We'll begin with a recap of yesterday, our first day in Ireland:
There's a very good reason I hit the hay so hard last night, despite already logging an hour of a nap so deep as to be prehistoric only a few hours earlier. The aggregate mental stress of the following events took its toll:
1) Fell asleep at 1 AM after whooping it up in Inverness with the Crown Prince of Plate Glass and his Sun Devils, only to awake a few sweat-saturated hours later, at 5:30 AM. Gathered our stuff. Got into a cab. Drove through the countryside and -- surprise! -- an airport appeared.
2) Flew from Inverness to Dublin on a pretty small plane, but honestly not so small that you spend the entire hour-long flight making jokes about how small it is, like the group of pretty large young Americans seated in front of us in row two. I mean, there was a jet engine outside my window, not a prop, right? Pump the brakes, young Americans. It's not like you looked out and saw propellers spinning and were sitting in front of Teddy. Nice Crocodile Dundee hats, by the way.
3) Landed in Ireland and suddenly realized, with a cold flash of heartless fear, that in juste a few minutes I'd be let loose on the streets, driving a car on the wrong side of the road.
I'd known it was coming, so it's not like I was surprised. It'd been looming for days, the sole reason I always sat shotgun (the uncoveted "dad" seat) when we took Ubers in Edinburgh. I'd sit up there and try to visualize myself behind the wheel, staying to the left.
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| Terror, thy name is Nissan. |
Here's a tip for you, though: do as I did and hit the freeways first. The M roads. This may seem counter-intuitive; it did to me. Knowing that my baptism under fire would take place on Dublin's crowded M50 made my fears even more acute, until I realized that by choosing to do that, drive directly to Galway, do not pass GO do not collect 200 EU, I'd given myself a nice long ramp for left-lane driving orientation, where what was at stake was merely the difference between plodding along in the slow lane (the left) or pulling out to pass (the right).
Here's another tip, something you may night consider when planning your right-hand-drive adventure, something the cheerful young girl at Enterprise Rent-a-Car (wordwide) neglected to warn me about when I asked "got any tips?"
"Stay to the left."
But not too far to the left. I settled into that right seat, checked my mirrors, noted how weird it was to have the gearshift to my left, pulled out into traffic... and immediately became a mirror image a teenager on the day he got his learner's permit, so terrified of oncoming traffic that I was driving almost out of my lane and onto the curb. Don't do this. It will seem like you're driving down the middle of the road but you're not.
Take this advice so you don't, say, nail a curb about a mile into the drive, seconds after breathing your first sigh of relief and thinking, "Hey, I think I've got this," as your passenger sighs, "Maybe we should've gotten the extra coverage for tires and windows."
You don't got this.
At this point Sandra Bullock decided that her duties, already quite extensive (mapping, audio) included frequent lane position checks. "You're getting pretty far over." "You're actually close to the middle line right now." "Try to line up with the dotted lines." (sounds of a Nissan Not Imported to the U.S. bouncing off of road reflectors)
How did this happen? I've been driving for 38 years. On the left side of the road.
4) After two (mostly) drama-free hours we pulled into Galway... and promptly drove right past the turn in for our hotel's parking garage, ending up two minutes later facing a brick wall at the end of an alleyway with a BMW three feet from our back bumper. "You'l have to back out," my wife, who'd decided to commit herself to keeping me from losing my mind from anxiety, said evenly.
"There are so many reasons why that can't happen," I said back, on the verge of tears. We sat there, waiting for the BMW to clue in and leave. Finally it did, leaving me free to execute and 11-point turn and carefully drive around the block for another shot at our garage, which turned out to be another dead end, this one terminating in a bunch of cars seemingly piled haphazardly on top of each other. Then Sandra Bullock, my savior, spoke the words I'd been waiting to hear all day: "I think they have valet."
5) So you can forgive me when, after a strolling through Galway's shockingly crowded
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| Not pictured: flash mob. |
6) Also, there was a flash mob whose members showed up and did wild, simultaneous dances while singing along to a song only they could hear through the headphones they wore, in this case "Mamma Mia." They were part of the Arts Festival, art being that which is best appreciated by people who shout SO GOOD SO GOOD SO GOOD whenever "Sweet Caroline" comes on at the bar. Maybe while drinking a Long Island Iced Tea, if there's a special.
7) After that, I was spent. We walked back after dinner, had some ice cream (it pushed Sandra Bullock "over the edge") and sacked out. The last thing I remember is my lovely wife, enrapt in her latest mystery novel, telling me I "look tired." Eight hours later we woke up, had a muffin, got in line for the bus to the ferry that would take us to Innis Mor.
That brings you up to date. For now.
REAL TIME UPDATE: it is with heavy eyelids that I type this, my one-beer-in-the-afternoon malaise eased just a little by Sandra Bullock’s glee in finding that by avoiding the huge crowd huddled under the shelter we actually became the first people to board the 5 PM return ferry to Galway.
Today we managed the ultimate July travel life hack: distanced ourselves from the crowds that descend on Aran Island every day in July. How did we do this? We got lost.
The goal was to walk to and from Dun Aengus, an Iron Age ruin of some sort whose majesty we’ll never know because after several mis-starts we finally gave up on the idea of reaching it when we realized the utterly deserted “road” we’d chosen was not just the road less taken but in fact that road never taken, except by us.
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| Peace, peace of mind... and mysterious walls. |
And you know what? It turned out fine. We didn’t see Dun Aengus, but we did see tons of abandoned stone farm houses and lots of lots of stone walls. Stone walls reaching out like octopus arms into the distance in every direction, relics... of what? Ancient Aran Islanders who gave up the project hundreds of years ago and the stone walls were too heavy to pack? One bored and obsessive person’s time-killing hobby? We saw few livestock and no farming. Just these walls.
We walked without seeing another human being for at least an hour. We stopped and scaled a stone wall to eat lunch leaning against the ruins of a barn. We practiced responsible access, though we were no longer in Scotland.
By the time we re-entered civilization, it was with great relief (we will make it back in time for the ferry!”) and a little bit of sadness (oh look: people). Saying goodbye to unspoiled grandeur is never easy. “This just convinces me more,” said a steadfast Sandra Bullock as we walked down the empty hill leading to civilization, “I want my next house to be away from everyone. I want an empty view.”
We probably would’ve appreciated the rest of the walk more had we not just spent two hours walking through the equivalent of earth before Major Taylor discovered that the paradise he thought he’d found was actually earth in the future and was ruled by apes. The road back was a “single-track” (h/t George for the local lingo), but it was the main rod back to town for all manner of traveler. We dodged the occasional car, lots of bikes and more than a few horse-drawn carriages, never quite certain how much further we had to walk, then stopped at Joe Wattey’s, which rose out of the fields like the Emerald City of Oz to sit at a picnic table and enjoy a late-afternoon beverage, which eventually led to the semi-conscious state from which I address you, pushing hard to wrap this up before the ferry takes off and I start wishing I’d taken that second Dramamine.
Here are your Aran Island numbers:
23,030 - steps.
99:1 - ratio of bicycles to walkers on Aran Island.
0 - number of attractive Irish wool sweaters purchased by us for two reasons: 1) buying them would make us the tourists who buy “San Francisco” hoodies from the tourist traps along Pier 39 and 2) it’s never cold enough where we live to wear a luxurious wool sweater.
12 - midge bites on my arms and legs that I didn’t notice until this morning.
1 - place on Innish Mor to buy soft serve. We never found it.
16 - cookies in the bag dropped by a determined bicyclist as he rode past Joe Wattey’s. As the cyclist who picked it up, then tried in vain to get his attention but could not explained, in a thick Italian accent, “He ees wearing headphones.”
3 - people we asked for directions to Dun Aengus. Despite their being Aran natives and us having a (lame and inconclusive) map from the tourist office, we still got lost.
0 - regrets that we got lost.
Looks like the ferry is about to pull out, even though it’s 4:42, this is a 5 PM ferry, the woman at the tourist office told us we could get back at 4:45. Good thing we didn’t make it to Dun Aengus. We’d still be on that road, watching as the ferry pulled away, wondering where we were going to spend the night.
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