The night we slept at the Jameson Distellery.

We woke this morning at 7am and thought “must get up soon” only to fall back asleep and reawake at 10am, the sun beating down on us, the heat magnified ten times over thanks to the car windows. I thought we were going to die of heat stroke, it was a bit much. Up, shower and moved on (after also covering myself in Stingoes) to Bantry.

We had always planned to come to Bantry. My great uncle and his wife are buried here and we felt that we should stop and pay our respects while we could. We found Bunny and David’s grave, they were buried with one another, with out effort, somehow we just knew where to go. We lay some flowers, which my hero Chris picked from the side of a busy road, dug out some weeds and had a chat to them about the family back in Australia, before saying goodbye and once more hitting the road to our next destination, Cork.

Cork isn’t such a bad city, its nice enough and all, but good god the parking is hell! We drove around and around and around the bloody city before finally finding a car park, and when we got in it was tighter than a nuns clacker! We parked with the aid of a lovely Irish gentleman who took it upon himself to be our parking attendant, he was a saint, very nice and helpful, and to be honest, we probably couldn’t have done it without him!

We took our time looking about Cork, relaxing and doing some window shopping before deciding that we should probably make a move… only to be caught in the 5pm traffic, oops!

We spotted on the map a little beach where we thought we would pull over for the night, so we made tracks for this place. There was a car RIGHT behind me on these twisty, turvey, narrow roads but I wasn’t going to go any faster, I plodded along at my 50 Kms, thinking he could overtake when he saw fit. We continued to drive along this road which was a main road by all accounts, before passing through an intersection that was completely hidden by the bends in the road and the singage for this was behind trees that over hung and besides which, the sign was bent and rusting. We swore and thought “if someone else had been coming we’d be gone, they should really do something about this!” We drove for a while more, the car following still very much on my tail gate, finally having enough I pulled over to let him pass and so that we could look at the map once more. Of course the car behind me then pulled over too and did a U-y. Typical I thought. Chris and I went on looking at the map until a rap at the window scared the life out of us. It was the man who had been following. I undid my window to be greeted by “did you know you went through an intersection?” I replied that yes I did. He went on to have a go at me stating that 4 people had died there recently, I apologized if we’d caused any concern but you really couldn’t see the signs and that the intersection was very very hidden. He looked at us and said “well, if you weren’t hurtling along you would have seen it” and then said “your not from around here, we have signs here in Ireland too you know” He was so patronizing! He told us that he was part of a community of traffic and road group, that seeing as we weren’t locals there wasn’t much he could do… I apologized again and left. I was so angry! I was NOT “hurtling” like he suggested I was, I was doing 50 in a 60 zone, with him RIGHT ON MY BUTT, what was he doing following me, and how far was he going to follow me before giving up the chase and what was he going to do had I been local? Arrest me?! God, he was so bloody arrogant, the most irritating Irishman yet. Yes, thank you for making me aware, yes, pointing it out was nice to do, but bloody hell, he could be a bit more polite about it all. If 4 people had been killed recently, and other accidents had happened like he suggested, then maybe he and his ‘community traffic group’ should spend more time campaigning for better signage and markings and for the trees to be cut back so people could bloody well SEE the intersection and STOP following strangers to rant and insult them! I’m not the first to make the mistake and I’m sure I won’t be the last. Hmph, that’s my say.

We stopped then at a beach, but it had an eerie, yucky feel to it. To me it felt as if it was a town out of a Steven King novel, I don’t know why, it just did. Chris didn’t like it either, we both got the “vibe” so we made a quick dinner and moved on, not knowing where we were going, but just getting out. The beach was incredibly full, the people all seemed nice and were happy, but there was just something about the place that wasn’t right; it had that ‘feel’

We didn’t know where we were headed but we saw that there was a town called Middleton close by, we decided to give this a shot. Chris was very excited to see that the Jameson Distillery was located here. He had wanted to go here while in Ireland but we didn’t think we’d have time, and we hadn’t been sure where it was, and now we stumbled upon it by pure chance. I was more excited to see that it had free parking outside its gates. It was after 9pm now, so the distillery was well and truly shut, but we decided that with free parking and a public toilet across the road, this was our camping spot for the night.

written by  Chris and Emily on June 2, 2009 from Midleton, Ireland
from the travel blog: Europe 2009
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