Travel’s Travails

We just got back from Galway, in the west of Ireland. 

In the words of that apocryphal New England farmer, “You can’t get there from here.” Here being Detroit.

The thirteen hour ordeal started at our daughter’s house in rural county Galway. My son-in-law Jan drove us to the bus station. We left the house at seven local time. That took about forty minutes. From there, we rode an express bus across the width of Ireland to Dublin, where we got on a plane to Atlanta, and thence to Flint, MI. By the time we walked in the door, we had been on the road for eighteen hours. We showed our passports to about a hundred people, and were scolded for not arriving two hours before the flight time. Somehow, we avoided the full body scan we got in Calgary last year.

So much for the convenience of air travel.

While I arrived home utterly exhausted, fearing I’d drive off the road before hitting my own driveway; that was not the low point of the trip.

Ireland is a wrong-hand-drive country. Everyone drives on the left side instead of the right, like most of the world does. I suppose I could get used to that, but for the narrow roads. Most roads there are wide enough for a good-sized lorry (truck, to us Yanks) — one, not two. These are not one way streets, but country lanes, and in some cases what passes for highways.

Daughter’s cars are both right hand drive, so they have the good fortune to sit next to the edge of the road, leaving me to face the terrors of oncoming traffic. Even that would have been okay, if people drove at speeds appropriate to narrow lanes. Instead, they take the speed limits (typically 80kph/ 50mph) as a right. Heart failure feels like a legitimate alternative to passing a lorry at 100kph, threading between it and a parked car on the opposite margin. I screamed out loud, but no one else noticed.

Ireland is an interesting country to navigate. For the most part, street signs and names are as unnecessary as house numbers. Signposts offer suggestions of distant destinations, but believing them may not actually get you there. 

If you’ve lived there for generations, locations are imbedded in your DNA. Navigation is essential if you go. There I so much to see, you’ll want to find it, even if you have no idea where “it” is. Within a few miles of the house where we stayed, there had to be a dozen ruins dating as far back as the seventh century, and some so complete that a roof and window glass would’ve made them livable.

Even away from the dime-a-dozen ruins, the scenery is painfully picturesque. Rolling hills are crisscrossed with stone walls, and every pasture is dotted with sheep, lambs or cows. Thatched cottages abound, some of them hundreds of years old, and still occupied. The villages bear no resemblance to American strip-malls, or even the space efficiency of their German counterparts.

While there, we resorted to our favorite solution: let someone else drive. Our native guides included Maeve Healy, one of Sarah’s co-workers and a history nut. She took us to Kylemore Abbey, which until last year was a girls’ boarding school. Most of the facility is off limits to visitors. It’s packed with nuns.

We took a bus day trip to the Burren (pronounced “burn” if you roll your r’s) and the Cliffs of Moher. The bus traversed those same narrow lanes. It was so big, opposing traffic had to stop to cross paths. I closed my eyes when two busses met. All I know is that nothing vital scraped off.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, now I suppose that my fictional Frank Healy will have to return to the Auld Sod to tip a few pints with his real relatives like Maeve on some future wild goose chase. A terrifying car chase along those narrow lanes is not out of the question.

I’ve already got the terror part down pat.