Day the day before yesterday + 2 = 30 + 2 = 32

Bathroom update - excellent facilities, but towels have let the side down a bit - nowhere near as nice as the bar set by Diane and Sean - your title of best overall bathroom amenities (European division) remains.

And back to cooked breakfasts - bliss. But the blissful part of course is that someone else is doing the cooking. And with a slight Irish twist - potato (or 'potatoe' if one happens to be former American president George W. Bush) bread - delicious. I am also warming to our host - I think he is just a little on the shy side, but he is very pleasant and very helpful with local information - in fact, he saved us an unnecessary trip by suggesting we ring ahead to check if the caves we were hoping to go to would be open, due to the inclement weather. It turns out that the caves are closed for the season, and even if it was in season, they would still have been closed due to the aforementioned weather - very wet in the area yesterday, which we caught the tail-end of on our way down to the B&B.

Quick readjustment to our itinerary and we decided to go to Derry/Londonderry, scene of many historic events over the centuries, not the least by any means being the beginnings of the Troubles [an example of meiosis as a figure of speech, and not, as I had previously thought, a litote] in the 1960's and the site of many street battles over several decades - more akin to a war zone than a quiet Irish town. It almost felt voyeuristic to be taking an interest in such tragic events that have taken place within the living memory of the towns inhabitants, yet at the same time it gives one heart that the conflict has settled enough that we were able to do so. We took two guided tours, one a bus tour of the wider town, and the second a walking tour of the old city wall, dating back to the 1600's (the wall, not the tour), and Ireland's only extant complete city wall. Both very informative, again with the occasional sparkle of wry and at times black humour, but both very respectful of the reconciliation between various political factions. It certainly helped to provide a bit more insight and understanding into a conflict I was always a bit too young and too geographically removed from to have anything more than a fairly basic understanding of, but was nevertheless interested in due to its vague contemporaneity. Luckily the weather held during both tours and only started to bucket down when Patrick and I decided to have a look at the Peace Bridge, opened just over a year ago to celebrate a thawing in relations between Catholic and Protestant. If the enthusiasm and goodwill shown by both of our guides is any indicator of the efforts being made at the political level, then there would seem to be hope for the town, region and even the country in the future. The bridge itself was designed to reflect the meeting of the two sides as it spans the breadth of the magnificent River Foyle, Ireland's fastest flowing river. It certainly makes our River Torrens look like not much more than a stream...come to think of it...... The River Foyle is so wide it looks more like a very wide lake, the only thing giving it away is its fast flow.

Drove back through bouts of pouring rain, but not enough to dim our view of the patchwork quilt of iridescent green fields and pastures layered over the land - hey, that must be why it's called the emerald isle (see Day 26) - we Higginses are known for our lightning grasp of metaphorical descriptors. We also passed a couple of fields of corn being grown - I would have thought a somewhat unusual crop in these parts.