Free upgrades are one of life’s little rewards, cherished and remembered. First class. Room with a view. Bigger car.
Unless you’re in Ireland. If you’re renting a car in Ireland, a free upgrade can be a burden.
We got a free upgrade.
Next to the Guinness brewery in Dublin, the Ring of Kerry may be Ireland’s most popular tourist attraction. It’s a scenic drive, a 111-mile loop densely populated with tour buses on winding roads barely 20 feet wide. Unless you enjoy abject terror, the smaller the car the better.
We named our (upgraded) Hyundai Harry, after the prince. The day we collected Harry was the day we were to watch The Wedding, and the betrothed were on our mind. Although Harry is black, he’s neither as comely nor as delicate as Meghan (he’s a clackity diesel), so he’s Harry.
Harry the Hyundai
Besides, he’s sorta big. Grownups sit comfortably in his back seat. All of our luggage fits in his trunk. There are enough cupholders for three beers! (And that’s just in the driver’s door.) In spite of that, at home he’d be a small car. On Irish roads, he’s positively Bunyanesque.
Did I mention the left-side-of-the-road, driver-on-the-right thing? Twice Louise and I have opened the wrong doors to get in. There’s the gearshift too—it’s almost impossible to rent a car in Ireland with an automatic—which is shifted with the left hand. Harry’s is a six-speed, just to add to the confusion.
It’s all tolerable, until the tour buses take to the road. They all travel in the same direction—clockwise—around the Ring, so they don’t meet each other head on, but that means the rest of us either go the other way around (and meet the buses head-on ourselves), or follow them, slowly, as they’re nearly impossible to pass.
Tour bus on the Ring of Kerry
The only solution is to leave early in the morning. The buses get underway at 10:00; we departed at 8:30. At least we had the road to ourselves for a couple of hours, and a spectacular couple of hours it was.
(Click any image to enlarge)
The Ring of Kerry includes a Twelfth-Century abbey, a rare Irish beach (O’Carroll’s, where Ryan’s Daughter was filmed), hundreds of B&B’s, thousands of sheep…
…and enough tour buses to last a lifetime.
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The Expat Almanac 
The Irish posts make me want to visit the Emerald Isle. The pub entry was delightful. So the big car has a stick shift. Can’t imagine. We drove on the left side in Australia, with an automatic and would not have wanted to add shifting to the counteracting of muscle memory. As it was, every time we thought we were hitting the turn signal, we hit the windshield wiper lever, not really a clear signal to the other drivers, even though the wipers were wildly flailing.
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Indeed, Anita, it’s all about muscle memory. And when the roads get REALLY narrow and a car is oncoming, we just slow to a creep and listen for the scratches coming from the left side of the car. 😉
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