DAY TWENTY-TWO: GALWAY TO DOOLIN

There are three official levels of roads in Ireland, not counting country roads and private lanes.  Here's a quick and handy guide to them, should you ever find yourself behind the wheel in the Emerald Isles:

M -- This is a freeway, minus the "free" part and generally minus a few lanes.  Excellent for first-time keep-to-the-lefters, M roads offer multiple lanes that are unique among Irish roadways as they are usually considerably wider than the average car, van, RV or bus.   M roads are toll roads.  Tolls are collected  the old-fashioned way, via toll booth (please have exact change and if you hand over the wrong coins because you just swapped out your pounds for Euros, try to find the correct change before hitting the button to roll your window up.  To do otherwise is to risk losing not only your dignity but also your forearm.  You can also pay your tolls online, by 8 PM the day of travel.  What happens if you don't pay them that same day?  Ask me in a few weeks.  We should know by then. 

N -- The so-called "national" roads are different from the regional R roads in that they have reflectors.  Otherwise I can't tell much of a difference.  Both roads are exactly 1.0003 car-widths wide, which seems to bother nor slow down local drivers not at all.  The reflectors come in handy because they offer lane parameters to help panicked visiting drivers avoid hitting either oncoming traffic or the stone walls that line 93 percent of all N roads in Ireland, even those that have cleverly hidden the walls behind foliage, leading unsuspecting visitors to sigh, "Well, at least if I hit something on the left it'll just be foliage," only to be quickly corrected by their (perhaps frightened wives): "The foliage is covering the walls."

R -- The "regional" roads, like the one we took for an hour today between Ballyvaughan and Doolin, are basically logging roads with white dots occasionally painted randomly down the middle to fool people into thinking the have two lanes.  As such you might think they'd be avoided at all costs by vans, RVs and huge tourist buses. If you think that you are naive and hopeful and maybe underestimating the intestinal fortitude of local bus drivers.  They're out there pushing that 80 k/ph speed limit (48 MPH), forcing novice Americans to pull into whatever wide spots they can find -- narrow road shoulders, small parking lots, street openings -- to avoid getting obliterated as they pass.  

Today is the last you will hear me speak of driving in Ireland.  I promise.  I will take up this crusade upon our return to England, when I will up the degree of difficulty by a factor of 2.4 by renting a car with a manual transmission.  Until then, assume I am handling driving in Ireland, it's roads so narrow as to make my life flash before me at least a half-dozen times today, with great aplomb and ease.  Unless something weird happens.  

Today we awoke in Galway refreshed and ready to move on, having avoided the temptations of race week for at least one night.  Just a glass of wine in a quiet (save for its terrible playlist combo of Motown hits and the worst possible tracks recorded by rock and roll geniuses, giving me wedding-goer flashbacks from my 20s) restaurant and back to the hotel.  We lolled about the hotel for most of the morning, not wanting to get to Doolin too early.  

While waiting for Sandra Bullock to finish up in the shower, I flipped on the TV for the first time in three weeks.  I channel-surfed for about 15 minutes, long enough to understand why Europeans' impressions of the U.S. are often inaccurate.  But maybe that's not a bad thing.  There are way worse ambassadors for the American Way than The A Team.  I like the idea of an entire continent using Mr. T as a stand-in for American values.  And those who don't, well, I pity those fools. 

Eventually I could stall no more and the road became inevitable.  We piled into the Nissan and pulled cautiously out into traffic, me actually saying "turn right, stay left" every time Siri instructed us to "turn right onto (name of road)" and silently cursing her when she said "take the (#) exit at the roundabout" for the seventh time within the first five miles.

Going native at Monks

"Don't worry.  Soon we'll be out of the city," Sandra Bullock said, fiddling with the radio until she found -- seriously -- Ireland's "classic country" station, which alternated Irish folk tunes with George Strait and weird "trucking and train" medleys featuring snippets of "East Bound and Down," "Folsom Prison Blues" and "On the Road Again."  I'm not complaining.  Took my mind off of oncoming traffic.

It wasn't so bad.  At one point we stopped to see the eerie Dunguaire Castle, mostly so I could prove that I had this under such control that we could casually pull over and see some landmark or view or something if we wanted without disaster striking.  We had an excellent lunch at Monks in Balleyvaughan, overlooking the Wild Atlantic Coast.  So confident was I by then that I agreed to leave the N road for the R "Coastal Road."  "How much narrower could it be?" I asked, rhetorically.

But some rhetorical questions are answered, whether you want them answered or not.  The Coastal Road is, in places, way narrower than the N road, which dissuades the tour buses not a whit.  They roar on, forcing oncoming traffic to the quick risk-assessment:  head-on collision with a bus or sideswiping a stone wall?  

Somehow, despite my best efforts, we made it through with only a few brushes against some roadside foliage  roadside foliage that was not, thankfully, concealing a stone wall.  This is why I bought the insurance.

Now we're in Doolin, which is a very small fishing village whose attraction to tourists is its

Doolin beach scene.

proximity to the Cliffs of Moher, which we will be walking -- not scaling -- tomorrow.  Also, it's supposedly the live traditional music capitol of Clare County.  After two days here I expect to be qualified to offer an opinion on that claim but not yet.  All I can say now is that it's pretty beautiful, has been found by tourists and isn't joking when it says it's the center of the "Burren," which is this series of coastal limestone fields that time and water have carved into these weird, gigantic blocks and might explain all of these stone walls we've been seeing.

Earlier we took a walk down to the pier to check out the Burren, which in Doolin doubles as a sort of beach (that's what the sign said) but not the kind of beach where you lie around on a towel, play volleyball and surf.  More it's the kind where you sit on a rock and watch really cold, really dramatic-looking water pound into more rocks that've been carved into amazing almost square shapes while a brisk wind blows through your Ben Sherman jacket, keeping you from sweating for several glorious minutes.  

'sup, Ireland?

It's also a place where you can finally get the soft serve ice cream cone you've coveted for most of the past three weeks then walk back to your hotel (which is also a hostel for the more budget-minded), buy a beer and sit outside with your wife, looking out at all of those green fields and the thatched-roof cottages and thinking about how this finally looks like the Ireland that the ruined romantic poets you'd been wondering about when you started planning this trip, six months ago, spend their lives missing terrible and writing odes to, and that pretty much makes the white-knuckler of a trip it takes to get here worth the hassle.

Here's today's Wild Atlantic numbers:

10,000,000 -- what you'd have to pay me, in U.S. dollars, to drive an RV on a regional road in Ireland.

500 -- what you'd have to pay me, in U.S. dollars, to attend a James Taylor concert.  Presented for perspective only.

33 -- people we've seen, since arriving in Ireland, wearing Boston Red Sox hats and/or t-shirts (often both), which, if you think about it, makes sense.  

6 -- extra time, in minutes, you will spend taking the Coastal Road from Balleyvaughan to Doolin instead of the N road.  Each of those minutes will be subtracted from the end of your life.

15 -- minutes it took us to check into the Doolin Inn because Effie, the woman working the front desk, was very friendly and didn't want us to take the walk down to the pier without turning at some point and looking up to see the tower on the hill behind us.  

0 -- items purchased at Doolin gift shops and/or woolen stores.  Our MO is usually to buy a bottle opener wherever we go, but Sandra Bullock "doesn't want some dumb Guinness opener," and as you've heard it never gets cold enough where we live to buy a sweater, so our perfect record of non-purchase remains intact.

Tomorrow our plan is to walk the length of the trail leading to the Cliffs of Moher, past the visitors' center ("It'll be cheek-to-jowl" with tourists," explained Effie, "but they stop there. None of them keep going on the trail.") and then decide whether to walk back or take the bus that runs every half hour, is small and green and emblazoned with a leprechaun (eye roll from Effie).  The trip out is a brisk 7.5 miles, child's play for those used to logging 20k steps daily.  But are we up for the full 15?  It's been almost 40 years since I did my last March of Dimes walk, so we'll see.