The next 24 hrs would teach us a few lessons. First of all, and we'd really been learning this one from our first day in Ireland, you need to have continual access to the web. We'd opted not to get an Irish SIM card and this was really silly in retrospect. If we'd had one from Day One many of our problems would simply not have been.
Our night in Glenbeigh would dish out another fine lesson - don't leave booking travel or accommodation to the last minute in major cities, especially on weekends. We were to meet the boys in Dublin on Friday night and had agreed to fly them over, but what with one thing or another had left things late. What does that mean? Expensive flights and buggerall accommodation. In the end Kate found something through Airbnb, we booked it in relief and sat back, satisfied .... Only to receive a message 10 minutes later from the property owner that the rooms weren't available. Now there's a real sting here with airbnb - they take your money and a booking fee in advance. So now we had no accommodation, we were considerably out of pocket, we we had to go through some sort of resolution process with airbnb, the property owner was refusing to answer anymore emails and it was 11 pm at night. This proved to be an excellent cocktail for the nerves.
Eventually, by around midnight, we had tracked down another place - not exactly charming, not exactly cheap, not exactly in a convenient location, but better than trying to sleep four adults in a car or on a park bench. We hit the sack, still out of pocket with airbnb.
The next morning we did our best to smile about it, through somewhat gritted teeth, packed up and headed towards Doolin and the Cliffs of Moher.
The lack of sleep and the frustrations of the night before seemed to colour the day. The countryside didn't have quite the same charm and now getting lost was becoming more of a frustration than a joke. Another lesson we learned also cropped up - check things out before you head off, especially if you don't have internet access. We missed the car ferry at Tarbert by five minutes and had to wait an hour. This delay would set us up beautifully for our next major frustration.
We had reached a little town when we noticed signs about some event called Hell of the West ... Little did we realise how accurate that name would be. As we left the town we discovered we were caught up in the middle of a cycle race, and there was nothing we could do about it. The roads were narrow, there were no side roads, and we couldn't overtake (we did try that once but got pushed off the road by a support vehicle). This meant we got to travel for an interminable period at cycling speed. At one point we did take one side road and even got ahead of the pack - there was this wonderful moment of freedom and joy BUT the police had blocked off the entry back onto the road until the cycle group passed - even though the damn group didn't get to the intersection for a good five minutes. So, we found ourselves back exactly where we had been. Oh, did we laugh about that. (NOTE: this particular cycling event turned out to be called Ras na mBan but Hell of the West was more appropriate).
I should point out that there are plenty of hills around this area of Ireland, so the going had wonderfully slow periods. So slow that when a tractor with a huge bail of hay cut in in front of us, and began to chug along (eliciting some bitter laughter and the occasional expletive) it really didn't even slow us down a second.
Thank God for the final lesson of the day .... Always hang in there when you're travelling. We arrived, more than a little cheesed off, at the Cliffs of Moher -and they were as spectacular as we'd been told. Of course it helped that the weather was perfect. And then things just spiralled upwards (such a pleasant change from the downwards spiralling) from there. Our b&b was great, the host really affable and we even snuck onto an evening cruise below the cliffs, with the locals telling us we had lucked out on perfect conditions for it - full sunlight and a dinner plate flat ocean. To round off the day we had pints of cider at the local whilst listening to an Irish band. Doesn't get much better.
What a Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde kind of day. Tomorrow Dublin and seeing the boys.
RSS Feed
