Car Trips and Cardboard

The view from my morning walk to work. Sunrise over Blackpool's industrial park.

Car trips and cardboard sum up my past two weeks, which have seen an inexcusable lack of activity on my blo––online magazine. Cardboard because that's what I handle all day at the warehouse––leading me to the little known fact (at least outside of the warehouse world) that corrugated can, in a very short time, make your skin chronically dry. I mean skin splitting open. Strange, eh? Anyway, I'm working full-time and editing a PhD thesis, leaving me few chances to stay up to date. But as Katherine has pointed out, the whole premise of Éire Apparent was to record the trials and tribulations of looking for work in Ireland during the Great Recession. Now that I have regular work for the time being I need to figure out another route for ÉA. But in a short two months I will be back on the job market, so the original function is not obsolete. Regardless of where that leads me, I hope to have entertaining stories along the way.

As a matter of fact, I do. Last Thursday Katherine's co-worker lent us her car for a day trip out to west Cork. Our destination was Lough Hyne, a beautiful area near the town of Skibbereen. She told us that she was confident I would be fine driving her car, but any damage that happened would have to be paid for. This warning made me nervous. Justifiably nervous, as I found out on the day of the trip.

You see, it's odd and disorienting driving on the right side of a vehicle and compensating for the width of the vehicle to your left. I managed to get out of Cork City in one piece, but the real difficulty turned out to be the extremely narrow roads of the countryside and its small towns. Going through one such place at around noon, I needed to squeeze in between a large van to my right, and a row of parked cars to my left. One of the parked cars (a BMW) jumped out and clipped my side-view mirror, shattering the glass. The Beamer was unhurt, so we fled the scene.

Instead of devoting the whole day to exploring, we had to find an Opel dealer to repair the damage. Luckily the housing for the mirror was intact and undamaged, they just needed to slap on a new glass surface (took them two minutes and cost me €62––dealers....they're all the same, regardless of what continent you're on). There wasn't much exploring to do anyway; it was rainy and miserable all day. Despite these hurdles, we did make it to Loch Hyne. Along the way we got some nice views in the small town of Glendore:

We couldn't do much more than hop out of the car for a quick photo here and there because of the rain.

In a couple of weeks we're going to try out Galway, in northwestern Ireland. (This time we'll travel by bus so I'm not doing the driving). Hopefully the weather cooperates.