How do you meet like-minded people? By doing the things you love, of course. Alan Valkenburg decided to snub the pub and get away from it all. It didn’t go as planned
Shortly after my wife, Catherine, graduated from uni with her accounting degree, we headed over to Ireland to start married life together. She needed to complete her articles, something that would take roughly three years. During this time, would-be accountants earn a pittance, and so our logic was that she’d earn said pittance in euros rather than in rands, and at least that way pay off her student debt a bit faster.
Everyone knows the Irish to be friendly and welcoming – céad míle fáilte – the land of a hundred thousand welcomes and all that. So what better place to make our fortune and some lifelong friends? Well, turns out you’ll struggle with the latter if you’re not a big pub person and you’ll struggle with the former if you are.
Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a drink, but not three or four every second night. And this reluctance to head to the pub had us socially stunted. Going round to someone’s house just wasn’t really done, you see. A birthday? Meet at the pub. A farewell? The pub. A big sports match? The pub. A funeral? The church, then the pub.
We gave it a shot, but the pub thing hits not just your wallet but your waist, and it just wasn’t us. We were becoming lazy and if this continued, we’d soon be like our neighbours, content to sit in front of their TVs over the weekend, ordering takeout. So we decided on a change: we would be outdoorsy; we would hike, we would camp, we would braai! Where better to meet like-minded people than at a campsite?
We set about exploring the island bit by bit. We targeted a new county one weekend every month, hiring a car and heading off. We’d ticked a few off our list when our first summer arrived. Why not go camping in the beautiful, green Wicklow?
I found a campsite online, booked a spot and we arrived on a Friday evening. The summer meant that we still had a few hours of daylight to enjoy so we set up our tent and dined on a pre-made pasta and tuna dish.
Before bed we noticed some lights flickering from inside the tent of our nearest neighbour and were dismayed to see that the family’s kids were crouched around a TV set, playing PlayStation games, extension cord connecting them to the plug point. ‘These fellas really know how to get away from it all,’ we chuckled to ourselves.
Illustration by Jess Nicholson
Morning dawned and we woke, ready to explore the countryside. A visit to a lough and a monk’s chapel? Why, thank you. Tea and scones at a quaint little country tea shop? Don’t mind if we do. Generally speaking, in Ireland, if you’re out for the day, you don’t head anywhere without packing your brolly because while it may be sunny right now, you can rest assured it’ll be pelting down in a few hours. But we were in luck, the rain stayed away and we enjoyed a lovely stroll in the mountains and marvelled at the sights before heading back to the campsite for our supper, something we’d been looking forward to all day: a braai, with real boerewors spotted in the window of a butcher. I’d been lucky to find a small, re-useable metal braai at a charity shop a few months earlier. It wasn’t perfect – the grid only about A4 size – but any port in a storm, eh?
The campsite was strangely quiet as we returned, close to 6pm. I went about setting up the fire spot, collecting rocks to surround our metal braai to try to get the right feel. Fire lit, I cracked open a beer, my first of the week, and stood back to enjoy my handiwork. Drip. Hmm. Those clouds had been drawing nearer. Drip, drip. And it did seem a lot darker suddenly. Drip. Drip. Ah, feck! Drip-drip-drip-drip-drip, pour.
The fire was in its infancy, it would not survive this. There was only one thing for it. Catherine donned her rain jacket and grabbed the brolly, sheltering herself and the fire. It quickly became apparent, though, that the umbrella could not cover her and the fire. And that’s when I knew she was a keeper. She gave in to the rain and held the brolly high over the fire. I did the natural thing and took a photograph.
Thirty minutes later, with the rain easing off, several cars returned to the campsite with pizza boxes and McDonalds bags. That’s where they’d all gone! A quick look in our direction and they headed into their tents for some takeout and TV.
I have no doubt that today they’re probably sitting around their TVs, or probably in the pub, telling the story of the time they went camping and saw this ridiculous couple – soaked to the bone, barbecuing in the rain.
This article originally appeared in the March 2022 print issue of Getaway.
Originally written by Alan Valkenburg.
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