We woke up a bit late the next day, and Edelweiss didn't want to get out of bed. Eventually I convinced her to rise, and then we called our first pick host – John and Niki. Niki picked up the phone, and we talked a bit, and they said that they were ready for us to arrive as early as the next day. Both Edelweiss and I were quite happy about this.
After breakfast, we worked together uprooting the nettle stumps we had cut earlier, and moving them to one of the walls where they could better block deer. This took a while, then I went back up to reclaiming the metal. If I was going to leave the next day, then I wanted to at least get it done. I worked until a late lunch, and then worked some more after that. Eventually I had gotten all the rusted panels cleared up and put away, and only the rusty shards that had fallen on the ground were left. Eileen suggested that I use a rake and rake up the whole mix and pile it out of the way. I found that a rake wasn't the most effective device, as the denser rust chunks (small or not) tended to stay behind while the rake picked up all the surface detritus and whatever rust was trapped in that. I wound up having to rake vigorously and do away with everything on the surface, but eventually the area was clear. A big ugly scar where all the panels had lain for a year and a half, but clear nonetheless. I had filled up five large bags with rusted metal. I then spend the next hour or so cleaning up the tools (rakes, bags, saws, etc.) I had used and also the pieces of wood that had been attached to the panels (but sawed around the nails to be removed and used for firewood).
I then went down to the house and got recruited by Edelweiss to help with the soil and compost and dung. She had finished clearing out the former nettle-bed, and I helped her use a wheelbarrow to collect the donkeys' dung (apparently they choose one spot and shit only there) to use as fertilizer. We got a wheelbarrow of the stuff, spread it over the bed (and put the excess on the surrounding vegetable beds), then used a small ptichfork to turn and mix the soil.
After that, we washed up a bit, and started researching how to get to County Donegal, where John and Niki lived. Apparently public transportation in Ireland wasn't very good, but with a mix of express and local bus routes, we plotted out a course. Rather than getting up early in the morning, and then having to make a bunch of tight connections, Eileen recommended taking us into Loughrea that evening, and then we could take the bus to Galway, spend the night in a hostel, and set off really early in the morning to make a bunch of less-crazy connections.
I packed while Edelweiss figured out hostel and bus arraignments, then figured them out the rest of the way while Edelweiss packed. Eileen then drove us out to Loughrea, and we got on the bus and traveled to Galway. We arrived late in the night, found the hostel we had reserved a spot in, found an internet cafe with a printer to print out the rest of our bus tickets, and then found a grocery store to buy the next day's breakfast. Edelweiss got mad at me at the store because I didn't look like I was putting effort into finding anti-itch cream at the store. Part of this was that I was happy about the new host, and part of it was that I didn't know that the anti-tich cream was as important to Edelweiss as it was – while I had no bug-bites still itching, she still had a few very uncomfortable ones.
We got back to the hostel, split up (different rooms that time), and I took a shower. It was nice – I hadn't showered since the last hostel, so I got a lot of grime off of me. I then went downstairs to use the internet. I had a lovely conversation with KrystalAngel, posted up a lot of blog entries, and—over the course of hours—figured out how we would be getting from the new host over to Bubble B's family's place after we finished WWOOFing in Donegal. Looking at various costs, one of the cheapest was an overnight ferry ride from southern Ireland to a port not that far from Normandy. While the plane would have been faster, I liked this option because it would be relatively novel – and novel is good.
With the planning done, we went to bed at 1-something AM. On my end, however, I could not sleep, as I was tense about missing the alarm, and the other people in the suite kept going and doing things, with one loud cell-phone conversation in the bathroom being particularly prominent. I remember the 2am watch-beep and the 3am watch-beep. I think I slept from 3-something AM to 4:50AM, when my alarm went off.
No comments:
Post a Comment