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A Gallop Round Galway

Team Top Bananas / 09.09.2009

After two damp but not really wet Rat Races this year, we hoped our long weekend in Ireland would be blessed with some of the weather that the Irish Tourist Board promote on their publicity shots of the Emerald Isle; although the rain mostly held off for Saturday night, Sunday was a different story.

Based right in the heart of the city in 'Eyre Square', the event village was bustling with racers and the general public when we arrived on Saturday afternoon; a veritable hive of activity. With a DJ pumping tunes from a truly mobile disco van and a number of people posing to get pictures taken under the start/finish arch, the race was certainly attracting the attention of the masses.

We registered and the headed off to find our campsite and set up the Sloan-Morgan 'palace' tent; something that should have been attributed points all on its own, along with the navigation of the one way system in order to find it. Some may even call it a warm up!

Campsite located and 'base camp' established, we quickly sorted out kit and then rode back into town to make the briefing from Stewart Caithness, the course planner with his book of dirty tricks to unleash on us. With the weather looking a bit uncertain, Stewart reassured everyone that we would be getting wet - either from above or below. Thoughts of the warm swimming pool from Sheffield and then the cold reservoir swim from Edinburgh alternated in my head. What did we have in store?

Marking up the map with the control points, we soon discovered that the goody bag had not one, but 3 different maps in it. Some smaller scale city centre views, a slightly larger scale map of the city and bit of the surrounding area, and then a final larger scale map which we would hopefully only need on the Sunday for the bikes.

As it turned out, only one control didn't fit on the 'middle' sized map, so we just drew it on ourselves; with a check point at a diving board at the sea front, it didn't take much figuring out where we might be getting wet! Another control was worth lots of points but could take 30-45 minutes, so that was highlighted as something we needed to investigate quickly.

The Saturday night Mean Streets had us pounding the pavements for all of the 2.5 hours available - with Chris and Anna sorting out most of the navigation and refining our strategy as we traversed the course.

Our quest for points took us almost straight to the highest value CP to find out what we needed to do - another orienteering challenge that needed to be copied from the master maps! Even more pavements to pound to earn our points tonight.

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