September 25.

Driving around the Donegal on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way, we had problems with finding a decent breakfast, went for a long walk along windswept Traemore Beach, and then arrived at Bloody Foreland before heading through a mountain pass to Glenveagh National Park.

Finding breakfast in and around Milford was another nightmare. The previous evening we had driven from town to town to town in search of something, anything, for dinner and found nothing until the fifth (or was it the sixth?) place we tried.

Breakfast turned out to be more of the same, nothing was open!

In Carrigart there was a miracle, a supermarket, and we purchased overly-sweet muffins and tasteless takeaway coffee. We found a more scenic place to park than the supermarket parking lot and downed our pathetic breakfast in the car. This was the best part of that breakfast, the view of the beach.Further on, in Marble Hill, we saw a sign that indicated a real live coffee shop was close at hand. This coffee bar, aka ‘The Shack’, had colourful chairs and a view. It also had a ‘salted toffee’ muffin and a latte that beat the hell out of our earlier breakfast. Doe Castle was part of our view from the coffee shack. Here I have zoomed in a bit on the castle ruin.On the route on the Donegal map in our Lonely Planet Guidebook I remarked that Dunfanaghy would have been a much better place to stay than Milford – the town was quite lively and seemed to have a variety of services and fun-looking pubs – certainly better than our attempts to find even one single place to eat around Milford. This is the Irish-speaking part of Ireland (darker green on the map below). The road signs and shops had most of the place names in Gaelic. This caused a few problems with programming our GPS, which apparently did not speak Irish.Next up, a long walk along the windswept Traemore Beach.

More on our 2015 trip to Ireland.