Mine Fields and Magic Roads

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Hi All,
At last our big adventure has gotten underway. We set off on Thursday morning (We'll skip the leaving ceremony) from Home, Navan, and the first stop on our illustriuos and exotic adventure was the local school to vote on the Lisbon Treaty - none too exotic or illustrious. The next stop was the local filling station to pump up what I considered to be a slow puncture, which soon turned out to be a very quick puncture and so the next stop on our journey was to the local tyre fixing man. Three stops in and we were still within spitting distance of Navan, oh well. The offending screw was dealt with, in no uncertain terms and now has to live out its days rusting away on the side of the a-fore mentioned tyre fixing mans wall, no mercy was shown.
We had a few jobs to do in Dublin on the way to our first stop in Limerick. We packed up the last of Maeve's things from her old house in Dublin, got our last round of vaccinations, got yet more passport photos taken and got our international driving licences. We met up with a few emotionally restrained friends (Sarah), said our final goodbyes to Dublin and headed out into rush hour traffic direction N7 and Limerick (NOT CORK, Again Sarah).
We got to Limerick comfortably within 2 hours and had a nice relaxing evening with Maeve's brother John and Fiance Vanessa. I'm getting quite used to these nice relaxing evenings saying goodbye for the last time to everybody, chilling out and having a few beers. We've had plenty of leaving parties, do's and soirees and I think that everybody just wants to see the back of us, and considering there were more parties for Maeve than I, I think they'll be especially glad to see her off.
Today in an effort to offset what are likely to be very large carbon footprints and in order to settle a bet we went to experience a Magic Road in Waterford. I, like most of ye, had never heard of such a thing until that infamous episode of Fr. Ted, the one with the holiday and Fr. Noel Furlong (Graham Norton) doing Riverdance in the caravan. Anyway we headed off a bunch of sceptics to Mahon falls to see if the car could actually roll up a hill with absolutely no power from the engine. You'll see from the attached videos that it actually does work. The car actually climbed up the hill and gained speed, we got up to 22MPH and travelled over a distance of half a mile. we must have saved a heap on our carbon emmissions, although we did have to drive over 60 miles round trip to save the planet for half a mile. A wierd experience but I think it made an hillarous video, watch it, if you don't believe me, if I hadn't done it myself I wouldn't believe it either. Maeve was least impressed, mainly due to the fact that she was €20 down to Alan.
We ended the drive in Lismore and saw, too late, that this really pretty town is in the middle of its' annual "Travel writers festival", pity we didn't get to it, this blog could be of a higher quality as a result.

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Photos

WW2 Magnetic Sea Mine
One of many WW2 Mines dotted around Dungarvan, Co. Waterford

Lovely Lismore
Maybe should have attended the annual "Lismore Travel Writers Festival" rather than running around the playground with the rest of them.

Comments

[Fiona Broughton]

Good luck and enjoy the trip
Hi guys, Murph andI are sitting at my kitchen table reading your blog while we both should be doing a bit of work. Aaron is trying to eat the computer and Murph is restraining him. We are very jealous of ye on this dreary dull day in North Cork. We're not convinced about the magic road. We want the video and will remain sceptical until we have seen it with our own eyes. Keep us up to date, Yours enviously, Fiona, Murph and Aaron