DAY TWENTY-FIVE: AROUND DINGLE

We’ve got a shade under less than three weeks to go in this adventure and have so far visited three countries and 10 cities, meaning that this is an excellent time to talk about souvenirs, the traveler’s dirty little secret.  We all do it.  They’re a necessary evil, even for sophisticated travelers like us who are so adept at blending in with the natives that we are sometimes asked for directions in languages we cannot understand. 

Not a souvenir.

Even us.  We’re vulnerable.  No matter how many pictures we take each day (and we take plenty.  Don’t be fooled by Sandra Bullock’s impressively disciplined “10 pictures on Facebook/day” rule.), there’s nothing that serves better as a concrete and lasting reminder that you’ve gone somewhere than a lowbrow item whose blatant message of “Hey! I was here!” makes it an eye-roller for the locals.

You know what I’m talking about.  You might have some in your closet or gathering dust on a shelf somewhere in your house.  I know we do.  They seemed like a good idea at the time.  

I’m talking about the wafer-thin fleece vests that have the bland “SAN FRANCISCO” written where the pocket would be, like this visitor from Nebraska is actually employed by the city of San Francisco and this is his work vest.  These things are catnip to visitors.  They’re also very practical because many visitors come to our fair city in August and don’t expect to get belted in the face with a wall of fog.  Who knew it could be so cold in California?  Not my dad, who had to  buy a wonderful reversible coat in Monterey the first time we all went there in August for the vintage car races.  I loved that coat.  Wore it in college. 

So far, of course, we’ve only talked about one kind of souvenir, the capitol S kind whose message is “I WAS HERE” not “this is what (X place) is all about.  There’s nothing actually local about these souvenirs.  If they’re grounded in any kind of localism at all, it’s something that existed so long ago that it’s become an almost (and hopefully) forgotten cliche to the natives.  This is your Disneyland hockey jersey with GOOFY written across the back, your Golden Gate Bridge snow globe (because snow is an important part of San Francisco), your Statue of Liberty pencil sharpener.  In Ireland, so far, it’s anything with GUINNESS on it or anything shaped like a leprechaun.  

For us, the ultimate Type 1 souvenir is a bottle opener.  This is our secret shame.  That isn’t actually much of a secret anymore, because anyone who comes over to our house and asks for a bottle opener has to use one that we’ve picked up somewhere with the EXPRESS GOAL of finding the goofiest thing possible.  

I’m not sure where it started, but it was way more than a decade ago.  Someone brought back a bottle opener, Sandra Bullock or me, or my parents gave us something and the light clicked on.  We were like Fat Jason Statham delivering a verbal knockout blow to a hapless American tourist as a busload of tourers cheered him on.  We had the fever and needed to go on. 

Original London bottle
opener concept.

REAL -TIME UPDATE:  Sandra Bullock, who at present is lounging on one of the three beds in our Dingle Bay Hotel room, searching madly for a way to stream a UFC fight (I’m not kidding; one of her high school classmates’ daughters is a UFC fighter), just told me the origins of the bottle opener tradition: many years ago, probably closer to 20 than 10, my parents went to Mexico and upon their return gave us a silver opener shaped like a dolphin.  The dolphin, which differs from all openers to follow in that it does not have the name of place emblazoned anywhere on its elegant and powerful body, was the first.

Now wherever we go, even when our son the Jawa (not his real name; actual name withheld pending his first Independent Spirit Award) when he travels, we come back with a bottle opener.  We’ve got openers from all over the world.  Ask for an opener at our house and you may receive one celebrating Pope Francis I.  You maybe get one shaped like a Chinese opera mask or the Southernmost Point in the United States.  Our openers range from classy (a minimalist chrome Mickey Mouse, from Disneyworld) to downright disturbing (a furry hoof from somewhere in Switzerland).  The bottle opener is a vital part of every trip to a new place, be it a weekend in San Diego or six-and-a-half-weeks in the British Isles, and what’s funny is, until we find it, we don’t know what we’re looking for.  

We think we do.  We go to England and think, “Oh, it’ll be the queen.  Or a beefeater.  The guys with the tall hats.”  It’s not until we find it — in this case, it was a red phone booth — that we know it’s the right one.  Or we find it, I say, “We’ve got plenty of time to find one,” and then we never see that same one again, which I never hear the end of.  Or we get an idea while we’re there and then spend the rest of the trip trying to wish it into existence.  Right now that’s a three-dimensional leprechaun, which has been surprisingly difficult to find.  It’s the three-d part, I think.  

Come on, Ireland.  Get a grip. 

Side note:  a leprechaun?  Sitting on a pot of gold holding a beer?  Seriously, Ireland, you don’t have to lean into it so hard.  Can we talk about the t-shirts showing evolution as beginning with a sea creature and ending with a guy falling down drunk?

We — and by we I mean Sandra Bullock — generally follow this same process when finding the Important Souvenir, the Type 2.  This is a piece of art, or jewelry, or a houseware, only available in this area or country or region, that Sandra Bullock has heard of and wants to explore.  She always comes into it with this clear idea in her head; this is what she wants.  On this trip one of those things was a large woolen blanket.  It was going to plaid, it was going to be heavy and it was going to cost a ton of whatever money that country used.  You may have already heard that this idea died a violent death at the hands of her evil husband, who used keen powers of observation to note that the blanket she sought was very similar to the Pendleton blankets she already had at home.

Heartbroken, she moved on.  Earrings, bracelets, paintings, sweaters… all fell by one by one.  Along the way she picked up some genre-busting Type 1.5 stuff — Moffat clan gee gaws, mostly, and a small photo of the Cliffs of Moher — but the white whale remained.

Excellent, Type 3 souvenir.

What Sandra Bullock doesn’t realize is that like an ideal vocation her ideal Type 2 souvenir always reveals itself over time.  Today it came to her in a tasteful shop several blocks from the Dingle tourist mashup where quiet music replaced the blaring traditional Irish tunes of the gift shops downtown.  A small pottery bowl, made by a local woman, perfect for “nuts, or olives,” that won’t even require us reaching for the emergency bag we brought to “put purchases in.”  Satisfied, we followed that up with some outstanding pizza bread because it’d been two-plus hours since we’d had carbs and walked through the mist to our distillery tour at the Dingle Distillery.  

Which was great and now we want to buy a bottle of Dingle whiskey, which you can’t get in the U.S. and sort of qualifies as its own brand of souvenir: type 3. 

Here are today’s Dingle numbers:

5  — number of local filming sites, of 8, that are from the John Wayne film “The Quiet Man,” according to the map available in the lobby of the Dingle Bay Hotel.

2 — parking lots at the hotel; one has space for 5 vehicles.  Thankfully, we were directed to the larger lot.

less than 50 — probability, in percent, of the boat trip we booked for tomorrow to uninhabited Great Blasket Island actually happening, due to weather concerns, per Mary O’Neill of Dingle Bay Boat Tours.

1 — length, in hours, of the “Fungi Boat Cruise,” which takes visitors to see Dingle Bay’s famous local dolphin, Fungi.  It will sail, rain or shine.

4 — permutations of butterscotch and caramel in the sundaes we had on our way home from the Dingle distillery: two flavors of ice cream, butterscotch sauce, salted caramel whipped cream.

6 — winners of the Gregory Peck Award for Excellence in the Art of Film, since 2006, presented at the Dingle Film Festival.  Past winners include Jim Sheridan, Stephen Frears, Gabriel Byrne and Laura Dern.

A quick look at the weather shows rain stretching out as far as the (generally unreliable) Apple weather app goes, all the way past Kenmare, through Cork and into Kilkenny.  Every chance I get I ask locals if this is what August is usually like in Ireland.  They all give me some variation of  this: “No.  Sometimes you get lucky.”