The best thing about the Cliffs of Moher is that a cyclist can pull to the shoulder of the main road, lock his bike to a wooden fence and fall in line, free of charge, with the hundreds of tourists who flock to one of Ireland’s most visited landmarks.

Fees are collected via an auto parking lot across the street.

The cliffs are impressive in themselves – a series of giant blocks of stone standing hundreds of feet above the exploding surf of the Atlantic. But the ant-like march of visitors, past the construction of a proposed giant visitors center and vendors selling everything from CDs to jewelry, dampen the experience.

Hitting the most popular tourist spots is not why one cycles across Ireland. That can be done much more easily by bus. So once we left the cliffs, my cousin Mark Dodge and I again head to the tiny back roads of the coast in search of Ireland’s most remote areas.

And in the regions of the Burren, Connemara and Mayo, we found much of that remoteness.

We finally lucked up with the weather for this important phase two of our travels. After more than a month of consecutive rainy days, the sun has come out in full force and sunburned nearly all of the Irish population. But you don’t hear complaints. They take sunshine, and all it entails, when they can get it.

We hugged the coastline and got our first taste of the Burren from coastal highway 477. This land has eroded away to reveal giant hills of limestone and the surrounding fields and shore are grassy slopes littered with limestone rocks.

Once on the north shore, we take the smallest roads we can find and move through the inland Burren, which offers our most remote riding yet. We see only a few cars as we reach a lonely hostel in the four-building village of Carren.

The next morning we ride north and out of this region, settling for a night in the bustling town of Galway, a haven for drink-hungry young backpackers en route to pretty much every where else in Europe.

We rise early to get our 50-year-old selves back into nature and weave up into the even more remote Connemara. The main road was stark enough, but not good enough for us and we turn onto a minescule winding paved pathway that vanishes into the plains.

Here it’s just grassland and sheep (sheep are virtually everywhere in Ireland) with the impressive metamorphic mountains – the Twelve Pins – standing to the north. Now we feel more like we are in Utah than Ireland. We see almost no one for about 50 kilometers.

As we again reach the coast, however, we do see a few people digging the earth. It’s here we notice that much of this land is trenched and soon we learn why.

The soil here is rich food for stoves and fireplaces and diggers cut foot-long blocks of narrow strips, then stack them on the side of the road to dry. The peat is a valuable commodity for a country – well above Maine in latitude – that sees wet, freezing temperatures in short days during the winter months.

Again we seek the “emptyness” of Ireland’s northeast, turning again to the coast. But – despite a significant crash the week we were there, and a notch up in interest rates – Ireland is enjoying it’s best economy in hundreds of years, maybe ever, and building goes on everywhere, big cities and little towns alike. On a few of nicest stretches of beach in this area, entire new communities have shot up as Ireland flexes its position in the euro-market.

Mark, always on the lookout for excellent surf spots, finds a few more impressive stretches near Sligo, though June is not the best month for big waves. We stay in a small hostel just west of Sligo, in the beachside town of Strandhill, and here we run into a hardcore sampling of surfing addicts. Not enough waves for Mark to plunge in, however.

Then, following the coastal road north, we hit Rossnowlagh, apparently the surfing mecca of Ireland, and again it’s an off day. Condos have shot up all around this town, testifying to its appeal.

We make our way inland again to the small hilly roads, then bolt through Ballyshannon and up the coast again. After four days of our longest, toughest riding, we reach Donegal, the southernmost town of the Donegal region.

We will rest here and explore the coast surrounding the Derryleagh Mountains, which we expect to be just, if not more, remote as the land we left to the south. It will be our last hurrah in Ireland proper before we cross into Northern Ireland, where we hope to get a feel for, not only the change in geography, but for the temperature of the political climate as well.

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