June 26, 2003
Rambling Rose...
In a totally unrelated story, Miss Salthill has won the Galway Rose title, and very easy on the eye she is, too. Her aunt won the Rose of Tralee title in the Sixties, so it runs in the genes. I'd like to think that I'm not prone to exaggeration but I have to say that the Rose of Tralee festival has to be the greatest pile of sh*te I have ever endured.
In the late eighties, I worked for one of the Irish banks, in their headquarters (bringing the system down from within). Like almost every other company in Dublin at the time, it was staffed almost entirely by country folk. And you would not believe how many of them had booked a weeks holidays for the festival. You have to come down to Tralee, it's mad craic. And the women. Well, that sold it to me (I was young).
By the time the train from Dublin arrived in tralee (in roughly the same time it took the Apollo astronauts to reach the moon), the monsoon season had begun in Tralee. We were camping on the GAA pitch - they had cunningly tempted the tent people to spend their money in the clubhouse instead of going to town by setting the price of Guinness at 1.25 a pint (as I recall, the saving was somewhere in the heady regions of 5p a pint, but lets face it, if we were stingy enough to camp in a swamp for the weekend, even a penny would have kept us there). We sat in the clubhouse, drinking and steaming (we had got drenched running from the train to the shuttle bus and on to the clubhouse).
We had a dilemma. We could drink our heads off until closing time and hope the rain would have stopped by then. Of course, by then, we would be drunk, and tent-erecting might prove a tad challenging. Or we could put up the tent in the pouring rain and then return to the clubhouse with peace of mind. Which is what we did. To discover that the monsoon had finished for the weekend, and the sky was clear and full of stars. Bugger! While everyone else, worse for wear, struggled with their tents, we hopped inside. To find our clothes and sleeping bag sitting in a puddle. Our tent was waterproof, so all the water that had accumulated inside the tent while we assembled it could not escape (We would smell of stale cabbage for the weekend, and even today, when Das Boot is shown on TV, I get flashbacks to that miserable weekend). And things would only get worse…
Cloudtravel's excellent travel site has a far happier account of a trip to Kerry (and the West).
Posted by Monasette at June 26, 2003 11:03 PM