ballyconnell

Date travelled: November 1, 2017

This is a place that would/will be different in a post-Brexit world.

The first place we crossed the Northern Ireland border from Ireland was uneventful and hardly marked. The adjacent town was small and run-down, reminding me of many other border cities I’ve either lived in or visited. I have no idea what people do for work there, maybe they drive a long distance.

Things I remember: pissing outside because I couldn’t hold it anymore. Losing Justin for awhile. Kids around an abandoned house of some sort who looked up to no good. A convenience store without much I wanted to eat. The impending darkness of the evening which would lead to yet another stressful drive on the wrong side of the road.

Most countries probably have towns like this – ones where you have to retrace where you’ve been on a map to make an educated guess at what it was called. Ones that if you didn’t have any pictures or automatically tracked movements on the GPS you may as well have never been because nothing sticks out.

I’m sure the lives of people there are special and as meaningful as anywhere else and there is a lot to learn about what they do, how they experience life and everything around them. It’s just that I’m extremely unlikely to ever know more than I do now, which is essentially nothing, even though I’ve been there.