes I can take Patricia's dog Ladi with me and run back and forth with her in the narrow bay. And since the weather has been hot and dry since last week, I also went swimming in the sea for the first time yesterday. The bay is small, beautiful and not very crowded, so it was a lot of fun, even though the water is still icy cold. From the bay, there is a path called Cliff Walk that leads to Dunmore East. When you walk along the path, on the left side are the cows and meadows, and on the right side, the sea stretches to the horizon. It takes half an hour to walk to the village, and yes, I got sunburned. On Saturday, I walked to the Food & Fish Festival, which took place in Dunmore. It was one of the cutest street festivals I have ever visited. The local police even had a stand where they distributed safety vests and info flyers, but always with only one colleague at the stand. The other two were eating their way through the numerous booths. With the premise of trying the most unusual food that the festival has to offer, I ended up with a skewer of kangaroo meat by the sea. It wasn't tasty.

In my last week, I went to Tramore with Madeline, a cemented coastal town that unfortunately doesn't have much to offer besides crowded beaches and loud promenades. However, the Metal Man on the coastal tip of the town is a beautiful landmark, a figure that used to warn sailors of the dangerous cliffs. Legend has it that if a woman manages to jump barefoot around the pillar within a year, she will be married. However, since I am not in a hurry with this topic, I walked normally.