Thierry Henry, GPS and breakdowns: An Irish road trip from hell

“It’s telling me we won’t get to Tralee until 1:44 p.m. tomorrow,” said James.

Well how could that be I thought. Tralee was only four hours away and we needed to get back by then to see the Ireland vs. France soccer game.

I pulled in off the motorway to figure out what James was doing wrong. No luck. Every which way I went about it sat nav was telling us we would not reach Tralee until lunchtime Thursday.

“It must be broken,” I said getting agitated, as I knew I didn’t know my way home.

We then tried to read the Map Quest directions backwards, but one wrong turn landed us in the middle of Dublin city center. I knew if I got to Heuston Station I would be able to get us out of the city and on the right road.

After an hour stuck in city traffic we finally happened upon the train station. Now we were home free, I thought.

No such luck.

I, yet again, took the wrong exit, and before I knew it we were on the road to Galway. After several calls to friends we ended up in Celbridge in Kildare.

As I continued to drive at the advice of those who knew better James decided to have one more look at the sat nav. After a few minutes of fiddling with buttons, he turned to me as I’m driving and said, “It says it’s on BICYCLE mode.”

It took a few seconds for the penny to drop before we realized that the reason it was taking us nearly 20 hours to get to Tralee was because sat nav thought we were cycling a bike!

At this stage we couldn’t help but laugh; in fact we laughed so much I nearly rear-ended a truck in front of me. Finally, three hours after leaving Swords, we were on the right road.

Unfortunately we weren’t even close to making it back to Kerry for the big game so we pulled in at a town called Mountrath, about an hour outside Dublin.

By now all of you reading this know how gut wrenching the Irish game was. We couldn’t get our head around the result and the cheater Thierry Henry.

A quick trip to the bathroom before departure frightened the life out of me. I glanced in the mirror while washing my hands to discover, to my horror, that my lips had swollen up like balloons.

I looked like I had just undergone an aggressive session of Botox. My lips were bigger than Angelina Jolie’s at this stage.

Confused and embarrassed by the sight in the mirror, I laughed. What else was there to do at this stage? It was too late to call the place I had the teeth whitening done so I had to grin (literally as my mouth was so swollen) and bear it until tomorrow.

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Nster.com