Morphing from Italy to Ireland

It's been a while since my last post about our travels – hope you haven’t been on the edge of your seat.  To remind you, we were last in Italy after Terra Madre in Turin and then a week or so in Bra. We had no plans at that stage and life got a bit messy: we had nowhere to go and yet we were overwhelmed by the myriad options.

So where the heck are we?  We're in Ireland!  And thank goodness, may I say.  Essentially we decided to bolt to the comfort of our friends’ home in Dublin to decide where to next.  How we got there was very Italian: simple and yet complicated at the same time.

We found a cheap Ryanair flight from Milan direct to Dublin on the 5^th of November.  It cost us €202 for all three of us, including two extra bags - a bargain in anyone’s terms.  I think roughly one-third of that was taxes.  The five-hour drive from Bra over to Milan was a bit of a nightmare, with wrong turns sending us on a scenic tour of nowhere, and me in a state of near panic worrying that we might get plunged into a tunnel without warning.  Milan is huge: it took almost an hour just to get through Milan and out the other side to Bergamo Airport, from where Ryanair flies in and out, then another half an hour to get out of there again and find a service station to fill the hire car and find the correct combination of exits to make our way back to the hire car depot.

Then we negotiated the Ryanair experience.  I don’t recommend it if A] you’re tired, B] you are travelling with a child, C] you have lots of luggage or D] you don’t like being treated like a member of the bovine family.  Given that we could tick all of the above, it was not much fun.  This is cattle class with a capital C: cheap but comfortless.

The way it works is that you pay a ridiculously cheap amount for the ticket AS LONG AS you are prepared to fly at weird times, like midnight or 5:30am.  Then you pay extra per passenger for a whole host of things:

•         Payment Handling Fee
•         Airport Check-In Fee
•         Priority Boarding Fee
•         Infant Fee
•         Checked Baggage Fees
•         Excess Baggage Fee
•         Infant Equipment
•         Sports Equipment
•         Musical Instrument
•         Flight Change Fees
•         Name Change Fee
•         Stupidity for Travelling Cheap Fee

Essentially, Ryanair works really well for adults travelling with a small carry-on bag and going somewhere interesting for a weekend.  This clearly wasn't us.

I have to say at this juncture that I think their policy of not allowing pooling of baggage allowance is unfair, especially for families like us.  For obvious reasons, we have suitcases of different sizes: a HUGE case for a great big strong daddy bear, a medium-size case for a moderately strong mummy bear, and a cute little case for an often tired and emotional three-year old to drag behind him.  The last does not lend itself to carrying 15kgs.

Anyway, being stubborn and tight, and given that we had arrived with plenty of time to spare and there was plenty of space adjacent to the check-in area, we decided to save a few quid and create entertainment for our fellow passengers.  We spread everything out and set about reorganising our nine pieces of luggage into three checked bags of 15kgs each and three carry-on bags of 10kg each, plus Oliver’s stroller and his car seat.  A major achievement.

The flight departed at 9pm and arrived at 10:30pm or thereabouts.  So, after customs, and baggage collection, and a taxi to our hotel, we flopped into bed sometime after midnight.  Completely wrecked.  But it was cheap!

Then, as a kind of wind-down and pressure-valve release, I sat up for hours watching replay after replay of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech and post-mortem of the US election.  How moving it was!  I shed bucketloads of tears and felt such optimism and hope for the future.

So, now we were in Dublin.  We were amazed at just how relieved we felt at being able to speak English!  The stress of negotiating language and cultural barriers had certainly taken its toll over the preceding weeks, despite the romance of being in France and Italy.

Our friends, Chris and Nolene (ex-pat Kiwis), embraced us warmly and we felt comfortable and nurtured in their home just south of Dublin (at Delgany).  We meandered to nearby Greystones almost every day for coffee, passing mansions of the rich and famous, and walking through a massive private golf course.  Greystones is a commuter town, and it seemed to us to be very affluent, but there were also many ‘For Sale’ signs.

The Irish economy is in a bad way, with a massive market correction signalling the demise of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, the local term for the economic boom of the last decade or so.  Town after town has houses half-finished and abandoned, evidence that the ‘bust’ part of the cycle had arrived.

We have met a number of people who have been directly and severely affected by the economic downturn.  Stories about up to 50% of the workforce being laid off are common.  There’s talk that the trade figures for this Christmas will be the worst for decades, and social support agencies are bracing themselves.

Meanwhile, in Delgany, Chris and Nole fed us well and encouraged us to formulate a plan.  So we walked and breathed and thought and walked some more and talked a bit and, when nothing else materialized, we finally decided to bite the bullet and head home to Australia.  Perhaps it was a delaying tactic, or maybe just courtesy, but before we headed to the airport we hired a car and drove to Sligo to say goodbye to our friends, Rob & Mairead, with the intention of then heading south to farewell Tom & Mary in Co. Clare.

I must say that I found the time in Delgany pretty tough, despite the great hospitality.  In hindsight, it makes sense that something was going to have to give, given the rigours of packing up the farm, on top of leaving our home in January (and then selling it in August), on top of a pretty gruelling itinerary for four months, compounded by travelling with a child who was pretty clingy and home-sick.  What gave was my health and the walls came tumbling down.  Actually, Oliver and I were both sick but I got sick enough to seek out some acupuncture and Chinese medicine, which helped in the short term.

The thought of leaving Ireland was pretty sad.  It feels like we’ve seen only a tiny fraction of it and yet there’s a tantalizing familiarity that made me yearn for more.  I don’t know if it was the desperate look on our faces but Rob & Mairead generously offered for us to stay for a while and, well, five weeks later and here we still are!  Pat’s been doing some work building a mezzanine floor in their huge shed, while Oliver and I have been doing mostly indoor stuff but also getting the polytunnel vegie area ready for winter.  I’ll write more about Bohey in the next post but suffice to say we feel utterly comfortable here.  And the Guinness is good.