Day 5 - Kinsale to Claregalway

As I mentioned in the previous blog, I was told at 10:00 this morning that the owners of the B&B were heading off to church (the check out time was 10:30) and so they wouldn't be able to help us navigate. I had pretty much packed everything and so I got out the B&B book and map and figured out the route for us. I used the cell phone to call another B&B and make arrangements. I'm not sure that I chose the best one as this place technically doesn't offer internet but they said that they could help out. I doubt we'll get it and I probably won't be able to post all these blogs until tomorrow.

I took a page out of the first B&B owners book and wrote down the roads that I needed to take instead of trying turn by turn directions. For anyone who travels to Ireland, I highly recommend this way of directing yourself as opposed to Google Maps or the like. I'm not sure how well the GPS works...I might invest in one of those for Scotland and England.

Leaving the town I got lost again but decided to follow the road I was on. I also had a lot of trouble getting up one hill...it was one of those ones that was almost straight up and I could only take it in 1st gear...if I tried to go into 2nd, things would get all out of sorts.

Nick didn't like my decision to follow the road we were on, he wanted to turn back but I wanted to see where it went. The great thing is that it took us towards Cork (the way we were supposed to be going). After that, getting from Cork to Limerick and Limerick to Galway was a breeze.
One of the things I've noticed about Ireland is that you can't see much in terms of Food/Petrol/Shops from the motorways. They also don't have fast food on every street corner. Even in Sweden we saw a lot more fast food locations from the highways. I wanted to get Nick fed and fed quickly but it wasn't happening. I only saw 1 advertisement for McDonalds and, by then, it was too late to try and figure out which exit they were talking about.

We didn't eat until we made it up to Claregalway where we're staying. I went into a grocery store and asked for directions to a McDonalds or the likes. I know, I know...I'm here to try Irish food and experience Irish things and this was totally against what I'm trying to do here...*BUT*, as a parent, you have to know how to pick your battles. When you have a 9.5 year old that is being REALLY good on all these long car rides and who is hungry and wants what he knows, you can either try and pressure him into trying something new or you can reward his good behaviour and give him what he wants. I opted for the latter.

The drive to Orenmore was pretty uneventful except that I had to drive down the same skinny little road 4x (twice up , twice down) in this quest. We had Supermacs (which is like McDonalds) and chilled out there for a bit. Nick wanted to get back on the road but I knew that we'd have to wait a bit before we'd be able to get into our room.

I've noticed that it seems that on the western side of Ireland, the accents are thicker. I'm not sure if that's true or just my perception but I've had to work harder to understand what they're saying.

We then called the owner of the B&B who said that we could come straight away and she gave us directions that I thought, at the time, were pretty vague (like a lot of Irish directions) but were perfect. Her house was easy to get to and they changed the colour on it...that made it confusing for me but Nick was absolutely positive that it was the house and he was right. I've learned on this trip to trust a lot of what he says (although, sometimes, I go on my instincts too).

I forgot to mention that when we got up this morning it was raining and it's been raining all day. Neither one of us looked forward to a long drive in the rain but it wasn't too difficult and I drove quite a bit of the way at 100 km/h and felt safe doing so. I also managed to get behind some slow going people and that made me feel good because I wasn't the slow person. I could relax behind them and let the faster cars overtake us.

I keep looking out at the rain and it's 8:00 p.m. here (20:00) and we haven't had dinner because lunch was late...there's a pub close by and the owner of this B&B said that the food is good but the prospect of getting soaked doesn't excite me. However...feeding a monkey is more important and we'll probably go soon.