A conversion of sorts on road to Oranmore rather than Damascus

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Old habits die hard and I’m probably from a generation of car-users ‘spoiled’ by being able to sit into our vehicles at the backdoor and then expecting to arrive within yards of our intended destination.  Out the country, of course, this is still a very achievable goal, but alas now even in a city as modestly sized as Galway in a world scale of things, the penny is beginning to drop, that our urban areas are just clogging up with cars.

In Galway city, there’s now an almost annual savage traffic snarl-up on at least one day towards the end of August before the schools return when families roll into town (as is their right) by mid-morning, but by early afternoon, it’s just a case of the urban arteries not being able to take any more cars.

Whether it’s urban myth or not, some of my colleagues maintain that this, by now annual ‘feast day’, occurs on the Tuesday in the last week before the return to school, when it tends to bucket down from the skies. (Pretty much always a safe bet in Galway for the end of August).

The case might be made for the mammies and their little pets getting up a bit earlier in the morning and having all their bits and pieces got by lunchtime but maybe that’s not a road to travel in case all of the feminists and mothers of Ireland launch a protest outside my front door.

From experience, I have learned that in the week before the return to school, there does tend to be an increasing aura of grouchiness amongst the schoolgoers and a stubborn reluctance to leave the leaba . . . a kind of sense of doom that their days of Summer freedom are about to come to an end.

So, early morning starts in that last week of the holidays are pretty much a no-no with the younger set.

Anyway, as chance would have it on the Tuesday evening of August 20 last, I found myself carless and in need of making the trip to Oranmore to reunite myself with the Hyundai i40, which should have been a pretty routine trip on the 404 bus from Eyre Square to the Galway Shawl village.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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