Blue moon

Our new favorite place to camp is at hostels. We usually pay €20 for the privilege of pitching our tent in the backyard, plus we have access to all of the amenities available to people who pay for a bed. This includes free breakfast, showers, wifi, and places to lounge indoors on comfortable furniture.

This is a better deal than the caravan parks, which often require that you pay for showers and don’t often have comfy common rooms. But hostels don’t always offer camping, so we resort to caravan parks as a backup.

So far we’ve only used these two options. We’ve been meaning to stay with a Warmshowers host, but the attempts we’ve made haven’t been successful. We also haven’t tried using AirBnB or simply asking a farmer to pitch our tent on a corner of his land. Some other cyclists we’ve met along the way have been using all of these methods with good success. We’ll have to broaden our horizons.

Today we took another short ride from Bundoran to Dunkineely, which is home to the modest but perfectly adequate Blue Moon Hostel, where we could camp for only €14. The ride today isn’t worth mentioning. This was a good spot to stop for the night as a launchpad for what we hope to be a great day of riding tomorrow.