Friday 3 June 2016

Beach or car park?

For some weird meteorological reason, Ireland is experiencing unusual hot weather at the moment. At the same time, half of France is flooded and colder than usual. I'm not going to complain about it, because I tell you, when it's sunny all day for more than 2 days in row, you'd better take advantage (you never know how long it's going to last...).

I love it when Ireland is sunny and warm. People just smile all the time and it's like the whole country comes alive. My boss brought us ice-cream for lunch the other day, my son's pre-school organised a water balloon fight, my childminder installed the inflatable swimming pool in the garden, and we've been soaking up the sun on the rooftop terrace for the past week...

I'm also lucky in the sense that I live near the beach. It's down the road so we just walk there, but the strange thing about that beach is that cars are allowed to park on it. The other behaviour I noticed is that beach-goers just stay next to their car and I really don't understand the reason behind this.

Parking is only allowed on one portion of the beach, so would you not rather lie down, have a picnic or make sandcastles with your kids on the car-free part?



We went to the beach last Sunday and took a spot quite a distance from the "No cars beyond this point" sign. As the time went by, more and more cars parked, until there was no more space on the "beach car park". So what did some drivers do? Park in the car-free  zone of course!

Before we knew it, the sea wasn't in sight anymore and all we could see was a line of cars. It was also quite worrying to see drivers trying to navigate between children playing in the sand. Surely having kids and cars in a place like that is a bit dangerous...







No cars beyond this point... yeah, right!


Coming from a seaside region in France where there is a proper cark park besides almost every beach and discovering cars were allowed to park on it here was quite a cultural shock at first.

I got used to it, like many other things, but I go to the beach to relax, listen to the waves and take a breathe of sea air... not see lines of cars blocking the view.

What do you think, should cars be allowed on the beach or not?