Wednesday 5 August 2009

It’s said that a man’s shoes will tell you all you need to know about their occupier. I believe that a solitary breakfast sausage is likewise a motif for an entire hotel and its position in the accommodation universe. Even retreating from such grandiose extrapolation, let’s agree that a sausage is the yardstick by which you judge a breakfast, or “the breakfast”, as they say here in Ireland. Must say, I like the inclusion of the definite article. The “the” hints at the sacramental status this morning ritual merits.

In the Shannon Court Hotel, the sausages were mean looking. Thin and greasy and, like other items on this plate, looking like they’d arrived from the ‘credit-crunch-buster’ economy range at the local supermarket. I wasn’t surprised. The hotel was cheap by Irish standards, but good enough for my needs, which were for a quick and convenient stopover point not far from Shannon airport.

I’d arrived on the Swine Flu Express from Bristol at about 10:30 the previous night. Why are RuinAir planes custard yellow inside? Someone is having a laugh, and it isn’t the passengers. On Irish soil, glad to feel real air again, cool against the sweat stuck to my forehead. There is one taxi left on duty, so I share it with a silent couple going on to Limerick. Checked into the hotel. Are there any Polish women left in Poland? They are all here, in hotels, shops, tourist offices, cafés and Subways. being grimly pleasant to the undeserving.

Time for a couple of Guinnesses and a stab at the easiest pub quiz I’ve ever confronted. (“British ska band, at their peak in the early 80s. Cryptic clue: Insanity”. Cryptic?)

Not much else about the place was Irish traditional. The restaurant was Chinese, and it was in the Chinese restaurant, surrounded by lanterns and distant, seductive oriental music, that the unsatisfying breakfast was delivered the following morning.

Afterwards, a recuperative hour of “The Wire”, David Simon’s polished drama about the ruthless villains of Baltimore — and that’s just the politicians. The hard-pressed “narcos” of the police department aren’t much better. It’s often among the street-level characters that most of the humanity on offer is to be found, though there’s not an abundance of it there either.

At midday, my father and two sisters arrived in two cars, and left in one. The one I took over was an elderly VW Polo with 123,459 miles on the clock (I wonder if my sister was aware of the 123456 moment a few minutes earlier?), no radio, and rear doors held shut with twine. Do I sound ungrateful? I don’t mean to be. A hire car would have set me back £250, so here was a gift horse into whose mouth I was reluctant to peer too closely.

The rain was full on, but I needed to get going. The sat-nav was set to Galway-avoiding-main-roads, and I spent 90 minutes travelling the 40 miles along serpentine back lanes and rutted farm tracks, surfacing occasionally to swish through some blue, pink, or yellow-washed village with the mandatory Guinness dispensary, frontage lugubrious and forbidding. Probably rockin’ and rollin’ an’ hollerin’ inside.

I’ve gone off Galway City, though I was never much on it in the first place. I was there just once before, in September 2004. I had trouble getting accommodation then too, but this time was worse. It’s not just a holiday weekend, but Galway races are on, which seems to be some sort of Irish Ascot. These people are nuts about racing, and had I appreciated just how big a deal Galway races weekend is, I would have given it a wide berth.

Abandoning the traffic jams in the city centre, I headed off towards Salthill, the suburb by the sea where I had stayed previously. It’s rammed with B & Bs. I headed to the tourist office to exploit their expertise. A smiling, pretty girl was manning the shop, ready to seduce me with all things Galway. “Can I help you?”, she asked, in a rich eastern European accent. I told her I needed a bed for the night, but she explained that the man who could help me with accommodation was out for half an hour. So could she give me some advice on where to stay? She looked a little embarrassed. “I don’t know Galway very well”, explained the lady running the Galway tourism office…

Not a good start, though she was able to point me towards some streets that had “many signs”, and I opted to do the legwork myself. Mistake. I should have waited for the return of the accommodation supremo. He would have done one of two things: 1) Tapped his temple with a chewed biro while gazing into space, before saying: “Ah, yes, of course, Mrs McGillicuddy over on the cul de sac behind Whitestrands Avenue… let me give her a call…”, or 2) Issued a high-pitched, semi-hysterical titter, reminded me that this is Galway race weekend AND a public holiday weekend, and that the only available room was at Lord Lucan’s house, and as soon as I tracked him down, all my troubles would be over.

Instead, I learnt the bitter truth the hard way. I wonder how many seedy front doors I knocked on that afternoon? 30? 40? I lost count. Door after door, the story was the same. Very few places had no accommodation available. In fact, I only bothered trying the places without the “No Vacancies” sign. They simply wouldn’t let a room to a solo traveller like me — presumably because they preferred to hope that a couple, worth twice the price, would happen along the way after me. (These places charge by the person rather than the room.)

By 5.30, I’d had my fill with Galway City, and skirted round the centre, heading into the west. And I should have stayed heading west. Instead, within 5 minutes, I had succumbed to the lure of the River Inn, and its “vacancies” sign. One last throw of the dice.

The River Inn is a busy pub, and especially on the weekend of the Galway races. The bar was filled with Guinness-toting madmen, baying at the three TVs. They were drunk on excitement and hope as much as anything they were drinking. It was a happy enough scene, and I could just about imagine myself stuck to a bar stool for much of the evening if they could rustle up a bed for me.

I seemed to be in luck. Or was I? The flushed proprietress assured me: “Of course we can help you…. but you should have been here thirty seconds ago. I’ve just sold the last room in the pub. Don’t worry, I have a place for you just around the corner.”

Glowing with relief, and smugly congratulating myself on my instincts, I bought a pint of Guinness and chomped gratefully on the greasy bar snacks.

The lady vanished for 15 minutes and returned just as I was starting to feel nervous, wondering if I’d imagined the conversation, mirage-like. We trotted up the road in the rain for 100 yards (my first run in a week), stopping outside a run-down semi. This didn’t look promising. She fumbled with a fistful of keys, eventually finding one that fitted. Dank, smelly hallway, stained stair carpet. She indicated a door on the landing. “Bathroom and toilet to share with the other residents.”

There was something about the word residents that did not appeal to me.

The room was nasty. Cracked window, faded orange duvet. I asked weakly: “How much is the room?”

“Forty euro.”

Gulp.

“Can you make it thirty?”

“I can not make it thirty”. Glare. “Forty euro. It’s up to you. Someone else will have it if you don’t.”

In her mind, she was doing me a favour, and I was being ungrateful. I’m sure my sigh was more audible than intended. “OK, I’ll take it.”

She gave me a single key. “What about the key for the front door?”

“That is the front door key. You won’t be needing one for the room”

“Oh really…? So how does that work then?” I felt stupid, but had to ask the question. I’m glad I did.

“Y’don’t need a key for this door because there’s no lock on it.”

“I can’t lock the room door?”

“Sure you won’t have anything valuable, will ye?”

I felt strangely insulted by that. We looked at each other in silence for a moment. I was weary and fed up. Maybe I should risk it. But then I glanced at the orange duvet again, and out through the cracked pane at the noisy main road. The rain was still sluicing down. A sudden gust of wind jiggled the window catch. All this for forty euros.

“No thanks.”

It’s up to you. Your decision.” She sounded accusing.

I felt deeply annoyed with myself, and with her, and with Galway City as a whole. It’s probably unfair to rope in an entire city, but somehow I felt that this treatment was a reflection on everyone. Money-grubbing misanthropes who would rather see a room go empty than to sell it to someone on their own who clearly needed a roof over his head on a day when the rain and the wind were giving this city the sort of holiday weather it so richly deserved. I got back in the car and fired up the engine. This time I was leaving the city and not stopping till I was well outside.

A half hour or so later I came to a small town that I decided would do the job very nicely — if only they would have me. To my dismay, they very nearly didn’t. I tried four B & Bs, getting the same answer that I did in Galway. “Race weekend. I can’t let the double room to one person.” No matter that the chances of finding a couple or family as disorganised as me, stopping to enquire for a bed at this time of the evening, were as likely as… as me not sleeping in the car that night.

The fourth rejection did at least offer to call the next B & B along the road. Amazingly, she returned to say that they had a room for me. It was around the corner and across the bridge over the trout river. Eventually I came to what the previous lady called “a funny grey sort of house”, and rang the bell. The establishment, all seventies chic and reeking of overcooked cabbage, was a dreadful place to lay my head — but what choice did I have? To add insult to injury, the vacant looking teenaged beanpole demanded 45 euros for this sickly red, non-en suite room. But by now I was beyond caring. I agreed to take it, and went off to collect my car from the high street, ten disconsolate minutes walk away.

Just before I got to the car, I found myself walking past a smart-looking, modern hotel with a huge glass window, beyond which was a capacious bar and busy restaurant. I was like the little match girl, peering in through the shop window at the lucky few. If the River Inn in Galway was the last throw of the dice, what was this? Was it even real? Or just some sort of delirium-generated delusion?

The pressure of hope was almost unbearable as I stood at the reception, watching the manager flicking through the reservation list. The news was good. There was a room available. It was a touch more than I’d intended paying — 69 euros — but I didn’t care. This was a real hotel, not some 1970s, cabbage-stinking, red-bedded, broken-windowed, stair-creaking, lockless, grungy back room that some chancer was using to lever fifty euro notes out of desperate travellers.

The Connemara Lake is a new hotel, open just a couple of months, and still struggling to become known. So fitting me in was actually less of a problem than I’d feared. Perhaps it was a comment on my dishevelled appearance, but they offered me their “Opium” room. Each room is themed, and my curiosity about the Opium room had me speeding, Pacman-like, around the angular maze of corridors. What would I find within? Some psychotropic variation on the usual chocolate lying on the pillow? The answer was disappointingly tenuous: an elephant picture above the bed. That was it. The room wasn’t huge, but compared with the other-people’s-nightmare of the accommodation glimpsed earlier that day, I was emphaticaly not complaining. It was like opting for the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel than a backstreet doss house.

The shower was hot and lusty, and along with the change of clothes, transformed my mood. The emotional makeover was bolstered by three pints of Guinness, each in a different pub around the hotel, and a final one in the hotel bar itself. It was here that an idea took firm root. Just before I sloped off to bed, I was able to collar Ivan the proprietor, and ask him about reserving some rooms for me for next April, when a bunch of us should be over for the Connemarathon: the festival of running covering half, full and ultra marathons. Had the hotel already been discovered and booked up? He would have to check, but didn’t think so.

Oughterard is a near-perfect town for the Connemarathon guest. Big enough to have a choice of drinking establishments and restaurants, and a bank, supermarket and petrol station, yet small enough to feel tipico — or the Gaelic equivalent. It’s a fishing town, with a lake and river close by, perhaps 20 miles from Leeneane, the start of the half marathon. It’s one of the towns that runs buses to the start. In short, pretty much exactly what I’ve been seeking. Ivan’s restaurant looks perfect for a post-race banquet, and the Guinness was as good as any I’ve come across. He has finally sent me confirmation that he’ll put several rooms aside for us, but I’m still nervous that something can go wrong. It’s no reflection on him. He seems a decent man who won’t let us down, but the exasperating experience trying to find a room in Galway City and Oughterard before I stumbled across the Connemara Lake has left its mark.

I drove through Leenane, the half marathon starting point, the next day, on my way to Newport. This stretch of undulating, winding road between Leenane and Maam Cross forms the route of the race, and the second half of the marathon. It will feel different again in the spring, sprinkled with flailing marathoners, but now, on a drizzly, misty August 1st, it had a beautifully desolate, last-man-on-earth quality. This race will be more than a race. I can see it now, and can understand why someone wanted to create this event. The marathon and ultra must be particularly intense experiences here. A marathon sends you nuts at the best of times. Here, in these craters of other-worldliness, I don’t dare imagine which corners of your consciousness you might travel to.

I pressed on towards Westport, where next April, the day after the race, we may be headed, to climb Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s highest mountain, and legendary site of Saint Patrick’s snake-repelling heroics. I add a cautious “may” there because it depends partly on the weather and our physical condition. The latter refers not to the aftermath of a gruelling race, but to the aftermath of 14 celebratory pints of Guinness and the pursuing Jameson’s. But from a safe distance of 8 months away, I can blithely state that an ascent of The Reek seems like a great way to blast a few holes in a hangover, and loosen knotted tendons. The drive took about 80 minutes.

Westport is a thriving market town, always packed with shoppers. I was pleasantly surprised to find a parking spot outside the tourist office, and even more pleasantly surprised to find people in there who knew about the town. I asked my question and was directed me to McGreevy’s, a toyshop that looks like it would have been there when my mother was a local child, 70 years ago, though their parents wouldn’t have been able to afford it. When I was a kid, my mother liked to remind us what she and her six siblings would get for Christmas: an orange, an apple, and a solitary penny.

Times have changed, and my 14 year-old nephew’s birthday expectations are somewhat higher. Eschewing the opportunity to add to his Celtic DVD collection, I decided instead to buy him something of more lasting value: a chess set. He’ll eventually thank me for it.

Just over the road is an interesting bookshop called Interesting Books. A scholarly looking American called John Hurst runs the show. When I took my copy of Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller to the cashdesk, he squealed at me: “Oh, let me show you this…” He fished around in a cupboard and pulled out a biography of the great man by someone whose name I don’t recall. He carefully opened the front cover to reveal a beautiful pencil drawing, by the author, of Kerouac sitting at his famous old typewriter. Over the page, he’d scrawled a poetic tribute to the angelheaded hipster. A nice item for a collector, but I didn’t ask if it was for sale.

The road into Newport takes me past Kilbride cemetery where, six months ago to the day, I helped lower my mother’s coffin. I called in. A deferential gang of workmen were tarring the car park. It was nice of them to stop what they were doing for the few minutes it took me to park, walk up to the grave, contemplate the mound, and listen to the invisible blackbird. And then I left again, offering a brief smile to acknowledge the tarring crew.

Jake seemed pretty pleased with the chess set, and especially when I told him I’d give him 5 euros each time he beat me. To borrow his word, I “annihilated” him for the first three games, though I was conscious that he was improving rapidly under my far-from-expert tutelage. Games 4 and 5 he actually won. Admittedly, they took place after I’d returned from the pub, but this is no excuse. He out-battled me, and deserved his 10 euros. I managed to reassert myself for the next 4 games, but I suspect there will be more combat to come over the years, and I was careful not to make the 5-euros-per-victory an open-ended commitment, or I could see this becoming an expensive contest over time.

I stayed four days, finally saying goodbye to my father, two sisters and nephew in a café in Westport, where we had consumed tea, and some of the finest cakes known to humanity. I felt unusually sad when it came to the parting. I hope I’m wrong, but I felt that this might be the last time the five of us would be together in Ireland, despite it being a near-annual get-together.

With the fearsome black cone of Croagh Patrick over to my right, I drove through the southern tip of Mayo, into Galway once again. Twenty or so miles, and I was at Leenane again, the start of the Connemara Half. The road alongside the large lake is, I think, where the race kicks off. I traced its 13 mile path down through the mountains to Maam Cross. A gorgeous road, brighter than the reverse journey four days earlier. This time I was travelling in the race direction, and tried taking note of the undulations. They are thrown at you, one after another, with one extended upward stretch close to the end. This will be a killer.

Hurrah!

Footnote:
The long gap between this trip and my posting (more than a month), is down to the nervousness I felt about not securing the Oughterard hotel. Until I had the written confirmation from Ivan, I didn’t want to tempt fate by making any assumptions. And OK, I didn’t want to tip off the rest of the world about it! I’ve told him we’ll put enough Guinness and food currency through his till to make it well worthwhile. With the array of beer monsters planning to join the party, he will be well rewarded.

Oh, and the clincher for the hotel I’ve chosen is that they offer some of the finest, meatiest breakfast sausages a hungry, beer-swilling athlete could wish for.

Oughterard: