Waterford, Ireland

by chris cunningham

Yesterday I drove down from Northern Ireland via Belfast and got lost along the way. I ended up in the town of Monaghan by accident and started looking for a place to stay. I was out of luck because this weekend just happened to be a bank holiday so all the hotels were booked. Amanda at work had given me her parents number in case of an emergency. They live in Monaghan, but it was now 11:00pm and I thought it might give them a fright if I just showed up out of the blue. “Um, hi… yeah..” I went over it in my head a few times before I resigned myself to the inevitable. So I trekked on all the way down to Dublin, hoping and praying there was a room near the airport. Fortunately there was a room at the hotel I’d being staying at during my layover flight to Los Angeles in a couple of weeks. The other thing this would let me do is have today to drive down to Waterford as a day trip. The trip down was nice and somewhere along the side of the road was a gypsy like camp of trailers. Straight out of the movie Snatch.

Once I got down to Waterford, which I thought was quite nice, I didn’t really have much time so I went to the Waterford Crystal factory and took a tour and picked up a few gifts. I’m not a big crystal fan but it was interesting. I bought a couple of Irish Coffee glasses for myself even though I don’t drink coffee. I had all the stuff shipped, but not after talking to this incredibly beautiful sales woman Jacinda for more than an hour. The typical red hair and blue eyes thing is really working on me at this point. I get it now. Sometimes I forget how fascinated people are by Hollywood stuff, and trying to explain what I do and how it fits into all of that can make conversations really easy. You field a lot of questions such as, “Are people in L.A. that shallow?” Yes. “Do you see stars walking around all the time?” On the way back, I got lost once again. I’ve got it figured it out. I get lost only when it’s beautiful out. I’m to busy to be bothered with maps at that point. I had a few hours to get to Dublin and caught the sunset on my way out of Waterford.