We Go to Ireland

It was a very big collective “we” – DD and me, all three kids, two sons-in-law, a girlfriend, the four grandkids, and DD’s Mom. 13 total, wrangling a group that ranged in age from ten months to over eighty years. The occasion was my 65th, although the actual date of the milestone was the day we flew back from Dublin. We were there for just over a week and the first day it was kind of a wonder that all three cars stayed on the road, given the sleep-deprived state of their drivers. We took an overnight flight from New York to Dublin, picked up the rentals, and immediately drove a hundred or so kilometers north to Kilsaran, County Louth, smallest county in Ireland and the ancestral home of our family name, in all its varied spellings.

In Kilsaran we found one C. headstone in a cemetery, of a poor baby that lived scarcely a year and then we drove a kilometer into town proper to have lunch at a little place we couldn’t find at first because the construction guys at the church gave us a name for the restaurant that had not been used in years, all trace of signage of it gone, but was immediately recognized by residents of the tiny town when we finally inquired after it. Food was OK – OK, as J. said on the flight home, the operative word for pretty much every meal in Ireland. We learned you don’t get bills in pubs, just pay on your way out; we signed the guest book and – sometime after three o’clock – got on the highway to Adare, knowing it was in County Limerick and depending on our GPS guidance.

My heart sank when we passed a mileage sign that said Limerick was still nearly 200 K’s away. (Unlike the States, road signs on Irish highways list the closest town at the bottom of the sign and the furthest at the top.) Of course, everything is in kilometers, not a problem for any of us, but driving is also on the left side of the road and that was a new experience for C. definitely and B. probably, who were at the wheels of the other two cars. D. said later that it was about the time we saw that kilometer distance sign that she was thinking of asking B. to just pull off the road and get a hotel. It was even tougher for the third car for they got separated at once back in Kilsaran because we went wrong out of the restaurant and had the GPS lady constantly, as she said, “recalculating.” But eventually we all made it, drivers awake if few others in the cars, to the villas of Adare Manor, outside the town of the same name.

Day 2, a Wednesday, we spent in Adare, a lovely little town with many ruins and a row of small thatched cottages along its single main street. We also took the tour of the Manor and learned why, along with the Irish flag and the US flag, the Marine Corps flag flies at the entrance to the complex’s golf club. The answer is that the man who bought the property in 1982 is an ex-Marine named Kane, Mr. Kane in Manor employee speak, who made his fortune on Wall Street. The dinner at the golf club restaurant that night, included in the package, was very, yes, OK, or in New York Times restaurant rating speak, “Satisfactory”.

Thursday we drove for half an hour to Bunratty Castle and Village, the village a collection of recreated Irish houses and stores from the mid-19th to mid-20th century. The castle had narrow winding steps that would have given DD severe claustrophobia had she mounted them. Castles are overrated – not quite “seen one , seen ‘em all,” but certainly a few are enough – for me at least. The countryside all through much of the counties is dotted with stone ruins of one sort or another and from various centuries. The land is very beautiful and not for nothing is Ireland called the Emerald Isle, but it had to have been a very harsh existence for much of its history and a very lonely one as well. It rained at least a little every day we were in Ireland. My sister Annie, I said to DD as we were driving back to Adare from Bunratty, would have loved to visit Ireland and could never have lived there, where the best season sees frequent rain and the temperature rarely rises into the 70s.

Friday we caravanned to the spectacular west coast of Ireland, to the tiny port town of Dodin where we took a boat called The Happy Hooker – presumably a reference to its other potential use rather than to the world’s oldest profession – and rode out to the first and smallest of the Aran Islands, Inishere. There we got wet – it was the day of steadiest rain --, climbed up to the highest point on the island to see more ruins and an Irish graveyard, built on top of the remains of a chapel dating to the 11th century. Pretty much soaked, we repaired to one of the island’s pubs for what at the time was our best pub experience, including for me a much more than OK lunch of beef and Guinness stew. Two of the three cars then spent an hour at the Cliffs of Mohor, certainly worth seeing, over 700 feet high, and apparently the most visited tourist attraction in Ireland, but not I think likely to come out a winner in the voting for the World’s New 7 Wonders of Nature. Fully my fault for only two of the three cars getting there and if we were doing this trip all over again, we would certainly have rented cell phones to enable everyone to stay in contact.

On Day 5, we stayed on the manor property and in Adare, touring a Norman castle where we saw the clever construction that widened the openings in the wall inside the castle to make it easier to shoot arrows out, but kept them very narrow from the outside, requiring a lucky shot to get through. Much easier, if only randomly effective, I suppose, to shoot over. Also very interesting that as you climbed down from top to bottom on the steps they are laid out in a clockwise direction so that those defending would always have the right arm free for sword use while the attacker, coming up the steps, would have his arm hindered by the stairwell wall. About this time I realized that we were staying nowhere near long enough in Ireland and also had the revelation while driving that as our travels continue I don’t have much of an urge to go to new places any more, with the exception of Australia/New Zealand and Iceland, but instead want keep revisiting and digging deeper into places we have liked – Southern Africa, Italy, France, Chile/Argentina, Hawaii, and, now, Ireland.

Late in the week the days featured more and more blue sky and in that heat wave – probably 68 degrees – in the wonderfully named town of Dingle (Peninsula of the same name) I saw a kid driving shirtless in a car with his friends on Dingle’s main drag. He had to have been Irish. Like the teenagers Annie used to talk about in Seattle who would doff their shirts any time the sun came out after the long rainy winter, no matter if the temperature was still in the low 50s. The main memory of the Peninsula will be not so much the views toward the water, but the intensely green fields, divided into rough squares or rectangles by the unmortared stone walls and, seen from a distance, the individual white dots against the green – grazing sheep.

Into Dublin then, reaching there shortly past noon of the day before we were to leave. We checked into the Croke Park Hotel, hard by the stadium of the same name, bought tickets to the hop on/hop off bus and set out to explore. In other words, we rode the bus to the Guinness Brewery and spent the better part of the rest of the afternoon there, trying to figure why Guinness tasted different in Ireland than it does in the States when it is all brewed at this site, and then shipped in cans, bottles or kegs. Were we tricked by memory (none of us drank Guinness regularly then, a situation that has changed since we have been back) or is it perhaps that the older beer acquires a slightly different taste than the fresh brewed stuff? Or some other reason? The next morning before we left we saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College and the same day, after a very comfortable Aer Lingus flight to JFK, I walked a bit in Harlem. Just to say I am one of certainly a very few people who have seen the Book of Kells and been in Harlem on the same day.

Dublin, as with the rest of the country as a whole, not nearly enough time. You can see that hard economic times have returned after a decade boom, by all the empty retail space in Dublin and also in Limerick when we drove through there on a couple of occasions. We returned all the cars in one piece, with nary a scratch. Every Irish person we spoke with was cheerful and helpful. As DD and I were trying to figure from the inadequate hotel map just how to get back to Croke Park, a very nice woman and then a very nice gentleman stopped on two different occasions to ask if we needed help. It reminded me of myself in New York on my good days. Another way to celebrate your 65th birthday – inject yourself against deep vein thrombosis in a hotel room in Dublin. It worked fine, again, even as we flew against headwinds that reached over 125 mph on the return flight.

I may have liked the trip best of everyone and am looking forward to going back. D. and B. say they’ve done it, happy they did, but don’t need to go back. B. says she would go back and spend more time. J. can’t see, he says, that every man in Ireland looks like us, long face, high forehead, and skin complexion that ranges from pale to paler to palest. He commemorates the trip with blind taste tests between Guinness brought back and Guinness bought here, except now the brought backs have run out. B. and C. said they would do another trip too. Call them the Guinness Four.