No, this is not me trying to learn another language. The Cornish continues (note I didn’t say progresses) and I will report on that another time.

I had a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime holiday touring the whole of the island of Ireland planned and booked. What could possibly go wrong? What went wrong was that the holiday was planned for May 2020. It is always difficult to arrange to spend long periods away from home but finally, later this year was to be the time for the rearranged Irish holiday. I do like everything planned in advance. Some call me organised and in a sense I am but this is not a virtue, it is a coping mechanism. I revisited the 2020 itinerary, tweaked a few things, made sure the tourist attractions we planned to visit hadn’t permanently closed and prepared to re-book everything.

When you are touring, three days here, four days there, everything hinges on the start date. This means I needed to begin by confirming the ferry. I didn’t do a year long course with an Irish University without learning how beautifully laid back the atmosphere is in Ireland (and no, still no certificate, one month after it was posted), so, in early January, it was not a surprise to learn that bookings had not yet opened for the ferry crossings later in the year. ‘Try next week’. After several ‘next weeks’, finally, a confirmed ferry booking.

Next step, caravan sites. Some of those we’d hoped to stay in were no longer running, others didn’t open until May and weren’t taking bookings yet. I know, I know, ‘’Twill be grand’ and all that but I really do like to know that we will have somewhere to pitch the van. Sites don’t seem to be anything like as plentiful as on mainland Britain, so arriving somewhere and hoping for the best is definitely not a great idea, at least not if you are me. Wild camping is illegal on the island of Ireland, or perhaps it isn’t, Mr Google is unclear on the matter. Having read ‘it isn’t strictly legal but you’ll probably get away with it’, I know this isn’t an option. The one person who won’t get away with it will be me. So back to trying to book sites. It was a real mixture, some online booking forms wanted to know the equivalent of the inside leg measurements of all guests, other sites took days to answer emails. We still can’t book a site for the end of the holiday. It was difficult enough finding one anywhere near the right place. Some only took motor homes not caravans, some closed for the season before we wanted to stay. In the end, we’ve had to settle for ‘just turn up no need to book’, which really doesn’t sit well with me. There are fifty odd pitches on this site, what happens if fifty one someones ‘just turn up’ and we are number fifty one? We had a site issue in Canada, two sites that we had booked had decided to close early for the season, leaving us in the lurch. Really hope this doesn’t happen again.

Tours then, booking tours is particularly important as we are only in a place for two or three days, so if we can’t get a ticket on a particular day, we can’t just go the following week. Surely we can book tours to things that say ‘early booking essential’? It seems not. ‘Early’ seems to equate to a couple of days in advance, which means we will already be away and I will have to struggle to do this when we have wifi or by phone, deep joy.

After a hectic week of googling ‘touring caravan site near x’ we are as prepared as Ireland will let us be. Apart from regular checking to see if ‘early’ is now, all that is left is to anticipate the trip and keep everything crossed that fire, famine, plague or earthquake don’t mean we have to rearrange again.