Guess Who is Going to be the Next 100 Million Euro Winner?

The long weekend started out okay. I park my car on early Saturday morning near the statue of Mary and talk up to the train station to catch the train to Dublin Heuston at 6:52am.

My entertainment for the next two hours are old episodes of The Chasers (oh how I love thee!) loaded onto my new (and extremely high maintenance) touch. I don't find many shows funny, but these people are hilarious. I'm in Dublin by 9am.

The sky is grey and starts to spit as I head into Cornucopia (19/20 Wicklow St) for breakfast. This cafe is vegetarian and has won numerous Best of Ireland awards. The produce is wholesome but my vegan sausage and potato omelete with red onion bland, and is nothing to write home about. I do some aimless shopping for the next few hours feeling smug that I've come prepared with my wellies, raincoat and umbrella as it is bucketing down. Plenty of people have clearly forgotten that it's never summer in Ireland. Shopping in Dublin is very high street chain and boring. The UK obviously has a bigger influence in the "Big City" as there are plenty more streaky, orange Irish women. (By this I mean their skin and not their hair.)

The Londoners finally arrive around 12 noon. We rendezvous at The Exchequer (Exchequer St, Dublin) for a decent and sophisticated gastropub lunch. I tell the boys that the food at the Exchequer is not typical of Ireland, and that they really need to find a pub that serves the boiled bacon and cabbage with the enormous side of potato in three forms (ie: mash, baked and fried).

We don't make it in time to go and see the Book of Kells (Trinity College), but we stand outside and pose to make it look like we have.


We also spot the ever elusive leprechaun, but nobody seems all that keen to catch it for that pot of gold. (It's recession time so I guess maybe the pot of gold runs dry.)

We then aimlessly wander around Temple Bar when M gets stopped by a pregnant woman asking for money. E & I (the hard-nosed cynics) carrying on walking. I spy M taking out his wallet and make the mistake of yelling, "M!!! NO!!! YOU DO NOT NOT GIVE MONEY. IF YOU WANT TO GIVE HER SOMETHING, GIVE HER FOOD!!"

M looks petrified, and the lady starts saying, "That's a good idea! Thank you, God bless you!"
It turns out that M was planning on giving her two euros, and instead, ends up paying 20 euros worth of groceries for this lady. Oops. I start telling M that people here get 200 euros in unemployment benefits per week, PLUS get an additional allowance for utilities such as rent, money for a phone........which doesn't help make M feel any better.


We have dinner at the ever popular Elephant and Castle cafe in Temple Bar, and I'm back on the train at 21:00 and home in bed by midnight.

SUNDAY: D DAY

The weather is shit. There's no question of that. But then, it's all the same whether it be spring, summer, autumn or winter. (Refer to my previous "The Wonderful Seasons of Ireland" post.)

I think my lucky streak with sunshine and road tripping has officially ended until we drive into Galway where the sky miraculously clears up to reveal sunshine and blue sky. I keep on having to stop myself from commenting on the weather and about how lucky we are as I feel like I am going to jinx it.


We have a nice cafe lunch at Ard Bia when all the trouble starts. What do you get when your friend asks you what your roadside assistance is like? A. had been doing some digging and discovered that her basic roadside assistance was defined by her car insurance (coincidentally my car insurer too,) as assistance so long as she has broken down within 1km of her driveway. She asks me what I have on my policy, and I tell her that I'm not sure, but I thought that I had full coverage.

"Maybe you better check," A says. "Although you're leaving so it probably doesn't matter anyway."

Last famous words. Into the initially wonderful wilderness and coastline of Mayo, I then spot my engine light on the dashboard blinking. "OMG! What does that mean?!" I say. A. looks up my car manual which basically says to stop driving and to go to the nearest garage to have to car looked at. The "Wonderful Wildnerness" reminds me of that HSBC ad with the two different perspectives.

How quickly the connotations of image can change from:
Beautiful (in that soggy way) to frightening when you don't know what the hell is wrong with your car.

Beautiful Frightening


The result, car having to be towed from the middle of nowhere. The guy driving the tow truck was initially going to leave us in location until I said, "Wait a minute, you're going to just leave us here.....in the middle of nowhere....?!!?" The next thing we know, we're inside the tow truck on our way back to Galway. Too much of a coincidence it was with timing from A. asking me about my roadside assistance to me needing to call on it that we stop off at the nearest news agent to buy a lottery ticket before catching the bus back to Limerick.

We're going to be the next euro millionaires by next Saturday.

Postscript on the car:
An oxygen cylinder needs replacing. The mechanic reckons that I could have continued driving it around Mayo no problem. He's currently ordering a part, and I'm driving the car around with the engine light still on.