As promised, here is part #1 of my report on the road trip around Ireland…
After I picked up the rental car we were ready for our first big journey.
I felt like in driving school on my first driving lesson while trying to shift gears with the left hand and not to drive on the correct/wrong side just out of habit…
The first stop was the Scrabo Tower where we could get an overview of the whole eastern side of Northern Ireland.
We finally made it! The whole group out there in the sun! But see for yourself:
I’ve forgotten my remote control in the car that’s why I’m trying to outrun the auto exposure đ
Everybody was in a good mood and we were eager to see all the nice locations we picked out for the day. The journey merely started, so went on to the car. Next destination: Portaferry.
But suddenly, we decided to make a spontaneous picnic in the middle of nowhere:
You may ask yourself why we did that, having such a tight schedule and so much to explore on the way ahead? Well, we wanted to meet our buddy John from the RAC emergency breakdown team.
Unfortunately he had bad news for us, our car was totaled beyond repair (clutch/gearbox blown). For me it was a slight relief because I thought it was me who had problems with the clutch and gears but as it turned out it was the car that simply wasn’t working properly. John couldn’t tow us away because our car was too big/heavy so we had to wait for another even bigger rescue car to bring me to the airport to get a new car:
There we got a new car and were ready to go on. I just picked up the guys from the spot our first car broke down and we went to portaferry to get something to eat. After that we went straight back home because that was a big enough adventure for one day.
Just imagine driving on the left side of the road for the first time and having a gearbox malfunction right on a roundabout and shortly after that your car loosing acceleration completely on a winding coastal road…
…I recommend reading the other posts and blogs if you want to see more coverage on this.