January 12, 2011

Irish Christmas

By roads-rus

I took this photo from a train window while traveling from icy Dublin to icier Galway on December 22, 2010.  Lucky, huh?

Spending the holidays in Ireland didn’t seem so crazy in October.  But the reality of the experience is that Ruth and I arrived in Dublin one day late because a snowstorm closed the airport.  This awful weather, we learned, was unprecedented.  A lot of our fellow travelers were on the train because their pipes had frozen and they were being taken in by relatives.

We had planned to travel by Irish Rail each day until December 26.  In fact, Irish Rail had issued us tickets for all days.  What no one told us, and I can’t imagine why not, was that the entire system was closed down on Christmas Day and the next.  December 26, as we discovered, is an Irish holiday as sacred as Christmas.  Nothing in Ireland is opened.  Nothing.   Except one, so far as I know, bus company, one really wonderful bus company that took us from Cork to Dublin by mid-afternoon.  If it weren’t for it, we would have missed our flight to Malta.   We were departing on the bus 15 minutes after leaving the deserted train station.  Lucky, huh?

You might think that this trip was a disaster.   Who likes numb hands and  treacherous sidewalks?  The ones in Limerick were even more difficult because of festive drinking which resulted in frequent vomiting.  But the opposite is true.  We had a blast in Ireland.  I’ll tell more about our experiences in subsequent days.

I’m a travel writer who learned a long time ago that if you tell the truth about travel, the downsides, the piece won’t get published.  The travel industry wants to sell beach and resort time, not discourage fun seekers by reporting what always comes with travel–the unexpected, the mishaps.   I should have called my blog  Travel Truth because that’s what I plan to focus on.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 at 8:12 pm and posted in 3 Compass, Be Careful, Europe, International Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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