Cork and Kilarney: "MURRRDERRR!"

The itinerary in Cork was set to be a very eventful one, including a visit to the Tigh Fili Art Gallery Café and a convoy of suitcase galleries that were to simultaneously roam the streets of the city for two days. However, unfortunately nothing seemed to work out as planned and luck was in fact, not on our side for this part of the tour. The day that we arrived, I received word that the suitcases galleries from Brighton in fact could not arrive in Cork, followed by a flu that I seemed to pick up along the way leaving me with no option but to cancel the event at the Tigh Fili Café. Our hostel was a rather large one, packed to the gills with a team of 44 rugby players from Newfoundland who shook the hostel like an earthquake as they endlessly trampled up and down the stairs to and from their rooms.

Cork was a beautiful city though, built mostly on a hill overlooking a canal that channeled into the oceanfront. The weather was a bit warmer than in Dublin, and the streets were lively and full of people and activities. Unlike many cities it’s size in Canada, Cork seemed to act as a cultural and commercial hub with a busy downtown still in tact. Having already been to the Dingle peninsula, and not having a specific event planned for a while, we decided to move on to Killarney for our next stop on the tour, a small town in the heart of South-western Ireland, next to the famous Killarney National Park.
A short stop in Killarney was by far worthwhile…perhaps less for the McCleave Gallery than for Robbie and I who decided to book a day off to go biking through ‘The Gap of Dunloe’ in Killarney National Park, an insanely exhausting yet rewarding trek to fit into a single day (at least for our legs!). Robbie and I managed to convince our new friend Ruben from Spain to join us for the day. After explaining to the owner of the bike rental place where we were going, his immediate reaction was a wide-eyed expression and a single word ‘MURDER!’ trickled seemed to fall out of his mouth in his mud-thick Irish accent. He told us it COULD be done though, and busy with a swarm of customers around him, he managed to hand me a spare inner tube, pump and a sarcastic ‘good luck!’

Of course, like a bad Scooby-doo episode, Ruben, Robbie and I all agreed to go ahead with the voyage despite the warning from our old friend at the bicycle shop, all of us childishly muttering ‘murrrrderrrr’ under our breaths as we passed each other on our bicycles. The scenery was fantastic. Intense, lush forests in some parts, waterfalls, sheep that roamed the mountainsides and crossed the roads in front of us freely, views that I never knew still existed in Ireland, which of course meant plenty of hills and pllllenty of exercise! So as you can imagine, as the day moved on, our sarcastic ‘murrrrerrrrrs’ changed their tones to more exhausted and defeated ones, imagining the man’s laughter when we returned with rubber legs and all. Almost as if it were meant to happen, Ruben’s rear inner tube went flat about two third’s way through the trip, further enforcing the old man’s promises. It was quite perfect really, a worth while day off indeed, and quite an adventure to go with it!