Falling behind again. I’ll try to do better. Last night I booked a room at the Evergreen B&B in Swords, near Dublin Airport, so we could be sure to get to the airport in good time to drop off the car, get to Terminal 2 and check in by about 11am for our flight to Bordeaux. I had paid for an extra day’s car hire to give us the flexibility to stay near Dublin and go to the airport tomorrow, rather than dropping off the car today at the airport, staying in Dublin, taking the bus back to the airport. As it is, we’ll have the car back without using any of the extra day, or the extra €10 for the GPS. Actually the GPS, whom we called Jane, because she had a plain English accent, not like Theresa’s, paid for herself by warning us of all the speed limit zones and speed cameras.
There are speed camera logos on signs all over Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic, but I doubt that many of the cameras actually exist. Local drivers certainly behave as if they don’t exist. Driving here is actually very good because open road speed limits are sensible (60mph in the UK, 100km/h in the Republic) and start right at the city limits. Often it’s surprising that the open road limit starts in a built up area. There is no campaign by authorities here to gradually lower open road speed limits and extend 50km/h for kilometres beyond town limits as in Australia. Or to lower the speed limit whenever a bend occurs on a country road. Wikipedia has a table showing 5.2 deaths per billion vehicle km per year for Australia, 3.6 for the UK, 3.9 for Ireland. Australia’s roads have a lot more room, but speed limits are enforced and people drive more slowly in general. It’s fun here on a narrow road to approach an oncoming truck which is using all of its side of the road, with a wall on your left, and both vehicles doing about 90k . Somehow we seem to miss each other. Drivers here can judge accurately where the extremities of their vehicles are, I can’t. 14 years ago, driving on a minor road along the southeast shore of Loch Ness, my car and an approaching car, whose driver didn’t use the pull out available to him, approached at speed and smashed each other’s right mirror. Close, that one! We both stopped, but no blame could be assigned. We shrugged and drove on. The tarmac dropped about 75mm at the edges and allowing our left wheels to leave the edge wasn’t an option. Drivers here are just more skilled, better drivers than Australians. I did hear on the news a couple of weeks ago that France has lowered the speed limit to 80 on all roads without central barriers. It was 90. Their death rate is 5.8.
Anyway, we left the Driftwood, near Sligo this morning after a light breakfast. Extraordinarily good range of items.
This place is as good as the Tara was. I must review them in Booking.com. Too much work to review every one we stay in, but since I use the reviews I should contribute. Just the very best places though. To select accommodation now in Booking.com, I’ve started to simply filter out everything with an average rating below 9 and sort the rest by price, pick a couple and read a few reviews. You can almost always get top quality at a reasonable price, unless you really have left it too late to book in a place like Dublin for a Saturday night.
We had until 9pm to check in at the Evergreen, and looking at the map of Ireland, route N59, running through the extreme west of the northern half of Ireland looked good, going through less populated, mountainous country. It looked to be a long way, 500km in a day to get to Dublin, but 200km of that is motorway, so we went for it. I’m so glad we did, it was a great drive.
It’s called “The Wild Atlantic Way”, and wild it was for much of the 300km between Sligo and Galway. Great scenery, attractive villages such as Newport and Westport. Raining, or at least wet roads most of the way. Wifi is slow here, so just a couple of photos from my camera. Too slow to get the photos from Anne’s camera.
We reached Galway at about 4pm, and after 40 minutes of Galway peak hour traffic we were on the M2, cruising at an indicated 120km/h and being passed by many cars. I added the usual 5% to get to 126, and the GPS said 121, good enough. We had a “freeloader” behind us a couple of times, using us as a cruise control, but following very closely. I do that at home on my Triumph, but I leave at least 2 seconds (61 metres at 110k) not 2/3 of a second. More heavy traffic on the freeways near Dublin, and Jane took us off the wrong exit and on a circuituous route along narrow lanes but we found the Evergreen B&B just on 7pm. Now it’s 02:35.
Free wifi at Dublin Airport is stellar. I added some photos from Anne’s Iphone.