Sadly, our last day with the A team

We took our time getting up and ready today, there was no hurry, check out was 12pm and our drive today was only about 4 hours, so we just relaxed, taking our time and getting things in order. Seeing as the van has been home for the past week or so our stuff has gone everywhere, so packing it up today was a wee bit of a chore, a hassle, but one that had to be done.

After our leisurely morning we headed off up towards Belfast, opting to stay the night just out of there (who knows when a coffee jar might go off?) and drove to a little jutty out bit of Irelands north, which was named Muckpoint. Not an enticing name, but it was nice enough. The plan had been to pull over somewhere by ourselves for the night, have a chilled out meal and relax, but sadly there weren’t many appropriate pulling over places that we could see. We drove around and down towards a little (or as the Irish say wee) beach where we saw what we assumed to be a car park for camper vans, so we pulled in. There were several other campers there so we thought “beauty, we’ll just camp here for the night” and got out and began to check out the area, then we slowly became suspicious that this spot looked rather like a caravan park, but the lack of signage or any reception area made us doubt ourselves.

Curiosity got the better of us and I had to ask a man camping near us if this was indeed a free spot or a camping park. He informed me (in between mouthfuls of ice-cream he was licking) that some woman had come and collected money off him, pointed out her caravan and told me she’d be the person to see. So I did, I went on up and made the mistake of looking at this woman and saying “this isn’t a caravan park, is it?” Immediately I saw her shoulders square back, her chest become puffed up, her head held high and she drawled intimidating “YES it is” Right. Okay. Kate, who had a fag hanging out of her mouth, sunburn to her shoulders, her short shorts well too short for her larger legs and a rat dog as I like to call them, sitting on her lap, informed me that this indeed was a caravan park and that we had to pay 8E to stay and deposit 10E for a key to the loo. Chris and I considered this and decided that as it was getting late and we had an early start tomorrow we didn’t really want to waste time driving around aimlessly tonight and agreed to the charge. What a mistake. We were surrounded by large caravans that were powered by generators, screaming children and, above all, horrible horrible little rat dogs, who wore pink jackets and yapped ALL EVENING. We were close to pulling our hair out. The good thing about this setting though was that we had the most amazing, beautiful sunset we’ve seen in a long time. Just gorgeous it was.

We made ourselves a meal from the left over bits and bobs that we had lying about, had a drink and hit the hay for our early start tomorrow.

written by  Chris and Emily on June 4, 2009 from Whitehead, United Kingdom
from the travel blog: Europe 2009
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