DAY THIRTY-ONE: CORK

Someday after San Francisco but before I’m too old I’m going to plant a fairy tree in my yard.  It’ll be like the one they have in Kenmare, a hawthorn tree that blooms in May and turns bright red in the fall.  Nearby I’ll arrange some stones in a circle and imbue them with mysterious druid powers to give the whole scene a calming, spiritual vibe.  I’ll call my Hawthorn the “fairy tree” and invite whoever to come and hang little notes all over it.  The notes can say anything — they can be wishes for everlasting love, hopes for offspring or grandchildren, dreams of world peace or even an early Christmas list request for a rare Pikachu card.  As long as they’re honest and come from the heart, whatever people want to write, it’ll be fine.  

 

On the fairy tree: a plea for Pikachu.

And I’ll build a little wooden hut and staff it with a weird old guy who sometimes is there and sometimes is not and sometimes closes early because it might rain and definitely understands the difference between four Euros and eight Euros.  People can come from however far, people maybe seeking peace but overwhelmed by the scale of Stonehenge, people with a hope or prayer that maybe they’ve said out loud but want written down so they can see it, hanging off a tree like a wishful ornament.  

Nah, it’s already been done.

You’ll have to go Kenmare to see the fairy tree and the stone circle, but if you’re in Kenmare, definitely go see it.  It doesn’t seem like much and it’s not as easy to find as you might have been told but do go.  Go there and fine yourself a little peace.  Even if it’s raining.  

And speaking of rain…

Last night after days — no weeks — of threatening, the skies finally opened up.  And me without my cool K-Way rain coat, in the wash after three hours of absorbing the brackish water of Kenmare Bay.  One final note about the fairy tree: that I stood shivering, hands jammed into my Levis pockets, rain pelting my stylish bomber jacket, reading the pleas hung on the fairy tree in no way lessened the serenity I felt.  

I was pretty happy, though, when we got back to the house, to find my rain coat washed and then completely drip-dried this morning for our trip to Cork.

Today’s rain was a mist, a steady thrum, a biblical deluge.  It came in sheets and in buckets.  It stopped only while we were eating lunch, then resumed the second we stepped outside.  It made driving that much more challenging, and by now we all know that I’m perfectly satisfied with the levels of challenge already provided by the driving in Ireland experience.  

We left Kenmare at 11 this morning, minutes after checking out of our stylish and spacious AirBnB, never able to pinpoint the location of the mysterious THUD that was our nighttime companion all four days.  Last night near midnight, frustrated and vaguely thinking that, once found, a solution might exist for the thud, I stood crouched in the hallway, wearing only a pair of athletic shorts, my eyes opened wide, darting around, looking for the source of this mechanical thud, only to give up after 10 minutes of no thud.  15 minutes later, safely in bed, thud.  Farewell, thud; the enigmatic source of your irregular report will haunt us forever. 

The elevator at the Hotel Metropole is
only slightly smaller than the Micra.

Lets take a moment here to sing the praises of the Nissan Micra (no kidding, that’s really it’s name).  And let us state now that it can indeed hold four adults and their luggage, two comically large Patagonia bags, two hard-sided roller bags, two carry-ons, two backpacks and various shopping bags full of stuff not yet transferred to the emergency duffle.  Was this a difficult process?  Perhaps. It’s mystery to me because when the time came to load up the Micra this morning I ghosted our entire crew.  Sandra Bullock packed, drawing upon 27-year-old Tetris skills courtesy of a GameBoy given to us as a wedding present by my old friend Andy who I haven’t seen in years.

I can’t tell you the reasons why I disappeared into the bedroom feigning some vague plan to “figure out our route,” instead playing Words With Friends while my intrepid wife completed the jigsaw puzzle of packing because I don’t know what motivated me to shirk Classic Dad responsibility in this way.   All I know is that when I emerged from the bedroom, the Micra was loaded and it was pouring.  “Yaooooaaahhh!” I shouted with what I hoped was enthusiasm as I sprinted from the condo to the front seat of the Micra, buckled myself in and waited patiently for the rest of our crew to join me.  

The rain continued.  

Cork is 44 miles from Kenmare and can be reached in 90 minutes if your driver cares not a whit about the Irish countryside.  And look, it’s not like don’t see anything.  You’ll still see all of the shades of green.  Probably not any goats in crowns stuck atop a tower, though in our vehicle the memory of King Puck remains very fresh.  “That’s a terrible thing they do,” Sandra Bullock muttered at one point during our drive today.  “I wouldn’t blame the goat if he just ran off.”  The Puck Fair begins today, without us.  

The funny thing about Ireland’s road classification system, we all noticed today, is that it’s meaningless. We spent most of the drive today on N22, which over 45 minutes went from two narrow lanes to two with a shoulder (“Amazing!” - all of us) to four lanes back to two microscopic lanes to one-point-five, all with a speed limit of 100 km/h. 

Cork?  Or Bethlehem, PA?

After a small side trip to a dingy office park to buy excellent crystal highball glasses and to Enterprise to fortuitously add O’Toole as a second driver, we arrived in Cork, our home for the next 24 hours, in time for lunch.  Cork was dingy and rainy, a dead ringer for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in February.  No obvious tourist landmarks to see, no beautiful cathedrals built in the 11th century.  The combined efforts of Sandra Bullock and Princess Grace to overcome our shoddy pre-Cork trip planning yielded very little; a brewery, a marketplace. 

 The rain didn’t let up.   Cork went about its life all around us.  Fish markets sold fish.  Butchers sold meat.     The slate gray River Lee ran silently through the middle of town.  

Teenagers wandered along Douglas Street, toting backpacks and shopping bags.  Gusts of wind turned umbrellas inside out.  The doors to the local Debanham’s blew open, sending the unmistakable department store aroma of co-mingled perfumes and trendy sportswear out onto the street.  Cork was a place.  I loved it.  

The brewery turned out to have a fantastic covered beer garden and the market was like Pike Place minus the whimsy.  I could’ve wandered Cork’s run-down streets for hours but the weather, a major contributor to the city’s cool gloom, was in practical terms apocalyptic at worst, lousy at best.  It eventually took its toll on our group.  “I’m over this rain,” Princess Grace said only minutes before we ducked into the Corner Bar to re-goup.  

The guidebooks say Cork is one of “Europe’s hippest cities,” with a thriving nightlife and many historic sites and that is probably so.  We did no research and spent a few hours wandering around its downtown.  We don’t know anything about the place.  Inevitably, we will hear about that once we get home and share our tales with fellow travelers, and that’s fine, but I don’t mourn the loss of experiencing the dynamic cosmopolitan center that may or may not be Cork.  What we saw today was just fine.

Cool, moody numbers for today:

368 — kilometers remaining on our present tank of gas.  Does this mean I’ll have to fill up before Dublin?  Does it mean I won’t?  I bought the tank at Enterprise.

4 — times I interrupted everyone’s Kenmare Stones experience to tell them I really liked the fairy tree.

9 — minutes I spent driving behind a large truck today (on a narrow road, of course) virtually blinded by the spray from his tires, unable to pass.  

3 — average number of questions Princess Grace will ask a waiter before ordering her entree.

11 — times I said “This looks like Pennsylvania,” out loud today after arriving in Cork.

5  — estimated number of items Sandra Bullock had on her lap at any time during today’s drive, including a purse, one or two jackets, a souvenir bag and a phone.

19 — time, in seconds, it took me to crack “How are you enjoying your tainted NBA title” after meeting a woman from Toronto at the brewery today.  

Our shoddy research has revealed that Cork’s “most happening neighborhood” is the one in which our hotel is located.  Tonight we will go forth and explore, probably going no further than the Italian restaurant around the corner (we went in and made a reservation for 8 PM) and the Corner Bar on the next block.  Then, tomorrow morning, Sandra Bullock will again demonstrate her superior Tetris skills and re-pack to Micra.  Kilkenny, by way of Kinsale or maybe Coje (our planning is really reaching a nadir), awaits.  The forecast calls for, you guessed it, rain.