IRELAND MOTORCYCLE TOUR (Episode 1/3) on a KTM 1290 Super Adventure R & BMW R 1200 GS

So this is day number four of the tour and just to kind of wrap up the previous few days which were just mostly trying to get to Ireland. Sebastian and I met up in Rotterdam to take the ferry across from Rotterdam to Hull in England and it's an overnight ferry so you get there the next morning and if you really want to speed it up you can actually make it on the same day to another ferry that will take you to Dublin. So you can get to Dublin on day number two at the end of day number two. We didn't do that. We went to Wales and took a little detour after we left the ferry in Hull and just kind of enjoyed the Snowdonian National Park which is quite nice. Then we stayed the night in close to Holyhead which is the ferry port that will take you to Dublin. It's a three-hour ferry ride. It's a large ferry that will then take you to Dublin. We skipped Dublin entirely. This is not the kind of trip to do sightseeing in the city. It's worth visiting of course but we made sure we got out of that place as quickly as possible and then went to the Wicklow mountain range which is really close to Dublin. So that gave us a glimpse of what we are likely to see in the next few days traveling Ireland and Scotland and here are a few clips of that. So after we saw the Wicklow mountains there was a good section of just straight roads to get us to our location of last night which is kind of off the beaten path a little bit and we had an early night. Slept a long time because we're still tired from the journey of getting here. So this is a full day today of just traveling smaller roads and we'll be entering the Wild Atlantic Highway. It's going to take us clockwise around the island of Ireland all the way to Northern Ireland and so we're going to do the first section of that. We'll be getting to the coastline today and then just kind of make it a way up clockwise around the island. The weather forecast is a bit mixed. Hopefully it's going to stay like this here today. The sun's kind of peeking out a little bit yesterday with a lot of rain so our clothes are still damp this morning but overall there's a good amount of rain in the forecast so that's kind of to be expected when you come here despite the fact that we have early August right now. So guys this is where we are right now. This is Cork where I bring up points to and so we're just about northeast of Cork and we're going to make our way to Cork now and there should be a nice castle, Marni Castle I think. So the weather stays like this. We finally get to see one in the dry. Yesterday we passed one and it was pouring rain so we didn't really have a look at it and then after that we'll make our way down to the coast, the southern coast and meet the Wild Atlantic Highway which technically starts further up I think with Watford is somewhere here but that part of the stretch didn't look very exciting so we're going to enter it just south of Cork. We have sunshine! So it's the first sunshine we see in Ireland, like this at least. Blue sky, sunshine. You can see the roads are still wet as it was raining here everywhere. That's really cool. The tree line, I mean it goes all the way to the road and you've got this like almost tunnel cut in here from all the vehicles. So with the first hundred kilometers on the clock we're hitting our first sort of site which is the Blarney Castle and Gardens. Off to see our first site, the Blarney Castle. Buy tickets to get in. You can see it from here but let's get this done before it starts raining again. And we've got a nice ice cream cone too. So we're really close to the ocean and this is the weather we're in. Just like low-hanging clouds with some visibility but it's really foggy. You can't really see very far so we're not gonna be able to see much once we actually make it to the coastline I think. But it does look kind of cool. It's got a certain mood to it when it's so foggy. Just won't be able to see much of the coast I suppose. But we'll see. We'll be there in a few kilometers. So this is our first site here where you can see you can't see anything at the moment. I think the best weather. Is there a training course today? Yes, there's a training course. What? I don't know. Maybe next time, huh? You just can't see it, can you? Oh yeah, here, look. Oh wow, wow. Wow, crazy dude. We're going alongside the coastline which is quite impressive to stand there and just look down. And the visibility is pretty low right now. It's a bit of a shame but I guess you have to expect that when you come to Ireland that the weather is gonna be like this a better part of the time. But we'll have a few more days here so there's gonna be a few days where it's hopefully not like this. We'll continue our journey on. It's got another 190 to go. At that pace it's gonna take us a while. So estimate time of the horizon is 530 again. So these are long days that we're riding. We started out with 350 kilometers to go and we still have a good part of it to go but it's really hard to see it. Put the eyes on. That's better. So we're back on really small roads, single tracks. It's got even like green patches in the middle here. You don't want to get on those because I'm sure they're very slippery. So we barely had any dry road conditions. It's been continuously raining or drizzling for the entire day so far. Check it out. So there's some water finally. So visibility has improved a tiny bit and we can finally see something. We're pretty wet now, both of us. Even me with my Gore-Tex. It's just water seeping in. The gloves are wet now. So we've got another hour to get back to the hotel so we're skipping a couple of points which we would have done with nicer weather but now… We're in a small town on the Wild Atlantic Highway I think it's called. Bit of a late start today. 330 kilometers to go today and since we were riding in the rain yesterday for most of the time, all my stuff is still wet. The place didn't have a hair dryer. Sometimes that's a good way to just, you know, get the remaining moisture out of your clothes. My gloves are wet. The jacket is still pretty damp. The only thing that's dry is my boots because I've got these boot dryers in there that help. I try to use them on the gloves but it doesn't really work. Yeah, so I hope this is gonna stay dry for a little longer today and maybe then closer. And the helmet is wet too which is kind of disgusting getting into wet helmets. So it'll be along the coastline today. We'll be seeing a lot of water hopefully if the weather conditions are like this. So nice to actually see this in the sunlight after we had such a rainy day yesterday. So now we're in the last few kilometers on one of those sort of half islands, fingers that are poking out into the sea. Whoa! There's definitely gravel on the road. I just hit a patch of gravel. So we just are returning from our first sight and viewpoint and it's quite nice on the way back too. So the weather is still stable for now. No rain. It's quite windy though and we've got a couple more like that coming up. We're kind of slow today. I mean we just got about 30 kilometers, 10 percent of the route and it's 11 o'clock now. It doesn't matter if it gets tight in the end. We can cut the route short. It's not a problem. Met some other Germans. I haven't really seen many bikers here yet. I thought I would see a lot more and it's just a handful of motorbikes that we saw and they were around the Dublin area and they were local to Dublin but haven't really seen a lot of travelers. That's surprising but maybe they just stayed in because it was raining yesterday. Maybe we'll see a few more today. So this road has been going on for quite some time offering this spectacular view. It's also not very busy. I'm just the occasional car and cyclist. We are on the Ring of Beira and see that orange yellowish arrow and so we're gonna make all the way down to the end of the tip and then come back up again and it's definitely a lot faster riding than some of the roads that we did yesterday which were much smaller roads where you know also there's less traffic. There's more places to pass which is great because on those smaller back roads it's really hard to see and there are just short sections of sort of straight sections where you can finally pass vehicles so that really slows down the travel. This seems to be a relatively fast road and that's a nice change of pace. So we're still on the Ring of Beira and the scenery is starting to get a bit more interesting. It's quite a long trip out here because the Ring of Kerry is probably the one that's better known. That's on the list for tomorrow. The lesser known Ring of Beira. Same idea. It just goes out and goes around in a loop and yeah we've been on this for a while. We're very close to the western tip i think. We're getting close at least so i gotta enjoy this view for a second here. My navigation system shows that we're pretty much at the end of what we can ride on our bike. We made it as far as we could to the Ring of Beira. This is the most western tip and behind me is an island and you used to be able to go across with a cable car which is not in very good shape right now. It's not operational fixing it at the moment but yeah you get a pretty good view of the atlantic ocean. It's quite nice here. And now we're heading back and there was a fish and chips place and we want to check it out. Get something to eat. It is one o'clock now. We stopped at the fish and chips place that's behind us. It's a food truck and they get four different kinds of fish in fresh every day so i'm quite excited about our food and we got an awesome view. We're not making any progress today. We're just hanging out enjoying the view and eating good food. So i suppose the Hili Pass is one of the higher elevations that you can access in this part of the island at least on the motorized vehicle at just under 300 meters above sea level which is high. You know we started off at sea level. It's amazing to see these like overgrown hedges and the trees and the crappy visibility that comes along with it but the road's good. It's in excellent shape so i wonder if we're gonna clear the trees pretty soon and then score a mountain road up the pass. Wild Atlantic Way. So we're on the right route. The Hili Pass was quite a surprise. You don't really expect a proper mountain pass in Ireland especially on the downhill side. It was really really cool. These roads are awesome. Just away off the beaten path. So we made it to the better part of the day without rain and now it's starting to rain on the last 90 kilometers we've got left. That sucks. So it looks like the ring of Kerry has dried up a little bit. We just stopped for coffee. This is like a campground or something. It's quite nice. Actually there's a little bay here and it's another 50 kilometers to get to the hotel and that's gonna take about 40 minutes to get there. It's definitely a very scenic part of the island. Oh it smells like ocean. I mean what the f**k people.