How I met my partner: Len penned poem for hitchhiker Sabine and love blossomed

During a tumultuous period in his life Len Lipitch picked up a pair of hitchhikers and within hours of meeting his now-wife Sabine, he wrote a poem — he had never written one before then.

In 1990, Sabine Lenz, a fashion design student from Hamburg, Germany, set out interrailing by herself for the summer.

She told The Echo: “I don’t know why I came to Ireland, but on the boat over I realised there was hardly any trains to use my interrail ticket for, so I met another girl and we decided to hitchhike together.

“As soon as I saw the Irish landscape I was hooked,” she said, explaining that her and her new friend planned to go to Achill Island.

Len stopped and picked both of them up, he was in the process of separating from his wife and was planning to leave Ireland.

“I decided to leave but I didn’t know where I was going, I was just driving and then I took a wrong turn, ended up by a pier so went into the town and had lunch then I saw two girls hitching, picked them up and the rest is history,” he said.

Len knew he liked Sabine instantly, saying “it took her longer”, and Sabine adding “maybe about half-an-hour longer.”

They stopped at a hostel on the way to Achill Island and went to a nearby pub, where Sabine was amazed by a talent show, saying: “I thought it was so fascinating — in Germany you wouldn’t show anything to the public unless you were the best.”

She and Len stayed up late after the other girl went back to bed, and the next day, Sabine told the girl that she would be staying with Len as they had fallen in love.

“We never before or after felt that sort of feeling, we just had a really strong, deep connection,” she said, explaining that she spent the rest of her holiday in Schull, where Len showed her a ruin he was thinking of buying.

“The ruin was completely overgrown, and he said ‘would you like to live here with me?’ — now it’s our home.”

They visited each other every month when Sabine went back to Germany, and the couple planned she would take a break from studying and try out a year living with Len, saying “my parents and all my friends thought I was crazy”, adding that her parents wrote her a five-page letter outlining their concerns.

Len is 20 years older than her, but when he came out to see her in Germany, “it was so natural between us, they could see we were in love”.

She ended up moving quicker than planned, but said “it wasn’t easy to start with, my life changing so much — I became pregnant with our eldest quite quickly, and we moved into a caravan without electricity while we did up the ruin.

“When our son was born, my parents came out to visit and they were so positive and full of admiration.”

While living in the caravan with a baby, they started making jewellery and selling it at a stall, where they were discovered by an agent who asked if he could represent them.

Nearly 35 years on, they have three children, a thriving jewellery business, a beautiful home that they built themselves in Schull, and “we feel so connected to where we are”.

Sabine’s Enibas jewellery brand features phrases in the Irish language, she has a store in Schull and the products are shipped all over the world.