An Early Start
It was an early start on the first Saturday. Holidays shouldn’t start so early, but as my sister said, it meant that we didn’t just spend the whole day travelling, and we got there with some hours to relax and find our way around before bedtime.
We were crossing from Fishguard to Rosslare on the Ferry with our little car. We toyed with doing Rail-Sail, which worked out pretty cheap, but by the time you’ve taken into account hiring a car at the other end and the inflexibility of having to carry all your luggage, the ferry wasn’t too bad in terms of value.
On and on
The M4 goes on much longer than I thought. And Wales goes on much further than that! I know that this is a generalisation, but people drive crazy in Wales – they go much faster than mandatory speed limits, even where these are explicitly for safety reasons.
Traffic was very quiet so early in the morning and we arrived nice and early. Ports aren’t great places to have to spend a couple of hours, but we waited around at Fishguard, enjoying a cuppa and a pastry, and passing the time with a game of cribbage (which we’ve recently discovered).
Food for thought
Eventually we got going. The crossing – on the “express” ferry – was good (actually, in hindsight and with the experience of the crossing back, it wasn’t THAT good) but we both felt sea sick – which has never happened to me before. At first we wondered if we were hungry, so we ordered some nice-looking pies, but nether of us could face eating more than half of it. We resorted to standing on deck, and wishing it would be over quickly.
We were on time into Rosslare. We disembarked and had a quick and easy, journey to Blackditch – our home for the week – via the surprisingly-large town of Arklow. The good old Irish supermarket “Supa Value” is still here but, further down the road was evidence that Tesco is taking over this country too. Food is EXPENSIVE here – the weak pound contributes, but even so, the number of Euros we were paying was high!!!
Cottages and Games
Blackditch turned out to be less of a village and more an un-signed collection of houses. We drove passed at first but eventually worked out where we needed to be and we were welcomed by our landlord for the week.
The cottage we stayed in was lovely and the pictures on Shamrock Cottages website didn’t do it justice. We were expecting much smaller bedrooms, but the whole place was much bigger than we expected.
The weather was fine and we sat outside and had a restful afternoon. The evening was spent playing my new, birthday-present card game, Munchkin: A possibly slightly over-complicated parody of fantasy role-playing games, which is fun but, we thing, more fun with 3 or more players.
After an early morning we had an early night and were looking forward to exploring County Wicklow in the days to come.