This is going to be posted much later than it happened with us not having any internet access for the next few weeks, but I’m writing posts along the way anyhow.
We finished the oven! Yes, with no time to spare, on the day before we left, we put the second layer on the oven and lit up a fire inside. Carter was very pleased as he was dreading leaving without getting to see it lit. We all just sat around watching the fire and being very happy about it finally being done.
Here is the oven after we finished the first layer of cob.
Carter drew out the door before cutting it.
The door is out!
The final product with a little fire burning inside!
From there, we took 2 trains to get us to Cairnryan where we hopped on the ferry over to Belfast. The ferry was great…it had a restaurant, shops, and the best of all, a kids play room, where we spent the majority of the trip. We had lined up a couchsurfer host in Belfast to stay with for the night in order to break up the trip a bit. When we arrived in Belfast, we hopped in a taxi and headed over to her house. She had said in her email to just give her a call when we were on our way and she would come out to meet us, so we called from the taxi and got no answer. We kept trying with no response. Then we arrived on her street without knowing her address because she hadn’t given it to us, so we got out the taxi and just started walking down the street not knowing where we were going. Oh, and did I mention it had started to rain? So here we are standing on this street in Belfast not knowing where this lady lives, we can’t get her on the phone, and no place to even get out of the rain. But somehow God has seemed to take care of us everywhere we’ve been, and he was there for us this time as well. As we are standing there trying to figure out what we are going to do, this man from one of the flats on that block walks up and asks if we need any help. We told him our situation and he invited us in out of the rain and for some tea. His name was Thomas and he was from Hungary. After chatting for a few minutes, he said we were welcome to stay with him if we needed a place and gave us tea and snacks. One thing we have seen on this trip more than anywhere else has been the hospitality of complete strangers. We did eventually get in touch with the Couchsurfer host (she had fallen asleep and her phone was turned off), but Thomas was just so kind to welcome us in when we needed it.
The next day, we took our two buses: one to Dublin, then from Dublin to Galway. On the way to Galway, we tried calling our next hosts to let them know exactly what time our bus would get in because we weren’t sure until we got to Dublin. We called the cell number we had for them, but got a message saying “this phone is not working, please call the land line instead at…..”. So we called the landline number, and then got the message “please call this number instead…”. We then try to call the new number, but every time we try to dial it, the call fails. So now we’re stressing out because they were going to pick us up at the bus stop, but we can’t get in touch to tell them what time. Then this nice gentleman sitting across from Carter asks if we need some help. He thought we were trying to call a B&B and was going to look it up on google on his phone. We explained we just couldn’t get the call to go through, so he offered us the use of his phone to see if it would make any difference. The call did go through, but there still wasn’t any answer. Once again, we didn’t know what we were going to do, but ten minutes later, the guy’s phone rings and it’s our host calling us back.
So after a long journey, we finally arrived this evening.
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