Wednesday 25th

Having arrived quite late on Tuesday evening, the receptionist offered to let me put the motorbike out of sight of the main road. Having mentioned this, it set in a bit of worry in that maybe they had issues previously with bikes. One of the places that she recommended was behind the hotel down a steep grass verge which was fine getting down and certainly was out of sight. Deciding that it would be safer down there, I rolled down the hill and parked up for the night.

Having had breakfast and geared up, I went to retrieve the bike in the morning drizzle. Looking at the steep hill, it was apparent it was going to be a challenge to get up and foolishly sped up the hill and lost traction on the back wheel causing the bike to fall to the left and catapault me off. My main concern as I bounced down the hill was that the bike was going to slide on top of me but luckily it stayed. As I got up to survey the damage, it was apparent the both wing mirrors had broken off and the front brake lever had too. I found this puzzling as the bike had landed on it's left hand side and can only imagine that my arm had caught them both on the way over.

The two hotel maintenance men helped me pick up the bike and park it up. Kindly, they offered to take me to the nearest garage where I hoped they might have been able to at least weld the brake lever back together. Unfortunately, with the lever and the mirrors being aluminium, this wasn't possible. The man at the garage went home too to even see if he had an old lever lying around but alas, he had given it away when he sold his bike.

To cut a long story short, after a lot of phoning around, we found one shop in Omagh who were Suzuki resellers that kindly offered to take a lever off a bike they had in store for me so we could carry on after I explained we were on holiday. They also had a left mirror too. Unfortunately, being 2 hours away, they weren't able to come and get me and for some reason, couriering them over was not an option. We ended up having to hire out a car and travel down the following morning as it was too late to leave in the afternoon.

Breaking away momentarily from the bike, we were amazed to find that securicor vans around the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic are still escorted by the army. No one had warned us about this and we were amazed to see two trucks of soldiers lining the streets guns and all whilst the cash pick up was taking place!

On the plus side, having the car meant we were able to travel round the Inishowen Peninsula in the evening visiting the most northerly point in Ireland. Predictably, it rained!