Ireland, Part 1

The Emerald Isle has a lot of red in it, we notice, as the ferry passes out of the jetties and begins to jostle with the mighty waves of the North Atlantic. There’s a lot of brown, too, to say nothing of the thick, black clay at a construction site and the mossy gray of boulder fields and stone fences. We see the sun sparkle on the red of dead heather and the dark brown of seaweed in low tide, and the cliffs of Moher hulk in the distance. As the Aran Islands come into view ahead of us and the waves from the tip of Greenland rock our boat harder and harder, Aryn learns the dizzy exhaustion of seasickness. Luckily, we pull into the harbor of Inis Mor before she gets the full experience, and by the time we spy the castle on a hill not far distant, she’s as ready for adventure as we are.

We have no plan. That’s not unlike us, but we were going to borrow a guidebook from the library or buy a map or something before coming, and we didn’t. At least we remembered the Garmin, and she got us to the ferry and, last night, pretty close to the hotel and, earlier, somewhere in a not-so-close neighborhood of six one-way streets behind and across the river from Trinity College in Dublin. No tours on Fridays, by the way, but the book of Kells exhibit is fantastic.

So, without a plan, when Aryn steps off the boat onto the Aran Island Inis Mor, we see signs for bike rental gleaming bright purple in the sunlight, and know. The guy handing out maps who promises a free baby seat confirms, and we dig out helmets as they bring our bikes around. Our path takes us up, up through tiny roads and past solitary cows and horses in miniature pastures. Rock is everywhere, as if this land was never meant for farming but no one bothered to tell the Irish, and they cling to their land like a religion (or a gun).

The tower atop what I overhear is “the tallest point on the islands” is closed according to the sign, but not according to the broken gate and empty doorway. At the bottom of the winding staircase is a bizarre collection of ancient furniture, farm implements, tools and dead flowers, and atop the tower—oh my. My breath catches. My words fail. If you’ve ever seen a photo album of this fair land, and stopped to stare at one photo in particular, the one that looks like it was taken from a low-flying aircraft over a dozen cows crammed into a hundred little fields, the sun magnifying colors unused to its direct rays, a lone old man toiling away in one corner, waves breaking on a rocky shores in another, a sea-foam green farmhouse in still another corner and a crumbling, ruined castle just off-center—this is my view, and more. I stand transfixed like Frodo in the Seat of Seeing in Amon Hen, like Mowgli in Ka’s gaze, like a baby on the 4th of July.

Riding helps me feel like I’m working off these enormous meals. The “full Irish” breakfast of tomato, sausage, egg, black and white puddings (I preferred the white), thick bacon, toast, tea/coffee/etc. Julie rediscovered her love of Kiwi from our breakfast spread in Galway. Lunch of hamburgers or chicken Goujons, fish n’ chips always served with a salad and maybe a pint. Dinner of seafood chowder, salmon and soda bread, 100% Irish steak, cottage pie, probably a pint but also a full selection of wines from around the world. This is one of the few places outside Italy where I’ve seen espresso and even a macchiato equivalent as a standard on the café menu.

We buy sweaters from the Aran Sweater Market as souvenirs. I forgo the woolen scarf and tweed cap and Gaelic-swirl pewter pocketwatch. Maybe I’ll get a tweed jacket in Scotland this summer?

Riding downhill back toward the boat, Aryn keeps telling me to slow down. She has no trouble with sea-sickness on the way home, nor does she have trouble entertaining the elderly couple at dinner (the only ones who pronounced the Aran Islands like Aryn’s name, by the way), so everything’s back to normal.


The kind of stories we'll tell our friends about this trip will be the ones about leaving our car in the parking garage in Galway because we don’t notice it closes at six on Sundays. Or driving for nearly an hour on a road our GPS didn’t recognize, imagining her wondering how we were making 120 km/hr over muddy fields and stone fences. Or Aryn asking us, disconcertingly, as the plan is just about to touch down, “Do you have Jesus in your heart?”

We probably won’t mention that Ireland is very much a country, with McDonalds and tattoo parlors (I’ll get that shamrock tattoo next trip), road construction and election posters (advantage: Fine Gael). Subdivisions outside old towns could be Eden Prairie, Fredricksberg, any American suburb. The history and life at Trinity College and the Book of Kells is fascinating, and it’s surrounded by the life and energy of that interchangeable group of college girls in sweatpants, and that same lone professor with a graying ponytail.

We'll gloss over what the English did to them "for eight hundred long years," as the McCourt family often mentions. We love it here.