The drought breakers hit Ireland.

Friday was sunny in London and Rohan and I wandered up to paddington station to catch the train out to heathrow so we could jet off to Cork for my first visit to Ireland. As I went through passport control the guy on the desk said the spelling of my name was not the posh form of sharon - apparently that would be sharan. I think he has a distinct misunderstanding of vowels, but instead I told him that it was fine and I would just spend the rest of my Friday weeping coz I wasn't posh. I think he thought I was serious as he kept patting me on the arm and apologising - I was probably more offended by the arm patting though....

We touched down in Ireland and it was pouring with rain - uh oh the weather jinxes strike again, everywhere we go we always take the rain with us. The hostesses on the plane advised that if we had a rain jacket we might like to put it on ...jacket schmaket we're from ballarat. We sailed through cork airport and got to the hertz desk where we got sent off with a little man in a van....the moment we arrived at the place to pick up our car the computer system crashed and the guys in the office went into meltdown apologising and saying 'oh god, we've got to get you out of here, you're only here for 2 days, you don't want to be spending it all in here with us'...i don't know i wouldn't have minded, they could keep talking, i would keep smiling each time they spoke and if they could have done an irish jig all would have been good. They continued to fight with the computers before turning and asking us if we had a match and some petrol. Thankfully that wasn't needed and soon we were zooming down the highway towards Killarney with Rohan very bemused to see a man standing in the middle of the highway selling newspapers in the rain. By the end of the weekend this seemed entirely normal to us.

It continued to pelt down with rain and on the radio they were saying 'jesus , whats with all this rain? we didn't expect this'.

The roads were flooding and things were looking grim, the poor Irish they didn't know that the drought breakers had hit town.