Cloudforest Diaries: 30-Hours Trip to Clare

My name is Alan O’Donovan, I’m Head of Community at Cloudforests. Last week, we took a trip down to Clare for site visits & to give one of our CoolPartners a tour of Cloudforest One. It was a short, but productive trip. We shot plenty of great content as well, and put some things in place to prepare for our next visit down.

Below I’ve done a diary entry of everything we got up to across the 30 hours, along with some of the pictures we got from the trip.

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Day 1 // Thursday

9.30 AM

We pack up the Tesla with all our gear for the trip, grab some snacks & drinks, and then we hit the road.

12 PM

We stopped at BirdHill to charge the car at the Tesla SuperCharger & grabbed a bit of food to fuel us for a busy day ahead.

13.30 PM 

We arrived at the Cloudforest One Site near Lahinch, Co. Clare, connect the car up to the Super Charger in the shed & got to work unpacking the car into the house on-site at Cloudforest One, The Shack, which will open to the public next year. We also shot some content from Cloudforest One before our first meeting of the trip.

14:00 PM 

At 2 O’Clock, Eamonn, our forrester arrived on-site to discuss the future plans for all of our sites. This includes the development of our native gift tree grove at Cloudforest One. The work to prepare the site for this has already begun and should be completed by the end of October. 

Meanwhile, I got to work on setting up our Barbecue for our dinner that night, as the sun was out and it was a hot day (which is something of a rarity on the west coast of Ireland).

15:30 PM 

Once the Barbecue was put together & Eamon had left, we had a quick turnaround before we packed the car up with all of our gear and headed on our way to Cloudforest Three in Doonaha, to the west of Lahinch.

15:45 PM

We took a quick pit stop to shoot some content of Quilty Beach on our way to Cloudforest Three. A beautiful spot & one of Bernards's (our CEOs) favourite places in the world.

16:15 PM

We arrived at Cloudforest Three and got straight to work. This site is where our first 20 CoolPartners planted their miniature forests in February of this year. So, our first order of business was to cross-check our site map with our records from planting day & ensure all of the miniature forests were still intact.

We also placed a beautiful hand-painted rock on the Netcelero site. This rock was painted by Conor Loftus’s daughter. Conor is an engineer at Netecelro (CoolPartner 010) and we are very grateful to Conor and his daughter for the lovely memento. 

17.45 PM 

After we had shot all of our content, we packed up the car and hit the road once more.

18:30 PM

Once we arrive back at the Shack @ Cloudforest One, we settle in for the evening & get working on our dinner at the barbecue.

Day 2 // Friday

9:00 AM 

After a gorgeous day on Thursday, it was a bit of a shock to the system to see the rain pelting down when we woke up on Friday.

11:00 AM

After a bit of breakfast & a coffee, we had our second and final meeting of the trip with Luke from the Health Services Staffs Credit Union (CoolPartner 033). 

The Health Services Staffs Credit Union (HSSCU) recently launched a tree-planting campaign in conjunction with us, to promote their current accounts for their members. They are planting one tree with us for every current account which is opened.

Thus, we invited Luke from the HSSCU to Cloudforest One to show him what we are doing & give him a chance to see our mission coming to life.

Despite the inclement weather, we got plenty of great content, as did Luke. Hopefully, next time the weather will be on our side!

13:30 PM

Once we had wrapped up the tour and waved Luke off. We packed up the car and hit the road back to Dublin.

17:00 PM

We finally arrived back in the office in Dublin, after one quick stop at Birdhill and plenty of rush hour traffic along the way.

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We had a fantastic trip down to Clare. We had a very productive 24 hours full of content & meetings. Looking forward to going back down again already!

If you’d like to learn more about our forests in Clare, simply follow the link below to find out more about all of our Cloudforest Sites.