From the Singing Chef to the Blarney Stone
The penultimate day of the tour and talk about the morning after the night before. Needless to say the day started off very slowly, lots of subdued people reflecting on the impact of Baby Guiness, I was reflecting on how I came to be in a fountain at 1.30am, and even worse, posted the image on Instagram that made me look like I had not pants on. The Scots were reflecting how Norway so nearly beat their old enemies, whilst the English started to dream of a World Cup final in 7 days time.
Ahead of us was the toughest drive of the tour, with 280 miles of Irish roads and a hangover. There was no sign of the Singing Chef at breakfast either, I’m pretty sure he was still in bed.
After a hearty breakfast, I dragged myself out to the car and managed to negotiate the route out of the hotel and into the town where we filled up with fuel for the day ahead. My head wasn’t able to cope with all the revving of the cars, so we let the convoy disappear into the distance and settled into a long, and hopefully incident free day, following the OTR satnav.
The route took us by motorway down to Limerick, which was thankfully without any incident. At one point, to our surprise, we passed the convoy filling up with fuel again and were once again, inadvertently in the lead. After negotiating the traffic jam called Limerick, it was so bad the satnav gave up tried to send us north again. We headed out to the spectacular coastal scenery of the Ring of Berra where we were sharing the road with lots of Sunday drivers.
By the time we got to Killarney the roads were crammed, the scenery was beautiful but we didn’t have many opportunities to enjoy it with the roads being busy, and it wasn’t just cars, we had horse and carts and even ended up in a sheep jam, when the hairy beasts asserted their right to roam.
Eventually we came to the highlight of the day, the spectacular Heal Pass, which meanders over a mountain range at the point where the Atlantic Western Approaches meet the south coast of Ireland, with deep water inlets and bays stretching miles.
As we climbed over the pass we stopped to have a chat with a lad doing the trip on a motorbike and then Sandy and Louise appeared, thankfully not with a tray of Baby Guiness on this occasion, but in their supercharged Jag, so we traversed the pass together and I tried, unsuccessfully, to get a video of them travelling down through the valley, it appears that my eyesight was affected by the night before.
For the rest of the trip we ran through pretty, colourful, towns and villages before finally ending up at the penultimate hotel, the Celtic Rose at Rosscarbery, Mysteriously, we were one of the first to arrive again, I think it might have been because we don’t get distracted, me and Wooksie are a very efficient couple.
Arriving early gave me a chance to head off a 4th night crisis with Mr Blowey’s room. I was able to have a chat with the receptionist to make sure he had a room with a view across the bay, like us. For once, he was happy with his room, but then got agitated because I didn’t want to get involved in drinking copious amounts of wine again after the night before.
Unfortunately, the view across the bay also included a view across the busy main road as we had the noisiest rooms in the hotel, meanwhile, the Pompey boys have a view across a very peaceful graveyard at the back and slept like logs.
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