Karen McNulty
Beyond fulfilling a keen ambition to slide down the pole at a fire station (I did Fire Service for my Bronze award), and hearing my daughter's own war stories from her school's (apparently) wettest ever DofE expedition, my two fondest memories were receiving my Silver award from Irish rugby legend Willie John McBride and my improvised strategy for rescuing an expedition before it had even begun!
As part of my Silver award, I was in charge of accompanying and supervising a Bronze award exoedition group from my school. We were to travel to the Antrim Glens by bus from Belfast and locate a youth hostel in Cushendun, where we would be based while we did all the hard yards with our backpacks the following days. All went well until the bus (the last one of the day) unexpectedly terminated a good few miles short of our destination. It was getting dark, the road ahead was a deserted, narrow cliff edge coast road in the middle of nowhere and we were a large group of mostly mid teen girls lugging heavy camping backpacks who didn't know the area at all. What to do? Our teachers weren't joining us till the next day. I guess they thought we could safely manage catching a bus on our own! I knew it wasn't a good idea to walk. We didn't have money for taxis, even if we could find enough of them this far up the Antrim Coast Road in the early 1980s. There were no more buses. So I had to improvise. I reckoned the police might be the best people to ask for bright ideas. I went into the nearest pub, sweet talked the landlord into letting me use the phone and rang 999. I think it must have been a quiet day at the office as the local police not only didn't tell me to get lost, but turned up with multiple squad cars and happily drove us to Cushendun themselves. Although it was a wild night and the youth hostel was a bleak building perched on its own on a rocky hillside, I don't think a group was ever so grateful as us to walk through its doors to a warm welcome and a hot meal. Phew!
As part of my Silver award, I was in charge of accompanying and supervising a Bronze award exoedition group from my school. We were to travel to the Antrim Glens by bus from Belfast and locate a youth hostel in Cushendun, where we would be based while we did all the hard yards with our backpacks the following days. All went well until the bus (the last one of the day) unexpectedly terminated a good few miles short of our destination. It was getting dark, the road ahead was a deserted, narrow cliff edge coast road in the middle of nowhere and we were a large group of mostly mid teen girls lugging heavy camping backpacks who didn't know the area at all. What to do? Our teachers weren't joining us till the next day. I guess they thought we could safely manage catching a bus on our own! I knew it wasn't a good idea to walk. We didn't have money for taxis, even if we could find enough of them this far up the Antrim Coast Road in the early 1980s. There were no more buses. So I had to improvise. I reckoned the police might be the best people to ask for bright ideas. I went into the nearest pub, sweet talked the landlord into letting me use the phone and rang 999. I think it must have been a quiet day at the office as the local police not only didn't tell me to get lost, but turned up with multiple squad cars and happily drove us to Cushendun themselves. Although it was a wild night and the youth hostel was a bleak building perched on its own on a rocky hillside, I don't think a group was ever so grateful as us to walk through its doors to a warm welcome and a hot meal. Phew!
