Apart from kissing the Blarney Stone, one of our more memorable day outings was to the Fota Wildlife Park. A wheelchair friendly tarmac path wound around the complete park, which took in every compound giving super views of all the animals on show. A refreshment centre is located at the centre of the Park and we arrived there at the same time as a school party consisting of children of all ages from Kindergarten to Secondary School. We bought coffee and sandwiches and the children settled down to eat their packed lunches but within a few minutes we were totally surrounded by a family of ring-tailed lemurs. Everywhere there were signs warning us not to feed the animals but the lemurs had other ideas and they were soon tucking into potato crisps, sandwiches and whatever else they could scrounge off of the children. Some of the children had packets of ‘jelly’ sweets in the shape of ‘babies dummies’ and the lemurs very soon made it plain they wanted the children to share these sweeties. Now the sight of a fully grown lemur, sitting on the rooftop of a café, sucking on a baby’s dummy defies description and is one of the few times when I regretted leaving the camera in the car. A small child came out of the café sucking on a ‘gobstopper’ lollipop; very soon this too, was transferred to the lemurs and it was a real eye-opener to see a family of four lemurs licking the lollipop at one and the same time – they were very adept at it and it was obviously not the first time they had been so well treated. It was absolutely fabulous to see such an interaction between the children and free-roaming ‘wild’ animals although I am not sure whether the Park Keepers would approve of such a sugar-filled diet – the lemurs didn’t seem to care one little bit!
Time to move on to Flemings White Bridge Caravan and Camping Park at Killarney. Harvey has an 8litre petrol engine, which we have also had converted to run on LPG for economy purposes but we had found very few suppliers of LPG in Ireland. The experiences that we had when trying to find ‘autogas’ in Ireland could be the subject of an entirely separate book but just a couple in passing: On one occasion I pulled onto the forecourt of a petrol station and enquired of the attendant if they sold autogas and in response was pointed to the unleaded petrol pumps. “Awfully sorry, my dear,” I said “but I need autogas – LPG - not petrol” at which point the penny dropped and the young Irish colleen apologised profusely for having mistaken my Somerset accent for an American accent - understandable, to a certain extent. Then we were told of a garage in Cork that used to sell autogas and the Wardens at Blarney gave us their telephone number to check and find out if they still did. “Oh yes, to be sure we sell the autogas, oh yes” was the encouraging answer to our question so without further ado we jumped into the car to go and check it out. On arrival at the garage we were stunned to see the rather decrepit ‘Gas Pump’ situated at the back of the forecourt, with the filler hose lying forlornly along the kerb obviously missing it’s nozzle. I found the manager and explained that we had just telephoned to check if they sold autogas and had been assured that they did, to which he replied once again “Oh yes, to be sure we sell the autogas, oh yes - but you can’t have any until next week some time - because the pump is broken!” We can’t argue against Irish logic, so we used petrol instead, much easier to find.
We did all the touristy things in Killarney and our fortnight there passed far too quickly, we could have spent another month there and still not run out of things to do or places to go. The spectacular scenery of the Ring-of-Kerry together with the shops in town meant that there was simply too much to absorb in one short visit, but one trip that I must describe was our drive through ‘The Gap of Dunloe.’ The ‘Gap,’ for those who don’t know it, is actually a beautifully scenic Ice-age glacier that the Irish for some reason or other decided to tarmac and call ‘a road’ and tourists are expected to take a trip part of the way through the ‘Gap’ in a ‘jaunting car’ – the Irish version of an English pony and trap. Mo’s injuries would not allow us to take the rough and tumble of a jaunting car so it was decided that we would go by car instead, however, the drivers of the jaunting cars had other ideas – if they allowed people to drive through the gap then they would lose their jaunting car livelihood, and like all of us, they have to make a living. So we drove out on the N71, the Ring-of-Kerry road, to a point a long way past the regular route of the jaunting cars and turned into the tiny little lane at the very far end of the ‘Gap’ where we entered the biggest and best ‘white-knuckle’ car ride I have ever had the pleasure to experience – how the Irish ever got a tarmac-layer along that track, I will never know, but I can assure you that our little Rover 25 had a real job to stay in touch with the road. In places the road would rise up an incline in excess of 1in5 for about 40 yards or so, it would have a ‘knife-edge’ summit at the top and then, without warning, immediately on breasting the summit, the road would veer sharply away to one side or the other, leaving a sheer precipice in front of you – where the road should have been. I am sure that a person with a fun-fair switchback history – or a drunken Irish navvy on one of his better days, laid the road - whoever it was, it really was a scary, funny and very exciting experience that we would not have missed for the world – and one which we would not repeat for all the Guinness in Ireland! We didn’t taken photographs of that particular area simply because the camera could not do justice to all that wonderful scenery so we bought several memory-invoking paintings of the area by local artists, instead.
Our next stopover point was meant to be the Curraghchase Caravan and Camping Park near Limerick but our reconnaissance visit in the car showed that, in our opinion, it was totally unsuited for an RV. The Alan Rogers Guide of 2003 stated that ‘the site is approached by a long tree-lined avenue that sets it well back from the main road’ and this was true – the long tree-lined avenue was, in fact, several miles long and ended in the middle of a forest where the abundance of low overhanging branches seemed to block out most of the daylight! Apart from the fear of ripping the roof mountings to shreds on the way in, there did not appear to be a pitch big enough for us, nor was any RV service point apparent and we could not see any satellite dishes in evidence meaning the possibility of a whole two weeks without the TV soap ‘Emmerdale’ – you must be joking! Back on the main road toward Limerick Mo spotted a campsite sign that took us a mile or so down a minor road but eventually showed us to the Adare Caravan and Camping Park and what a lucky find that was. A small, very friendly, family run site owned by Hugh and Marie Doherty, that appeared to be managed by a small dog called ‘Jessie’ and her four eight-week old puppies – I assure you that nobody did anything on that site without the inspection and approval by Jessie, in the nicest possible way. She was very proud of her pups and would only allow visitors to play with them after she had inspected the visitors and given them her approval. Having given each visitor her approval, Jessie was then on hand to welcome them home each time they returned from a day out, it really was quite heart-warming to receive such a freely-given welcome - not only by Jessie and the pups but also by Hugh and Marie – not very good RV facilities but a site I commend whole-heartedly and without qualms.
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| Several pitches big enough for an RV |
...and what a way to finish the day! |
We had roamed as far as Limerick whilst we were staying on site at Killarney so we planned to stay at the Adare site just for a couple of days whilst on our way further up-country to Knock. Completely unexpectedly, we met up with Terry and Wendy, a couple of regular caravan visitors to our home-site at Quantock Orchard Park in Taunton and they told us of several day outings that we should go on, which we did and thoroughly enjoyed. We also met for the first time with another pair of RV full-timers, Tommy and Dianne, but we didn’t get much chance to socialise as they were due to leave in short order, also bound for Knock. We agreed to meet up there after we had exhausted our touring capabilities at Adare but were quite surprised, a day or so later, when given a message asking us to phone them without delay. They had somehow missed the turning for the Knock site and having stopped close-by to ask for directions they had been warned by the locals not to go on to the Knock site because ‘travellers’ had invaded it. Needless to say they had immediately revised their plans and carried on toward Sligo for their next stop and, in the manner of friendliness associated with full-timers, they had immediately sought to contact us in order to warn us of the problem – and what is more, having found a couple of really good pitches on a super site at Sligo, they had ‘temporarily’ booked us in! We were happy to accept their advice and soon found ourselves on the road toward the Strandhill Caravan and Camping Park situated adjacent to the Sligo airfield – a day-time flights only, airfield.
That is when fate played another unbelievable part in our holiday. The N17, part of the route through from Limerick to Sligo, was under reconstruction in places and we found ourselves approaching a ‘coned-off’ lane which was much too narrow for us to get through - but with the contractors laying tarmac on the other side of the road and nowhere to turn around, we had no option other than to put our trust in the Gods and our nearside wheels up on the grass bank. Several vehicles in front of us there was an articulated lorry and, being as wide as us, he obviously was in the same situation as us, so I decided to follow in his tyre tracks in the ‘selfish’ hope that he would find any rocks or ditches first. We got through without mishap, or so we thought, and congratulated ourselves on our sneaky plan of following the artic – that is until a couple of hundred yards past the roadwork, where we pulled into a garage to refuel. As I climbed down from the cab, I heard a faint hissing sound coming from the front tyre and suspecting a puncture I jumped back into the cab and dropped the hydraulic jacks to support the weight of the vehicle. I found a clod of earth stuck to the tyre-valve extension and when I went to remove it, the valve came away in my hand! We presumed that the valve extension had snagged a stone in the artic tyre tracks, sufficiently hard to actually snap the threaded sleeve of the valve below the core – there was nothing for it, we would have to change the wheel. It was then we discovered that what we thought was a plastic wrapped wheel-brace was, in fact, the spanner used for manually raising the hydraulic jacks in the event of mechanical failure. How lucky was it that we had ‘unknowingly’ pulled into the forecourt of a service station with a tyre specialist workshop attached – the only one within many miles? For one thing, the wheel nuts required a 33 mm socket spanner (the old inch-and-a-half AF size) and the biggest one I had in my toolbox was only 32mm; the wheel nuts had been put on with a compressed-air wrench and even if I had the required socket, all I had to operate it was a 16-inch handle – no chance! The garage owner, in true Irish fashion, immediately drove off to a local tractor dealer and borrowed a socket big enough for the job and within half an hour, having changed the wheel and refuelled, we were back on the road. Although I helped wherever I could, the garage owner actually did most of the work and then refused to take any payment; I insisted that he took ‘a drink’ for his services and thanked my lucky stars that I had the good fortune to be where I was when the incident occurred. I pledged that as soon as possible, and before I drove much further, I would get the ‘spare’ repaired and somehow I would equip myself with a proper wheel brace just in case I got caught out again. At Sligo, I went into a ‘truck-stop’ and quickly and easily got the spare repaired with a new valve but getting the wheel brace proved to be much more difficult because of it’s unusual size - until I found an agricultural outlet which specialized in fork-lift trucks where the storeman managed to find a 33mm socket which had been on a shelf at the back of the cupboard for as long as he could remember – and he had worked there since the last World War!
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