What a night!!!! It was raining hard until 2 in the morning. Suddenly the rain stopped so I thought I would be able to have some rest, but there was a amazing wind wobbling the campervan… So as you can imagine, we haven’t slept. Luckily, yesterday we were able to get out of the campervan to put the hot water and heating on, so at least we rested warmly the time we managed to sleep.
But let’s not think about last night anymore. After our breakfast we dismantled our camp (disconnected the electricity, the gas, we cleaned up the dirty water, cleaned the kitchen pots, and put the stairs in the trunk…) with the ease of the one who has been in this all his life. Of course, the wind was still very hard, as Olivia can tell you. She opened the door of the caravan to get out of the van and the wind opened it so suddenly that it dragged her and she got hang from the crank! Thanks to God she did not get hurt.
We headed to Keen beach, very close to Keel’s campsite. This was an old whale shark watching (and fishing) spot, which has now been left for recreational use. A nice visit, here it is supposed to be a path to the cliffs but were not able to see it with the fog and the wind (we also did not know exactly where to start walking). Anyway we spent some time in the beach playing some time before getting frozen.
Then we visited the Balleroy National Park, which Alfonso recommended us because there is a small and easy trekking route the girls could do without any problems. This park is a peat bog, and they tell how it was formed and how peat is used here as fuel. Before starting our trekking we cooked some pasta in the parking lot (that the cool part of traveling in a campervan) and after having lunch we started our walk.
To make the walk funnier to the kids, we started to play Geocaching. This is a GPS mobile app that allows people to hide small treasures in the real world, and the app warns you when there is an object around, so you can look for it. It’s a fun game because the app tells you the coordinates but you need to find out where the treasure is hidden (you don’t even know how the treasure looks like). At the end of the walk there was one of these treasures and after some seeking, I was able to find the hidden treasure under a stone… The girls were so happy an excited!
The treasure was a sealed box with some “jewels” inside and a guestbook to sign. We signed the guestbook and left it just as it was before, taking care that no one sees us hiding it again.
It is still too windy! My head hurts because of it, it’s awful.
Just after this trekking it was time to start our return, Dublin was far away and our holidays were finishing the day after tomorrow… So we drove towards Newport, the small but picturesque little town where we couldn’t stop yesterday. So we had to do a small stop here. After having a Expresso coffee, we noticed that that there is another geocache in a nearby park called Princess Grace park, so decide to go to search for it. We entered the park which is a very closed and beautiful forest, and when we get to the place the GPS told us, we started looking for it.
This time it was Maria who found the chest, hidden under a hollow of the tree, but no one dared to take it, so I wondered no spider lived here and put my hand in. This time the chest had a lot of little things but you should not take anything from a treasure without leaving anything in return, we just signed the guestbook and hid the chest back to its place.
Oh, here the weather was way much better, the sun was appearing and the air had already calmed down.
We continued our trip, we left Newport to reach Westport, a town that we already liked a lot a few days ago. We stopped by to buy some groceries and here we went for the third geocache, which was in a very nice forest next to Westport Quay. We found it after a short walk, thanks to the clues left by the owner, since the GPS was not accurate because we were surrounded by trees. This one was hidden under three stones. Like the first one, the treasure only had a guestbook we signed and left it in its place again.
We had a beer in a bar with live music, we were so comfy that we realize that it was getting too late to look for a camp site and the one in Westport was going to close in about 15 minutes! We had to rush! When we arrived at the campsite they seem to not open us… Oh oh itf it’s too late we had a problem because there wasn’t any other camp site nearby… But in that moment the barrier opened because a car was coming out and we decided to sneak in with the campervan. There was no one in the office… We managed to find the security guard in the bar of the campsite having dinner, and very kindly attended us, letting us stay with the condition of paying tomorrow morning.
Great! Our problem was solved, we parked in a free spot as the guard told us, and then we needed to dinner… Wow, it looked like the camping bar was closing, luckily we had some we have dinner in the fridge! As you can see how cool is traveling with a caravan! haha First we went to have a shower in the campsite facilities and then I prepared the dinner, something easy to prepare because we were already tired. Our day was so long and exciting! After the dinner the girls were exhausted so everyone to the bed. Good night!