DAY 22 and 23

10:00 am Camp begins. In the states camps have official looking tables that collect money and take down names. Here each kid turns in his money and then at the end of the day we ask each one if they have paid. Total honor system.
11:30 am Camp here is funny. The camp director will walk up to me and tell me I have the next hour and a half. Luckily the Haggerty family business is camps and I have drills to kill time out the wazoo.

5:00 pm After camp, took a jog around Ballina. It has a neat new pedestrian bridge and I went inside the cathedral. Very pretty. The town is right on one of the best Salmon Rivers in the world. Old men are waist deep in extremely cold water to get themselves one and only one (by law) salmon.

7:00 pm At dinner TK tells the funniest story. They have two cats now. About four years ago they saw one of their cats dead on the road. They scooped him into a box and buried him in the back yard. Then two days later the same cat came traipsing into the yard all muddy from his adventures. The daughter was only 13 and thought the cat had come back from the dead and crawled out of the dirt. But apparently they buried some other person’s cat.

9:00 pm Real Madrid trains in Ireland to get out of the heat. They just played a local Irish soccer team in a warm up match. The Irish team consists of part-time players and a total payroll of 25,000 a week versus 2.5 million a week for Real Madrid. This game is the equivalent of the LA Lakers playing a local men’s league team. In typical soccer fashion it was scoreless until three minutes left when Real Madrid broke the dreams of the collection of elevator mechanics and school teachers (actual careers of players).

DAY 23 10:00 am Camp begins. It’s like Groundhog Day for me at this point. Of the 23 days of this journey on 17 of them I have led the camp in stretch at exactly 10:15 am. Never 10 am due to Irish time.

11:45 am One of the wee campers grabbed a rebound and instead of moving up court, she takes the ball out of bounds. We figured she must have thought the ball went in, but when she did it again five minutes later, we realized there is an obvious rules interpretation problem with the young girl.

5:00 pm Arrive home from camp

5:02 pm Sit in recliner. Those that know me well know exactly where this is going.

5:03 pm Pull up bar on recliner.

5:04 pm Pull down hood on jacket to shade eyes from sunlight.

7:00 pm Wake up from greatest nap of all time.

7:30 pm Excellent meal of chicken curry and rice. NO PATATOES!! I am in withdrawal.

8:30 pm Cell phone plans are different here. Rather than monthly plans, you buy “credit” or a certain amount of minutes. Needless to say minutes are more expensive and more precious. Just saw ad here about cell phones with two people getting locked in a walk-in freezer. Spoofing on how precious the minutes are the guy refuses to call for help because he knows the next shift will be in there in four hours. So this reminds me of an actual story involving a freezer. A Clemson buddy of mine had to do community service for underage drinking. He was helping out a church by stocking their walk-in freezer. After being in there 20 minutes, they forgot about him and locked the freezer. He was stuck in there 2 hours wearing shorts and a t-shirt. They were polite enough to credit him for 8 hours worth of community service.

10:00 pm Jimmy’s pub is my new favorite pub in Ireland. Again, not that I am any connoisseur, but most in Ballina will tell you and I agree that this pint of Guinness is a 9.5. Plus, it is only 3 euro when everyone else charges at least 4. Obviously, I made sure to buy my round here before we moved to more upscale joints. Top it off with the fact that the owner/barkeep looks and sounds just like Peter’s dad in the Family Guy. He was wearing a tie behind the bar. I thought that was an extremely classy touch.

10:30 pm TK tells a hilarious story about a hole in the wall pub where his mom now lives. He tried to order a hot whiskey, which apparently involves heating up the glass and adding lemon and some other stuff to make an amazing liquor concoction. But when he ordered she said come back when the band is done. He said, “Huh.” She explained they couldn’t do it while the band was playing. If she turned on the burner to heat the glass, they would blow a fuse. She says, “Love, just come back at intermission.” Then he has to pee later and can’t find a toilet. He asks the same pretty lady and she points out the door to an outhouse 50 feet out in a field. He says, “Really? There’s nothing else, it’s pouring down rain?” Plus its five degrees Celsius. She replies, “Oh love, just stay along the walls of those buildings and you’ll be fine.” TK does say even with all that it is his favorite pub in Ireland. Great music, beautiful girls, fun people and an outhouse. I think Toby Keith talks about an outhouse in the last verse of “I love this Bar.”

11:00 pm We went next door to hear some really, really good jazz. I try to get into jazz, but I find it so boring on CD or on the radio. But live jazz is usually excellent. This was no exception. We then walked home, stopping for the two I am with to pee into the river, right in front of a “river guard.” His job is to ensure no one illegally fishes at night or urinates into the river, but lucky for us he was playing away on his lap top.