Wednesday, November 30, 2005

We escaped alive from the man in the Transit...

That's the second Transit/Trannie story of this tour (see "Eire we go again?" posted 7th November)

I digress...

Sligo came and went and (as I’d done the last time we’d been there in 2001) I pointed out the street that had the sports shop where, in 1988, I’d bought a brilliant pair of Nike “Hotspur” football boots. Strange how these things stick with you but, being a former believer of the urban myth that “you need to buy football boots a size too big because the socks are thicker” (!) I’d bought a size 9 back then and, being someone who used to be careful about these sorts of things, I’d looked after them lovingly and was still using them when I played for my works’ team in 1999!

Sorry. Back to the bus…

The journey down the N4 through what the map now tells me were the Bricklieve Mountains passed in a barrage of showers so I didn’t really start paying attention to the scenery again until the rain eased on the N61 south of Tulsk and we passed a sign at Clooneyquinn marked “Percy French Birthplace.” Hmm. You’ve got to be intrigued by a sign like that haven’t you? Percy French? Is that the least Irish sounding name ever? Or do Bono and Tony Cascarino edge him into third place?

Intrigued we may have been but we were on a mission – Roscommon for afternoon tea or bust! As it turned out this lovely market town didn’t have any bust but we did get a splendid takeaway cappuccino (hark at us!) from a deserted Italian restaurant. Percy French would keep.

Roscommon held no real interest for the compilers of our youngster-centric Rough Guide (already being referred to by us as the “Rough as F**k Guide”) and reading between the lines, actually reading the lines themselves we’d have been well advised to avoid what sounded – in the book - like a miniature version of Shrewsbury. Ignoring the book (so why bother to read it then?) we had a lovely couple of hours wandering about the town and visiting the park in the grounds of the 16th Century castle. The park, surprisingly as it’s not the sort of thing we normally go for, had a playpark. A dashed good one at that – at the top of the climbing frame there was even a periscopey type thing which I was dying to get a shot of.

Just off the main street, was a fantastic greengrocer’s which had carrots with huge, long stalks all tied up in a very rustic fashion. Eschewing these delights and not thinking for a second of the potential harm to our night vision by doing so we went instead for the lovely looking potatoes. I know that we didn’t have them that night but we certainly got around to them over the next day or so and I can honestly say I’d never had better boiled potatoes. A mundane subject perhaps, but when’s the last time you got a potato that actually had some flavour?

Leaving Roscommon behind, our biggest concern was how we were going to be able to follow the winding, be-junctioned R355 south of Ballinasloe. We needn’t have worried – we got lost long before that as we tried to find our way out of Athlone. Guesswork won the day again. Either we have a natural flair for this instinctive navigation game or that map’s better than I thought. The reason for our route confusion may well have been the distraction of the RTE news bulletins – it takes a hell of a story to push terrorist attacks in London and the G8 summit at Gleneagles off the top of the news agenda.

All I’ll say is that the story concerned an Irish priest – now based in the states – who had been doing a spot of shagging on the side (so to speak) and was, for reasons I now can’t recall, faced with extradition. I told you it was a hell of a story. It turned out he was appealing the extradition on human rights grounds – his argument being that his rights had been breached as – are you ready for this? – he’d been forced, forced, to wear pink underwear in court.

We arrived in Mountshannon shortly after 6 o’clock. It had been a long day and we were glad to stop. Alas things are rarely perfect and we soon came to the conclusion that we’re rubbishy, anti-social type campers. We moaned about the excessively loud music the people nearby were playing, we moaned about their kids running riot. We were tired and hungry. The camper van staple, pasta in a tomato sauce soon remedied this, helped in no small measure by Ben’s home made garlic bread slices and a glass of red. The site itself was excellent. On a beautiful spot right beside one of Ireland’s many Lough Dergs (Red Loch), the site boasted all sorts of water based activities, excellent facilities and a brilliant wee hideaway type cabin which you could rent. We’ve got a picture somewhere – sadly not one of the Polaroids though. It was like a cross between the Wombles’ burrow and Fulton MacKay’s beach hut on Camusdarrach in Local Hero. We were suddenly green with envy. In the picture the cabin appears to be green with ivy.

Here’s a thing, campsite showers. Rarely, if ever, on our trip did we come across any whose cubicles were big enough to get changed in without getting your clothes or towel soaking wet from the puddle you’d just made. After a while it started to get on my nerves. From about day three onwards it came to be known as Irritable Towel Syndrome.

Trusting our fate to the R.A.F.Guide we set off, early doors, for “The Ferry to Kerry,” unnecessary capitalisation notwithstanding. The Ferry… does exactly what it says on the tin. Well, on the signpost, travelling as it does, from Clare to Kerry. The signpost on the Kerry side mustn’t have quite the same ring to it. Though Kerry, to be fair, does have a certain ring anyway (sorry, apallingly crowbarred tourist destination gag there). To get there we went cross country, skirting Ennis and passing evocatively named villages and hamlets like Tuamgraney, Fair Green and Lissycasey. As I checked the spellings on the map I came across an “instructional” location we would narrowly avoid later in the day: Moanmore.

Kilrush, the town near to the ferry, proved to be wonderfully memorable for two reasons. Firstly, in a shop I’d gone into to look at sweatshirts (I didn’t know it would be over 30degrees by the weekend) the owner took it upon himself to share with me the source of his and his assistants’ amusement: The Daily Star. Not being a tabloid reader I don’t know if it’s normally funny, but I indulged him. Front page, full colour, taking up the whole page was a picture of the devastation in London. Unfortunately the photographer, whether deliberately or not, had chosen to photograph a mangled double-decker from the side which clearly showed the advert on the side for a summer blockbuster, with the caption “OUTRIGHT TERROR – BOLD AND BRILLIANT.” “Ah sure now, it’s a terrible thing right enough,” sweatshirt man assured me.

The second reason Kilrush proved such a delight was the tourist information office. Not normally a cause for much comment – except that fake one in Girvan – but we’d gone in to find out if the Family Farm, with all its unfortunate connotations, mentioned in the Rough As… was open. It wasn’t, but what was that flyer? “Relive the Percy French Experience…Are you right there Michael, are you right?” So, Percy was deemed an “experience” now? Was that experience in a Jimi Hendrix sense I wondered? How could we resist? Could you? Moyasta Junction here we come…’scuse me while I kiss this guy.

Surreal about sums it up. We laughed and laughed. The story of our Percy French Experience is as strange as that of Percy’s own story. Mr. French, it turns out – and for comedy context you must bear in mind that this was all told to us by a Tommy Vance look & soundalike – perhaps it was he? – was a celebrated songwriter and storyteller back in the early 20th century, hailing – as we already knew from near Clooneyquinn in County Roscommon. He wrote the types of songs that Val Doonican used to sin on TV in the 1970’s and 80’s: “Phil The Fluter’s Ball,” “Delaney’s Donkey” and the like. Well…one day old Percy had a big gig in Kilkee and he hopped aboard the now defunct (though about 200 yards of track still runs, we’ll get to that) West Clare Railway at the station in Ennis. The train was late. Hours late. Percy arrived in Kilkee just as his audience had given up and gone home. Percy, understandably was not a happy chap. He went mad and called the West Clare railway all the bad names under the sun and proceeded to write the ditty, “Are you right there Michael?” all about his experience of the tortuously amateurish (as he saw it) West Clare Railway set up, whereby at every station a railwayman (Michael) would get out and check all the doors to see that they were closed – thus slowing down the whole travelling and sticking to the timetable thing. The driver, no doubt wishing to get home in time for tea or perhaps get to Kilkee to see the Percy French Experience, would check that they were ready to go by asking, “Are you right there, Michael?”

Can you see where this is going? The West Clare were suitably stung by this and sued old Perce for slander, saying that his song was detrimental to their business. They were, they said, a professional outfit, a model of reliability and safety. The judge in Limerick agreed and awarded them the then not inconsiderable sum of ten pounds, plus costs.

Percy was, understandably upset and appealed the decision. A date was set for the hearing and our good friend set off for court in Limerick. When, over an hour after the appointed time Mr. French had failed to show up, the judge had no choice but to dismiss the appeal. At which point – some of you are ahead of me here, I know it – Percy walked into the courtroom, explaining his tardiness in the most priceless fashion ever – the train, yes a West Clare Railway service, had broken down en route from Ennis and they’d had to wait over a hour for it to be repaired. Game over, court awards Mr. P. French Esq. Ten pounds, plus costs. Altogether, “Are you right there Michael are you right…?”

This story seemed to us to be too good to be true but we’re assured that it is. I’d love to have been sitting in the public gallery in court that day. I can see the old judge sitting there as Percy rushes in, “how dare you man, the nerve of it, casting aspertions on the professionalism of such an august institution as the WCR whilst you, a shyster, a charlatan, a so-called entertainer (here I imagine him spitting out the word through clenched teeth) have the bare-faced cheek to show contempt for my court…” In my mind I see Percy saying “if I could just explain your honour, allow me to show you the departure time on this here ticket…”

The experience for us had already got off to a great start long before we heard the story. We pulled up in the car park and went into the green carriage that’s in the Polaroid diary (9/7/05) where we were met by, shall we say, a shifty looking character with a near impenetrable Cork accent. It all had scary echoes of our previous trip when we’d visited the Drombeg stone circle near Roscarberry, Co. Cork…

The stone circle, reputedly one of the most complete and spectacular in the whole country (it was) got almost a full page in the Rough As… and sounded just the sort of Place Pete McCarthy would have visited in what is still my favourite ever book. WE parked our hire car in an unassuming looking gravel square and followed the Bord Failte signs to the circle. We certainly weren’t expecting what it now occurs to me was our actual first encounter with counterfeit tourism.

Outside a scruffy looking Portacabin an even scruffier looking bloke said something like “low, Ishowyouhotwedoeer” which translated after a few seconds as, “hello, I’ll show you what we do here.” Obvious really. Though what did he mean? I’ll show you what? We’ve come to see a stone circle, how hard can that be? He mentioned something about leaflets, Italian, French, English and German. Inexplicably I, in terror, shouted “German!” Though I realised my mistake when he handed me a leaflet all about the stone circle, written in German. Needless to say I swapped it, but not before we’d parted with a few punts each (this was pre Euro) and were sent on our way circle-wards, knowing that something wasn’t quite right but not realising until much, much later in the pub that we’d been done. Good on them I suppose, free enterprise and all that…

Back at the Experience, Cork-man said – and I swear this is true - “low, Ishowyouhotwedoeer.” This time we at least felt we were being more ligitimately relieved of our cash, getting as we did the story (from Tommy Vance), the “audio-visual show” (grainy black and white film on a knackered looking 14” screen combi unit perched high above our heads – “okay, that’s enough of that now, the train is ready for you,” CLICK – and off it went), and THE TRAIN RIDE!

No photo could do it justice, no words could fully tell the tale – you really would need to experience the experience, as it were. We were led outside to the platform where a couple of carriages had been nicely painted in full West Clare livery – if I was a train anorak type I could no doubt tell you more about them. The, ahem, locomotive was a slightly bigger version of one of those miniature trains you get a theme parks and in the grounds of country houses, with some fibreglass and perspex bolted on to give it a bit of bulk – bear in mind the carriages and the track were full size – I have to say, it looked incongruous to say the least and was not what one might call confidence inspiring.

Nonetheless, up the ramp (!) we went and into a fully carpeted (I’m talking wall to wall and floor to ceiling here) open plan carriage, complete with electric lights and posters advertising the rental potential of the whole experience – weddings, bar mitzvahs and the like. As the train moved off Ben went tearing up and down the carriage. Being the only passengers, Gail and I did too – just because we could. Had we already been on the station tour with old Tommy V, we’d no doubt have indulged in a chorus or two of “Are you right there Michael?” as it was we simply dashed from side to side, looking for points of interest out the windows (cows, grass and more cows I’m afraid) and laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. The best – Tommy’s chat aside – was yet to come. Having gone about 200 yards up the line, we reversed, went back to the start then kept going back towards the main road, where we stopped and then steamed (sic) back to the platform, before disembarking for our tour of the station with “Rock on” Tommy.

In spite of the bizarreness of it all, it was great, great fun and hugely informative. The West Clare Railway Trust are raising money to restore the company’s old loco, which even as we spoke was in Bristol being refitted. Tommy told us they hoped to have it up and running by the summer season 2006 and after that it would be a case of repairing and reopening sections of track, with the eventual goal of running from Kilrush, right through Moyasta Junction (where we were) and out to the seaside at Kilkee. He didn’t tell us if they’d sorted out a timetable yet. Old Percy would be proud…

And so onwards to the Ferry to Kerry. Our vague plan – which you’ll already have spotted was out the window – had been to go all the way round the coast coming along through Cork and Waterford before heading north via Dublin and the southern part of Ulster, so we didn’t buy a return ticket. My wee list and the Rough As had throuwn up a few possibilities campsite-wise so we came off the ferry and headed for the sea. The sun was splitting the skies and we were grateful to be sporting shorts and sandals as we pootled along with the windows down. I can still feel the heat on my right arm as I type this – the tan built up far more quickly there! Winding country lanes mingled with occasional glimpses of the Atlantic as we made our way towards Ballybunion, stopping off only to buy a paper. “The Kerryman” (at a whopping one euro ten cents) was my choice as I paid obeisance to half of Pete McCarthy’s First Rule Of Travel: on arrival buy a local paper and read it over a pint. To be honest though I could have murdered a Guinness.

As it was no longer wet, perversely the seaside resort “delights” of Ballybunion made me wince. It was monstrously busy, there were families everywhere and boy racers with their thumping bass sub-woofers patrolled the streets. Instinctively we knew this was not for us. We pushed on past golf course after golf course – including one with a club house the size of a football stadium and a car park which looked like The Best Of Top Gear. The sun continued to beat down and we were a sticky mess by the time we hit Ballyheigue, which the Rough Guide assured us was a sedate seaside location.

Sedate it may have been, but only in comparison to Ibiza. It was mobbed, the main street was so busy we could barely get to the far end, such was the volume of Saturday afternoon traffic. Another quick decision and we made off again, this time for the wonderfully named Ardfert and the beachside site at Banna Strand. I’m sure Banna features in a Christy Moore song and if it doesn’t, it should – it’s a truly spectacular beach. Mile after mile of golden sand, warm gulf stream water and fairly massive waves. Off with the t-shirts, on with the SPF25 (Celtic complexions, what can I say?) and into the sea we went. Ben took to this like the proverbial duck, with his groovy lycra surfy-wetsuit type thing and sprinted off into the breakers. Before we knew it, we’d been there for a couple of hours and were all tired and hungry.

Trooping back, dripping but happy to dry off in the still blazing early evening sun we decided on a barbecue for dinner. Our site, the strangely monickered “Sir Roger’s” was by now almost full and we couldn’t fail to notice a caravan similar to one we’d seen on a caravanning programme (there was nothing else on, honestly) which came with its own pick-up truck and which we knew gave little change from a hundred and thirty grand. Where do people get that kind of money? That’s more than twice what our house cost!

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