Athlone’s friendly welcome a real winner
IT’S 9pm on a Friday and we’re in a car, driving around in the dark. Needless to say, we shouldn’t be going around in what seems like circles; we should be enjoying dinner at L’Escale Restaurant at the Hodson Bay Hotel, but we’re lost in Athlone town and sheets of rain are crashing off the pavement rendering the place a ghost town.
Eventually, we spot a brave smoker standing at the door of a bar.
We pull up and sheepishly ask how to get back on the Roscommon Road. All I can say is that if she could have hopped into the car and drove us to the Hodson Bay, she would have done so. She gave us directions, repeated them and made sure that we had it pat.
I turned and smiled at my husband. “See what I mean? THE nicest people in the country”. It’s a mantra (along with, unfortunately, ‘don’t worry, I know my way around here’) that they had heard repeatedly during the previous 2.5 hour drive.
My mum is from Co Roscommon so I’ve spent a lot of time in the Midlands over the years. By contrast, my dad hails from Kenmare so there were always marital jibes about the majesty of the Kerry landscape versus the monotony of the bogs.
But even as a child my take on it had been: Kerry may have raw beauty but people in the Midlands are the nicest in all Ireland. My recent weekend in Athlone reaffirmed that.
Despite arriving at the Hodson Bay, one and a half hour behind schedule and after the Waterfront bar had officially stopped bar food, we were readily served in the conservatory. I had a good roast lamb, my husband a mediocre seafood chowder and the children decent burgers and chips.
The hotel was heaving and remained like this throughout our stay. With its location on the shores of Lough Ree, it’s the people’s hotel and you can see it’s the default location for weddings, funeral lunches, christenings and every kind of social gathering in the town.
We had a family room with two adjoining quarters separated by a wardrobe area. The hotel recently won a Parent’s Choice gold medal and my eight-year-old is adamant that the buffet breakfast sealed that deal.
Breakfast at the Hodson Bay is legendary with a hot buffet and a table laden with cereal, muesli, fresh and dried fruit, juices, yoghurts and the all-important pancake machine.
If the eight-year-old could have lived on pancakes for the weekend, he would have as pancakes were dispensed from a kid-high machine that children can control by keying in how many pancakes they’d like before waiting to see them drop out of a slot and drowning them in maple syrup.
Our first stop on Saturday was Ballinahown Craft Village which, although in County Westmeath, is a 20 minute drive from the Hodson Bay. To get there, however, we had to drive past Bay Watersports, which is located just outside the main door of the hotel.
Try explaining that to an 8 and 13-year-old boy?
An hour later though there wasn’t a mention of water trampolines. In fact there was zen-like calm as the four of us sat in Helen Conneely’s glasshouse workshop rubbing a serrated rasp back and forth over four chunks of bog oak. Helen is one of the country’s foremost bog oak sculptors and I can’t recommend attending her craft classes enough.
Within minutes of taking the bog oak in your palm, you find yourself lost in its form and in trying to bring that to life. We rasped, we sanded and we polished our wood for over an hour before, Helen cut inscriptions on our bog oak using laser printing technology. It was one of our most pleasant mornings as a family.
They have a great community going on at Ballinahown, which is an ecovillage, and as we sat there sawing, we watched local children building a community butterfly farm. Further down the village stands a telephone box library, from which locals can borrow books. Community bikes also rest adjacent to the community centre.
Helen has one of the best stocked design shops in the country (www.celticroots.ie) beside her studio, while Core Crafted Design, which hosts a boutique tea room with Avoca-quality food across the road, offers more of the same and is a great showcase for local artists. The goods on sale in both shops are irresistible.
It was off then to Lough Boora Discovery Park which was developed by Bord na Mona from an exhausted cutaway bog. With 22 kilometres of various colour-coded cycleways and walkways (with bikes, trailers and tandems for hire for €3 per hour), it’s a nature lovers paradise and as you watch a hare dart across a tobacco-coloured wetland and a stocky little woodcock searching for food beside the grey Finnamore lake, you will be held by a landscape that should be appreciated by Irish people more.
If there was something Zen to our morning in Ballinahown, the theme carried through to the afternoon as we rolled through the unique landscape with the only sound our bikes and trailer rolling over gravel.
But by 8pm that was all over: we were transported rapidly from pared back simplicity to wanton luxury as we sat down to dinner at the 12-storey Sheraton Hotel in Athlone town centre eating quail, barbary duck, seared fillet of hake and Atlantic code on summer green risotto at La Provence restaurant.
Walk into the lobby of this urban hotel and you just want to fall into one of the leather armchairs, order a drink and watch the world go by.
The hotel, which has a womb-like Elemis spa designed by Stephen Pearce, has managed to admiringly pull off being chic without being offputting. Again, in all the staff there is a gentleness meets ‘easygoingness’ that is so unique to the Midlands. I’ve now added staying in the Sheraton’s penthouse suite to my bucketlist.
The Hodson Bay Hotel has a hotel room sale this month. Room rates from €69, stay two nights from €109 per room based on two adults sharing. Breakfast included. Book before Jan 31. Available for selected dates January - March.
Sheraton Athlone is offering B&B plus one dinner from €99 per person sharing and 2 B&B and one dinner from €129 per person sharing
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