Look Right and Turn Tight Then Kiss the Blarney Stone!

The hazards of driving on the left side of the road!

One the southern portion of the visiting Ireland we had many new experiences. Among them was learning to drive all over again. It is amazing how you can verbally(whispering to yourself as to not alarm the other passengers) tell yourself to stay on the left side of the road and your brain will take over forcing the car into oncoming traffic. There is also the problem with the left side of the cars in Ireland, it likes to rub up again the vegetation and rock walls found everywhere along the county side. I will have to write Renault and tell them they have a defect in the design of their cars. Actually, I got the hang of driving as was able to help out driving on some of our longer drives. That was after a long learning curve (no pun intended). My experiences included having to back up down a small one lane road about a quarter of a mile because the tractor heading for us was bigger!!. I decided the rubbing is racing theory did not work so well with a tractor. The other experience involved two cars a road about the size of a side walk and me trying to get out of the way by pulling in the closest turn off which so happened to be on the right side of the road, my brain took over and I went for it. Obviously the guy heading towards me, that I just drove in front of, thought it was a good idea because he gave me a long honk (I have determined that meant good job in Irish) !!!! It was not only my car driving that involved excitement, as the bikes in Ireland I feel have the same affinity to thorn bushes as the left side of cars. Luckily this only involved myself getting snugly with a rock wall covered in thorn bushes on our bike ride around the Dingle Peninsula.

After training my brain to ignore itself and drive on the correct side of the road, I was able to enjoy some sights. The Blarney castle was a popular tourist spot and we stopped to kiss the old stone. Actually there was some concern because we heard that the locals like to use the stone as a urinal. Once we confirmed it was safe we set up the spiral staircase to the top of the castle to kiss the famous stone that is said to give you the gift of eloquent speech. I am still waiting for the affect (I think Katie is hoping there will not be any side affects involving increases in volume levels or quantity)! Actually I did not realize we had to lay on our backs hanging our head outside the castle wall to reach the stone. There was plenty of disinfectant going around after the kiss just to be careful.