Traffic

Wow, it has been a long time since my last post! Things have been going pretty normal here with plenty of things to write about but I've gotten a bit lazy.

I have a correction from the Hunting post. They DO have golden horns. Who woulda thought?

Today's post is about the amount of traffic in Maynooth. For a 3 stoplight town with a main street about the length of Brown Street from Stewart to Wyoming in Dayton, there seems to always be backups. At one end of the street there is a primary girls school. At the other is the primary boys and the secondary boys and girls schools. This is also where the parish is located. You can see the church in the first map labeled RC church. I live where the x's are above where it says Hostels. When school lets out, parents come to pick up their kids both on foot and in car. The parents who drive park halfway on the sidewalks providing problems for those who are walking. Then there are those who stop in the middle of traffic to pick up their kids. This would be like stopping in the middle of 48 in Dayton, but the kids are generally pretty fast and I am not driving so I don't really care. Then there are the parents who walk home with their kids. Most of the time there are moms with "buggies" but I have seen quite a few dads picking them up. I like it, especially because in Ireland the gender roles are still very traditional. School pick up happens everyday around 2:30.
Then pretty much constantly on Sunday there is traffic from the parish's 5 mass services with the Protestant church meeting across the street in the school gym. Then about 5 there is more traffic because people are getting out of work. At other times of the day it is very crowded and I cannot figure out what the reason for it is. From 9:30-midnight there is seldom a car to be seen but from 1:30-2:30 when the pubs and bars close there is a back up of taxis that are ever present waiting to take drunk people home.