Hitchhiking Kilkenny to Cork

Thirty-minute walk through the center of Kilkenny to find a good spot.

Picked up a map of Ireland along the way. Finally, a good spot: cars going slow, space to pull over, across the street from a busy gas station. After an hour wait, which seemed a little long for such a spot, a thirtyish guy (Jer) picked me up, told me about his hurling team and the history of the landscapes as we made it to the coast and turned south. He took me past Waterford, past Dungarvan and Youghal.

Because both the hostel manager last night in Kilkenny and Jer today warned me of “yellow alert” weather for tonight and the weekend, I thought it best not to stop in those towns but to try to make it to Cork.

Jer dropped me in the cute little town of Killeagh, but no place to stand. I walked out toward Cork, but it became clear that a good place to stand was not near. And I didn’t want to get too far from town with the clouds forming. I walked back to the Killeagh grocery, found out about a bus to Cork, bought a discounted sandwich, shared it with a stray dog, and decided to stick out my “CORK” sign while I waited for the bus. The bus stop was the only place in the village to pull over; hence it had an endless stream of temporary parkers; thus, effectively, no place to pull over. I stuck out my sign anyway at a pedestrian cross with a traffic light. In less than five minutes, a work van stopped in the lane of traffic to gesture me in.

This is one of the weird things about hitchhiking. Right when you have a disastrous spot where no one can pull over without endangering multiple lives nearby, you get a ride. Like the time the Italian driver stopped his tour bus full of West Africans to pick me up in Brussels. Or the times in California where people stopped quickest on the worst ramps.

The driver would take me all the way into Cork, but I only understood about 10% of what he said. His dialect was much heavier than the Kilkenny dialect. He told me the name of his dialect, but he said it in dialect, so I have no idea what it is or how to transcribe it. I managed to pick up that he was going to do some masonry work in Cork, that only one of his many brothers and sisters had left their village, breaking his mom’s heart by moving to Canada. Oh, and also he thought the cost of cocaine was too high. It almost wasn’t worth having a drug habit any more. Like so many of my drivers, he went way out of his way to make sure he dropped me where I could walk to the city center and find a coffee shop with wifi.