DAY TWENTY-EIGHT: APOLOGIES FROM KENMARE

Dear Ireland and Irish people,

I apologize for the bottle opener my wife purchased today.  Or rather I should say we both purchased it, though the decision to purchase it was made long before I arrived on the scene, possibly while I was hacking away at a tamed and groomed version of the beautiful Irish countryside at the Kenmare Golf Club.   

(aside -- If you're turned off by this reference to the Grand Old Game and think it's for boring old country club guys, please enjoy this video of the Melvins golfing and this one of Snoop Dogg at Augusta.  Thank you.)

Even if you sneer at golf, how about this view?

As you know, kitschy bottle openers are our family's favorite Type 1 travel souvenir.  We are truly committed to each and every search, putting maximum effort to finding a piece that truly personifies the gestalt of a place we've visited.  It's precisely because of this, the thought and care taken to find this perfect souvenir that I must apologize to you, Ireland (but not you, golf haters) because the bottle opener we found this time was the embodiment of every negative stereotype ever lobbed at your beautiful country and its warm, thoughtful and heartfelt people.

For this, I apologize.

But lets be honest, Ireland; the blame doesn't lie entirely at our feet.  Yes, we could've snapped up one of the other bottle openers -- the one that just said IRELAND in stylized script, or the one shaped like a cartoon sheep, but what do either of those say about the unique character of Ireland?  Anywhere you go in the world you'll find a bottle opener bearing the name of the place in stylized script.  And the sheep?  I saw the same sheep on a bottle opener in Scotland where, you may not know but probably should, there are three sheep for each citizen.  That's right, Ireland; 15 million sheep in Scotland, only 5 million Scots.  I understand completely that there's a rivalry and that you roll your eyes when the Scots claim to have invented Whiskey (just repeating what I was told at the Dingle distillery), but you've got to know that you can't claim the sheep at your own unique, bottle opener-worthy national symbol.  They probably have sheep-shaped bottle openers in New Zealand, too.  Have you every considered that, Ireland?

I suppose there are other elements of Irish culture you could fashion into an effective bottle opener -- a washer/dryer combo that takes four hours to complete a single load, perhaps? 

Perilous cliffs everywhere.

Available all across Europe.  Hardly the exclusive domain of Ireland.   Small signs warning of perilous cliffs and steep drops?  Rarely seen on golf courses, but there it was on the cart path between 15 and 16 today at the Kenmare Golf Club.  One wrong move and you, your cart, your clubs and the bag of 200 tees you bought today for one EU go toppling into the Atlantic.  Nobody's going to buy a bottle opener shaped like a sign, though.  

You probably sell bottle openers shaped like those newsboy caps, Ireland.  I haven't seen one yet, but the hats themselves are ubiquitous -- in gift shops.  I haven't seen many actual Irish people wearing them.  Instead, maybe you could sell a bottle opener shaped like an older guy walking down the street, just going about his every day business wearing slacks, a white dress shirt, no tie and a tweed jacket.  I've seen plenty of those guys.  Might make for a complicated bottle opener, though.  Or maybe a bottle opener that looks like a gigantic bus barreling down a one-and-a-half lane R-designated road.

High-level ideas, all of these, but frankly too complicated.  

If you want to get specific, for us you could've made a bottle opener that represented the parallel paths travelled by Sandra Bullock, Peter O'Toole and Princess Grace and me.  One would show a carefree S. Bullock strolling through Kenmare (after spending the first four

Fantastic tomato soup.

hours of her day doing laundry), eating a fantastic bowl of tomato soup at the Kenmare Brewhouse (she had one waiting for me when I met up with her after my round), then, not so great for you, Ireland, purchasing the bottle opener that generated this apologetic letter.  You could have O'Toole and Grace, landing in Dublin at 8 AM, then sitting in the airport, firing off increasingly desperate texts including multiple reminders from O'Toole, who has been to Ireland before to research his family history, that "Ireland until recently was a third world country."  I apologize for my friend, Ireland.

You could show them waiting an extra hour for their flight to Killarny, riding a bus across the tarmac then finally boarding, landing and then catching the car I ordered for them last night when Sandra Bullock, in an act of both generosity and self-preservation because she didn't want to face the prospect of sitting in a car for another two hours today with me behind the wheel, insisted I go golfing today and get a car for O'Toole and Grace and finally arriving here at some point within the next hour.  By the time they get here they will have been in Ireland long enough to fly back to Newark.  

The Dublin airport is 176 miles from where I presently sit.

Or you could have shown me, clad in a golf shirt and my silly REI hiking pants, throwing myself on the mercy of the club pro at the Kenmare club, telling him, "I have a tee time but I only have this shirt," then thanking him profusely as he checked off the things I'd need:  "You'll need balls, and tees, and maybe a pullover because it might rain. Can't get you a glove because we don't have any for lefties.  You guys get the shaft, don't you."

Thank you, club pro.

You could show me hitting golf balls into trees, skulling them along the ground, inexplicably sinking long putts, walking briskly from hole to hole, a solitary figure making a mockery of golf attire in his hiking pants (which are not allowed on most golf courses) and Keen shoes (ditto), then joining my wife for the awesome tomato soup and walking unconcerned through a brief rain storm on our way to the store to buy beer.  Naturally, by the time we reached the store it was sunny.

You could have made bottle openers shaped like all of these things and more, Ireland, but you didn't.   You gave us two choices, Ireland, reasonable ones, ones that checked all of the mental boxes we use when seeking a new bottle opener: there was the sheep holding a giant glass of beer and the leprechaun, halfway submerged in a pot of gold, holding a coin in one hand and -- you guessed it -- an overflowing beer in the other.  

We apologize, Ireland.

There was another leprechaun.  He may or may not have been holding a beer.  He was "more three-dimensional" per S. Bullock, but when we went back to the store after our incredible tomato soup (shoutout again to Kenmare Brewmaster) we couldn't find him.  There was a smaller leprechaun, also holding a beer, but his tiny stature would have rendered him overwhelmed by the size of the openers he'd be sharing the glass bucket with back home.  That was it.  The stylized "IRELAND," a few uninspired sheep, the sheep holding a beer and three leprechauns.  Oh, and a bunch of Guinness stuff but as we discussed earlier, neither of us is a big Guinness fan (though enough of one to know you're supposed to wait patiently for it to settle after it's halfway full, not grab it before it's done, American guy standing in front of me at the Dick Mack's bar in Dingle a few nights ago) so to purchase Guinness paraphernalia would be to brand ourselves as poseurs.  Leprechauns.  That was all we had left.   

It's not our fault, Ireland, but we apologize anyway.  

Here are some numbers for today:

38 -- estimated total number of gift shops in Galway, Doolin, Dingle, Killarney and Kenmare perused by Sandra Bullock before deciding on the drunk, gold coin-displaying leprechaun bottle opener she purchased today.

16 -- number of holes a person can golf without wearing a glove before a blister will erupt on his index finger.

9 -- golf balls lost today.  Three in trees.  I've never seen that before: you hit a ball into a tree, generally it falls straight down or caroms off crazily.  Not these.  They just stuck up there.  Maybe you could do a bottle opener of a tree eating a golf ball, Ireland.

1 -- golf ball that simply disintegrated upon impact.  Second shot in the middle of the 12th fairway.  I took a might swing.  The ball disappeared.

3 -- items I put in the dryer last night:  Sandra Bullock's hiking pants, one of her shirts and a her black jeans.  Everything else I line dried.

1.5 -- total time, in hours, required to dry those three items.

8 -- total hours elapsed since we received our first text from O'Toole and Grace, excitedly telling us they'd arrived in Dublin.

And finally, a plea: if anyone out there has a UK outlet adaptor, please send it to me here in Kenmare.  The amount of gymnastics I've had to navigate to keep my phone, iPad, laptop, FitBit, bluetooth speaker and clippers charged with only one adaptor is exhausting.  Of course, maybe I could ditch a few of these devices...