“Never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly.”
– Author Unknown
The 1980’s style motorhome sped down the middle of the narrow road towards my small rental car. The huge beast wobbled on the uneven road as it got closer. I pulled over as far as I could and stopped my car. The other driver didn’t slow down at all. So this is how I’m going to die, I thought. In a rental car on the Mizen Peninsular, in Ireland on a sunny day in July.
When the motorhome whizzed by I closed my eyes, but not before I saw that only a few inches separated our vehicles. If the driver hit a dip in the road towards my car that would be that. But that wasn’t that, and here I am to write about it.
Driving in West Cork isn’t for the faint of heart. I consider myself a confident driver, but I hadn’t driven on the left-hand side of the road in a long time, with a manual transmission, no GPS, no navigator, and no detailed map. I couldn’t take my eyes off the road for a second, which made it hard to enjoy the beautiful landscape, or see signs pointing me in the right direction.
The main road along the coast had two lanes with a dividing line. It was on the secondary roads that things started to get tricky, roads barely wide enough for two cars to get by with four-foot high hedgerows growing right into the road. Pullouts were far and few between, so when a car raced towards me the weeds and the hedgerows whipped the side of my car.
Next came the one lane country roads that looked more like someone’s driveway. If a vehicle came from the other direction one of you had to back up until you found a slight indention (often a long way back) to pull over to make enough room to pass. My confidence returned as the days passed – I no longer closed my eyes.
I asked some of the locals in my writing workshop about driving there. They had horror stories about winding up in ditches and the need to be, “Very good at going in reverse. It’s feck’n crazy.” .
It was a happy day when I returned my rental car. The agent asked if everything was alright. “Yes, everything was grand,” I said as I ran for the bus.
