Holy cats, the Irish can't drive.
You know how when you're in a car, the other cars will generally take a slight notice of the cars around them and, oh, say swerve when there's space for one car in a 1.5 car space road?
Not here.
So, today, Bernd went off to Geneva, and Marlene and I decided to take a leisurely drive to Cork, with a stop off at Blarney Castle so we could kiss the Blarney Stone and acquire the apparently much needed gift of gab.
Ah, but first, we had to adjust to the roads.
For some reason, highways = easy, local streets = chase scene from James Bond film.
To reiterate, the "highways" vary between 2 lane (in each direction) roads, 1 lane (in each direction) roads, roads that go through towns (as in through the dead center of it), roads that have blessed passing lanes (more on that later) and roads that have speed zones where the speed limit will literally drop to half the speed you were a moment ago. Oh, and this is all on the same route.
Passing, when you can actually do it, is a blessed event. Sometimes, there's a lane where you can pass, sometimes, you pass by going into the opposite lane against traffic and hope you pass in time before cars come the other way, and my personal favorite, you pass in the SAME LANE. as the highway lane has space for 1.5 cars and you can sometimes slip by to the right (you pass on the right here) which is just way too fun.
So the highway drive was fun, we pretty much went straight to Blarney Castle with a quick stop to mail a postcard to Texas (Insert official shout out to Aidan and his parents here) at a tiny food store along the way.
Then, we got to Blarney Castle where upon entering this town, we were cursed. First, we got a tad lost (even though we were using a GPS computer lent to us by Bernd (more on this later), then, going up an impossible street, as in there was space for .75 of a car impossible, and cars were just plowing through as if it was a 12 lane highway, I got a tad too close to the left side, and clipped the left curb to avoid getting killed by a truck. Now, I've done this a 1000 times in NJ, but of course this time, the hub cap goes flying off. I guess considering I'm driving a Nissan Micra, which is a car where the name itself is actually bigger than the car itself, that I'm lucky that this didn't cause the engine to fly off.
Taking this in stride, we pulled over to the side reclaimed our hubcap, and then noticed that most cars in Ireland don't have hubcaps, so at least we got ours back. Now, we know why of course, there's no space for them on the dang streets.
Anyway, we proceeded onto Blarney Castle, which, as one might guess, is a castle. It also has that famous stone, where, once kissed the gift of gab is acquired.
If you've read this far, you can tell that I kissed the stone, since this entry is going to reach "epic" level soon.
After wandering around the area, (very nice, see the pix). We made our way to Cork, which is a fairly large city that has streets with space for .75 cars wide. After getting out of the car, we had our final issue of the day, we realized that Marlene lost her hat. So right now, there is an orphan hat in Cork. If it is reading this blog, Marlene misses you, please come back.
In Cork, I wandered into the Virgin Mega store and bought some music I never listened to. This included the new album from the Kaiser Chiefs that includes my new favorite song "Ruby". A new hat was purchased for Marlene and we had a good time just looking around.
We decided to head straight back to Limerick, where our friend the GPS system (which they call "Sat-Nav" here and which I think is far cooler to say than GPS, so I'm saying "Sat-Nav from now on) took us home. The Sat-Nav system has a woman with an English accent telling me where to go. Since I dig English accents (when spoken by females), I will follow this woman anywhere. Marlene is a tad concerned about this.
We got back into town, and went to the local supermarket which was about the size of the Meadowlands, grabbed some food, and came back to the apartment.
We need the rest, tomorrow, we're going to Dublin, this involves more driving. Plus we're staying over at the hotel owned by Bono of U2 fame. You cannot possibly imagine how forward Marlene "I would fight a holy war for U2" is looking to this.
