Say hello to the goo

It's a little bit hard to make sense of what's going on. After slowly building on a theme that's been present all summer, the theme of all-out busyness, we're peaking here in Boston as August draws to a close (Let me note that referring to a period of time 'drawing to a close' is probably the last thing I'd expect to hear in my brain, but it seems to have come to that). This is going to lead to a pretty non-linear post here and probably some related posts that I'll eventually link together, but follow along if you choose.

We're here to move our daughter into her new apartment. We have a minivan full of stuff and a shopping list of furniture to buy after we've dumped all of said stuff into said premises. Moving, of course, is among the busiest busy's you can have, especially Boston at the beginning of everyone's school year, so things would be a bit out of hand in any event. But that's just the tip of the iceberg (oh god, there I go again).

We came here from a weekend on Cape Cod for an informal reunion of Ronnie's high school (give or take) friends. It's a group of people I've gotten to know pretty well over the years; I like them all and enjoy hanging out with them. It was fun and as relaxing as would be possible for me under the circumstances, which are complicated circumstances.

Let's start with the visiting old friends thing. It resonates with me on a particularly deep level because one of the busy's this summer has been scanning all of my parents' old photo albums to create my own life album. There's no way doing this kind of project from scratch can have any result other than leaving your emotional self as a puddle of goo on the floor. It hasn't been exactly chronological (I'm just taking binders out of boxes in no particular order) but the pattern is clear. Every bit of family baggage I've been carrying is on 600 DPI display as I pull photos of myself, my immediate family and relatives, close 'family' friends (i.e., my parents' friends), my own friends, places we've been, most but not all of which I remember.

You can probably see how that could be overwhelming, especially since my father took multiple shots of every pose and my mom did no editing when she put them in albums. I'm not able to do too much of it at once, so it's been pretty omnipresent in my life all summer. So ending the summer by hanging out with the outcomes of someone else's childhood, much as I may love them, is emotionally jarring. A natural result of seeing all the pictures is to make me intensely miss a lot of people and that's only increased by the synergy with a different group of old friends.

Let's add to this the virtual certainty that I will be turning 60 in October. Much as I wish this were a typographical mistake (not in the blog, in the Book of Life perhaps), I've been feeling age creeping in on me here and there, both in my internal processes and what people say to me. Sixty is not old (actually it is old, but it's not death), but it ain't young either, and though I've never gotten too caught up in the round number thing, this is a milestone that I can't escape. I'm guessing I will write more about aging at some other time (senior discounts!), so I'll move on.

The part of this that I absolutely brought on myself is that I've been reading Infinite Jest this summer. IJ is an 1100 page monster of a book by the late David Foster Wallace, (the movie, The End of the Tour is about the book tour for this book). Reading this book is a life-changing experience in ways I don't even know yet. Every page has something that stirs me up and it's hard to understand what the cumulative effect will be. I've got fewer (not less- that's a book reference FYI) than 100 pages to go and it's like rolling down a hill that gets steeper and steeper. It's funny and insightful and weird and impossibly complicated and deeply affecting, at least in some part because you read it knowing that Wallace ultimately committed suicide and you can get a glimmer of insight as to what might have been going on in his head that eventually led to that.

We also went to Ireland, of course, and I've done a fair amount of biking, though not as much as I'd like, and school is starting soon, and I'm in the midst of an IRS audit for some gut-wrenching medical expenses. And now I'm in Boston. Moving day is tomorrow and then school starts the next day. So if you see a strangely familiar-looking puddle of goo somewhere, make sure to say "Hi."

Waxing and washing

So the time has come to wax. I guess you can wax in many ways but I try to make a point of only waxing reflectively. So I’ve told you lots about my trip, but how was the trip? What’s it like driving around Ireland for 2 weeks? What’s Ireland like? What have you learned from the trip?

Before any of that, I want to give myself a major pat on the back for planning and executing a two week trip abroad, with 7 different hotel stops, without screwing anything major up. We never arrived anywhere to find ourselves without a reserved room and none of the hotels were bad. In fact several were quite good. So there’s that, but since I’m not interested in planning anyone else’s trip for them, I’ll move on.

Though I never saw anything that used the phrase “Emerald Isle” or even the word emerald during our trip, Ireland is indeed very green. Not the city streets, of course, but the countryside is relentlessly green.

Speaking of the city streets, by the way, I should just note that compared to the Dutch and Belgians, the Irish are absolute wizards in the laying and maintenance of cobblestones. While in Bruges, we could see a new cobblestoned sidewalk being laid and it appeared as if there might be just a hint or design work going on to minimize its comfort level for walking. Irish cobblestones, on the other hand, are nearly flawless.

Of course, there are no potholes in Ireland either, since potholes come from the freeze-thaw cycle, and it never freezes in Ireland and at least in the weeks we were there, it barely thaws as well. You could store wine outside.

I know I’ve gone on about the driving, but the back roads thing becomes enervating after a while. I didn’t put a scratch on our car (aside from that one momentary bottom-out in the Black Valley) or anyone else’s car. But the concentration required to keep the car in the right place, which usually consisted of between a white line in the center (except when there wasn’t one) and a hedgerow on the side took a little too much out of me.

I did learn to use the side view mirror to see how close I was to the center line as a way of avoiding the vegetation or rocks on the other side. And I only screwed up a couple of times and never at a high speed or in a way that could have caused us bodily harm. I was able to park pretty well and gained a great appreciation for roundabouts, which are not really difficult and convey lots of information about where all the converging roads are headed. The two things I never got used to were putting on a seatbelt from the right and looking to my left to see the rearview mirror.

Really, though. It was too much driving. Too much distance to travel for the amount of time. Too much time in the car. It wasn’t extreme for the most part, but it got progressively wearing. One needs either more time or a less ambitious itinerary.

The other thing, and this is what you have to go in knowing, is that there isn’t a lot too do in Ireland. With a few exceptions, it’s not a place you go to do things. It’s a place you got to be and experience. Honestly, that’s not everyone’s cup of tea (oh, and by the way, forget about tea, the Irish are coffee mad. It’s hard to be in a good sized town and not be spitting distance from a café). If you want activities, you absolutely must plan them.

That said, it’s a lovely place to be. The people are just as wonderful as you hear. Some of our favorite moments were in taxicabs.

Enough for now. More in a couple of days.

On the way home

Wow wow wow. Just took my seat on the plane back to Philadelphia. The airport experience here in Dublin was remarkably arduous, even in the context of arduous airport experiences. It’s just a good thing nothing went wrong, or we never would have made the flight.

Once we got the shuttle bus from the hotel, we arrived at the airport at 9:35 for our 11:35 flight and then waited in line for:

1.  Initial passport check
2. Check in and baggage check. This from probably the least personable person I’ve encountered in the past two weeks. The one good thing is that the process was slow enough that I was able to offload about 10 excess pounds from my bag. My carry-on roller bag is by far the heaviest bag we have.
3. General Ireland security clearance, which meant belts off and computers out, but shoes on through the metal detector. After that we headed to what is called US Customs Preclearance, and to be honest the order of things is getting a little fuzzy for me (this happened within the past hour of writing this)
4. Another passport check
5. TSA Security clearance, which meant belts off again, shoes off this time but no need to empty pockets. Here I dealt with the rudest TSA person I’ve ever seen, not giving any instructions, answering questions in a clipped and abrupt manner, telling me to do this and that, and then fussing at me for not moving up because there were people waiting behind me. Oh really? There are other people on line behind me? I’m shocked. In Security Clearanceland, everyone knows that the person behind you is irrelevant. You need to get your stuff checked and you have no reason to dawdle. 
6. Passport kiosk land, where you scan your passport, answer questions about whether you were in contact with livestock, and leave with a slip.
7. Passport control. where our passports were checked again and our slips were taken.

At this point, I mentioned to Ronnie that we were done with Pre-clearance and wondered when Clearance on Post-Clearance would be like. She was not amused. And as we exited that last line, they announced boarding for our flight, so we queued up for that next, an finally got to our seats.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the screaming baby 3 rows behind us, but at least we don’t have to queue up to hear him. He has excellent screaming volume and stamina, even for a baby.

From Cork to Kilkenny

It was time to leave Cork, so we headed north toward Kilkenny. We stopped at a ruined ancient castle called the Rock of Cashel. Supposedly, St. Patrick, when he wasn't busy driving the snakes out of Ireland, also drove Satan out as well. The epic battle caused a large rock to land at this spot, though it's not there to test for Satan's DNA or anything.

Pretty cool looking castle though, though lacking in any kind of informational signs, and we weren't of a mind to take guided tour. So we headed out. Ended up on back roads and detours again, which was frustrating and made the trip take a little too long for comfort. Sigh. It's been an unfortunate theme. Tomorrow is all motorway, so that should be the end of it though.

Kilkenny, as we learned just before we headed this way, is having an arts festival for the next two weeks. We were a little trepeditious about crowds, but we (accidentally, I'll admit) cruised right up to our hotel, which is located just at the junction of all the main streets. Fortunately, our room faced none of them and was pretty quiet. The town is known for having a pretty and well preserved castle, which it certainly does.

The town was absolutely hopping and we walked around, fearing that it would be tacky like Killarney, but in fact it was pretty and tasteful for the most part. The mall kind of area was easy to avoid. We had lunch at a very nice little cafe which was unfortunately under siege by bees, which caused us to exit quickly.

The festival seems very popular and features all kinds of arts, from music to theater to painting to crafts. A lot of it was pretty mainstream (yes, we know that Ireland has pretty landscapes) but some of it was pretty interesting.

I'm guessing most of the people in town were Irish, but there were definitely a lot of British and Europeans as well. Overall, it was a nice vibe and the shopping was good. Ronnie found some very pretty earrings that she bought in a pop up store shared by a few local artists. It was kind of fun because the woman who made them had good advice as to which would look best on her. Suddenly she realized she'd left her purse somewhere and realized it was probably from our bee-induced (not a phrase I've used before) hasty exit from the cafe. Fortunately, it was safely put away and ready for me to pick up.

We had dinner in a tapas place near the hotel. Again, very busy and upbeat vibe throughout. The food was good, though there was really too much in each of the small plates to make it workable as tapas. If a restaurant suggests ordering 3 tapas as a serving and we both struggled to finish 2, you know the portion sizing is off.

As we hung out in the room after dinner, we periodically heard music and applause from the events outside. A bunch of guitarists and other players were jamming in the hotel bar. I listened a little bit. Nothing special, but still nice.

Gotta say, having nice weather makes a huge difference. After all of the cold and grey, having some sunshine lifted our mood significantly. As one of our taxi drivers said a couple of days later, Ireland is a nice place when it's sunny, but when it rains in can be pretty miserable.

Second day in Cork

Well since the first day in Cork was kind of a bust at best (when I told my dad we were here, his reaction was, "Oh god."), I thought we could do better today. I went out for a walk early and got a bit more of a sense of the place. It has potential; what I'm not sure it has is enough money to make all the good stuff happen.

There was no rain forecast today, and out we went. In the morning we went to the Cork City Gaol, a state of the art 19th century prison that is quite beautiful architecturally and as old prisons go, didn't seem quite that bad. It was actually a mixed gender prison and the conditions were surprisingly good, except when they threw a bunch of Republican rebels (in the 1920's, not after the debates) in there and jammed as many as they could in a cell. Some of their graffiti is still visible.

Part of the fun of the place was that they had cheesy wax (or something) figures depicting various goings on.

Aside from whipping, the favorite punishment was to put the prisoners on a treadmill to pump water or grind grain.

Looking for something more uplifting, we then went to the St. Anne's Church of Shandon, at the top of a hill near our hotel. We had heard from the owner of the B&B we stayed at in Kilmare that you could actually ring the bells of the church. Sounded good to me, so up the hill we went. Sure enough, you can ring the bells by pulling on cables. I chose that Irish churchbell standard, "Don't Cry For Me Argentina." You can then climb a narrow spiral staircase  up and look at the bells, but you have to wear those kind of headsets that they ground controller wear at airports, because it's pretty deafening when someone down below is playing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow."

No, I don't have a mohawk, that's the frame

Very loud when you're standing next to it

There's a nice view of the city from the top.

From there we went to, what else, the Butter Museum, tracing the rise and fall of the Cork County butter industry. I will say, the butter here is very good.

Ronnie is excited to visit the Butter Museum

I think our favorite touch was the recorded churning noises you hear as you walk up the stairs. It was actually interesting, in an obviously limited sort of way. And we weren't likely to get such an opportunity again.

We then had a nice lunch at a café near the hotel and then rested in the room for a while, and then decided that we would drive down to a nearby seaside town called Kinsale for dinner. Kinsale is known, at least in Kinsale, for being the gourmet capital of Ireland. Honestly, the food's been pretty good here in general. Too much, mostly, but good, Anyway, I called a few places and got one someplace we weren't crazy about, so we went to our first choice, a wine bar called Black Pig, to see if we could squeeze our way in. It was completely full when we got there. All that was available were two stools by a teeny platform on a column, but then we got to move to two chairs with a kind of box table, and eventually to the bar itself. It was a great meal (especially good butter), and the people in the place just couldn't have been nicer to us and to everyone we saw them interact with.

It really is genuinely friendly here. At the pub the night before, I overheard a guy say he was a bookstore manager in Dublin. Later on, I was standing at the bar near him, and struck up conversation. It was really easy and natural. We talked about the book business and he asked my name and it was really quite nice. There's no agenda. People just want to chat.

That was our experience in Kinsale as well, with everyone we talked to. After the meal, I struggled to drive back to Cork, partly because I got lost, and, not coincidentally, because the headlights on our car are awful. The brights were almost as strong as the regular lights on my car at home, so I had no visibility at any point. It was very hard. All the driving is hard, but this was particularly bad being at night.

But we made it back safely. Tomorrow we're off to Kilkenny.

Just a note on what happened between the Ring of Kerry and Cork

I realized I skipped a little bit. We got back from our drive pretty unhappy. I went out for a walk and checked out the restaurant where we were supposed to eat that evening. I asked the woman in charge where we could see an actual Irish music session in town and she suggested a couple of the less touristy pubs. I checked them out and they were both very small but one was having a session that evening.

So after my walk though this very pleasant town, I went back and we got ready for dinner. We're kind of restauranted out at this point, but this place, The Mews, was very nice. Good food and low key atmosphere.

Then we went down the street to Crowley's Bar and watched 4 women, 2 fiddlers, a flutist and banjo/mandolin/fiddler, eventually joined by a guy who was also a fiddler.

Traditional Irish music is not the most varied stuff you'll see, but I find it very soulful and enjoyed it a lot. It made the day end on a better note, so to speak.

Face down in Cork City

We're in Cork. Cork City, I guess they say- the county is quite large. It's an old city that's clearly had lots of ups and downs and seems to be in the middle of one of those up or down periods. Soe hopeful looking signs, but shabby and poor in a lot of others. It does have a big university and some high tech so there's hope, but it's old and beat too, so you can either do something good with it or not. The place appears to be trying, with mixed success, to reinvent itself as a modern city, within the limits of the geography and infrastructure.

The geography is difficult because it's all hills and marshland. The name Cork comes from some Gaelic phrase meaning marsh. And then there are hills. It's Ireland's second-biggest city, with a population of around 120,000, and has that kind of second city inferiority complex that you see everywhere.

It was a trading town, and the largest exporter of butter in the world at one point (not sure how much competition there was for that at the time). It was fiercely nationalist during the original revolution, which earned it the distinction of being burnt to the ground, so most of the medieval aspects of it are gone.

After spending a pleasant hour walking around Kinsale, we got here on yet another grey, dreary day and decided, for lack of any other direction, to walk through the main shopping area. This was part of an urban renewal project, of which there have been many though the years, most recently in the 1990's. As befits those times, it looks like a mall. It was a great fresh food market, called the English Market,

one nice department store and a couple of decent one, but the rest was kind of trashy (GameStop, H&M, etc.). After wandering got depressing we came back to the River Lee Hotel, which is very spiffy and modern. We kind of crashed for a while, after which I went to work out.

The hotel is attached to a spa and to a very busy upscale gym, with a very loud class consisting of someone yelling and everyone else punching things. Outside the room, a spinning instructor was waiting with a pallet of spin bikes. I went into the main gym, which is the kind of urban gym I tend to go out of my way to avoid. Loud, pulsing music, rows of machines, free weights and mats crammed into a corner. It was so loud that I could hear their music over what I had on my headphones. I held on for 25 minutes and then gave up.

We then had dinner in the bar downstairs. It's a pleasant enough bar and the servers were great (our favorite line, the waiter gives Ronnie a bit of her wine to taste and she said, "Oh it's okay, I trust you." And he replied, "Are you sure? I wouldn't."). But the place is infested by fruit flies. They like wine and they like Guinness as well, from the look of things. I've been drinking almost entirely Guinness since we arrive. I know there's a thriving Irish microbrew scene, but I didn't come here for that, and I've made a point of not buying stuff to keep in the fridge, preferring to force myself go to the bar downstairs for a draft if I want something.

I've also tried Beamish Stout, which was recommended by the bartender in Kinsale and the bartender here said he kind of alternates it. It's a bit toastier and less smooth, but good. That was it for the day. Hopefully it'll be more fun tomorrow.

The tipping point

Let's face it, I just screwed up. I was already to skip the Ring of Kerry, with all of its magnificent scenery and hordes of tour bus, but everyone said, "oh, you have to see the Ring of Kerry," and the only day we could do it was today (Tuesday, I think), so we set out to see an abbreviated version of it.

Gotta say, I get why it's a big deal. There just aren't a lot of great mountain/ocean combos to be seen. We left relatively early and went the opposite way of the tours, deciding to do an abbreviated version. Saw some very wonderful things, but the abbreviated version was still too much, considering how much car time we'd had the day before.

Yes, it's quite grand!

On the way back, I figured we might as well take a peek at Killarney, the main tourist stop in the area. I stupidly assumed there had to be some reason everyone went there. More on that later. Getting there was the real adventure.

So rather than go the regular main scenic route along the mountainside, I decided to take the local road down through the valley. For the first 20 km or so, it was really beautiful, and even though it was slow, at least for me the views and the sheep, which were mostly uncontained and wandering on the roadside were worth it.

Unfortunately, we hit a weird kind of tourist jam-up. Suddenly we started seeing more and more people walking along the side of the road. Then a bunch or horse-drawn carts. For the longest time, we couldn't figure out where they were coming from. We were literally in the middle of nothing.

The road was very narrow, though there were occasional turnouts. Sometimes the horsecarts would let us through, sometimes not. It took what was already kind of long and made it seemingly endless. I even bottomed out the car once, with one wheel going off the pavement and making a nasty scraping sound. No obvious damage though (and hooray for $0 deductible!). We finally got past horsecart central (there actually was such a place, not that it was called that) and were able to drive as normally as is possible under the circumstances. That brought us into the snarl that is Killarney.

I'm not just referring to our facial expressions by the time we left, but the traffic. It's so crowded that you could hardly walk and it was trashy touristy stuff for the most part (not that there aren't some nicer shops). Ugh. That put a really bad taste in our mouth, and the hour or so it took us to get back only made it worse.

I'd have to say that was our low point. Too much car time. Too much Killarney. Fortunately, the town where we chose to stay, Kinsale, is a much smaller place and quite nice. So I'll pick it up there next.

Time for a spin in the countryside.

In the back of my mind, I have this little nagging voice that says, "don't ruin the trip to Ireland by spending too much time in the car." These were the couple of days where we kind of overdid it. The first one was necessary if we were going to do our lap; it's not a short distance from Galway to Kenmare, no matter how you dice it. But of course we couldn't just drive there, we had to check out the natural wonders on the way.

And they were, in fact, quite wonderful. I've not found that all so-called wonders are actually so, but that does not apply to either the Burren or the Cliffs of Moher. The Burren is most certainly not to everyone's taste, and to be honest, we experienced only a small part of it, which is conveniently located near a small megalithic tomb.

This is the small version of a megalithic tomb. Random tourist included for scale.

It's these weird "pavements," they call them, of limestone with grooves and ruts and layers and all kinds of shapes, and part of what's cool is that they're all filled with plants. Hundreds of flowers and different kinds of foliage. Really quite remarkable looking. There are lots of things here that make me wish I knew more about geology.

So once we were through the Burren, we headed for the cliffs. Not surprisingly, there was a long, narrow raod headed up toward the cliffs, which we could see was ending in a snarl at the parking lot. Fortunately, I had seen a sign for another car park a bit earlier, so we turned around and went that way.

From either parking lot, the cliffs are a hike. I guess it wouldn't do to let people just park up there. The place where we landed was a mere 800 meters from the cliffs. That doesn't sound that bad, does it? Of course it was all uphill and with what must have been a steady 25mph wind. So it was quite a grind getting up there, and then you had to deal with the windiness on the tops of the cliffs themselves. Fortunately, the direction was onshore, so no danger of being blown over. And really, the spots I took these pictures from had another level about 8-10 feet down, so if I'd fallen I guess I could have hurt my knee or something, but it wasn't dangerous.

It was, however, very hard to stand still and take pictures, but here's what I got.

Not too bad, for a bunch of cliffs. And, of course, since human beings are what they are, what do they need to do when they get to the very top of something?

Of course, build a tower. Why? Really, I mean it. You needed to be 40 feet higher on top of these 400 foot-high cliffs? Was the view that much better?

So back down the 800 meters in the wind and finally we were on our way to Kilmare. On the way, we got stuck in a bad traffic jam around the noted tourist town of Killarney, which should have been a warning to us. Finally got there close to 7. Looks like a nice town.

To be continued.

Sunday, and I know it's Wednesday already. I will catch up.

Today was our last full day in Galway. I think we were hoping to feel a little more settled here, staying for 3 nights, but the nature of the hotel and what we were doing with our days kind of prevented that, for me, anyway. I know that people really like Galway, and I can see why. If I ever get a chance to come back here, I'd like to be situated differently and not during race week.

But c'est la vie. Today is Ronnie's birthday and we planned to go to the races to celebrate. The weather forecast was very uncertain, which made it hard to plan, and even though it didn't rain, it was chilly and the crowd was rather sparse (don't get me wrong, there were plenty of people- it just wasn't packed). Ronnie looked beautiful in her dress and fascinator, and I had my new blue blazer and tie, so it would have been more fun had it been more of a scene. We stayed to watch a race, and then headed back to check out the town.

It's a nice little city. Lots of pedestrian streets, as they seem to do well in these old European cities. We had lunch in a nice little patisserie and walked around. Lots of shops and pubs and street musicians. I could see it being a good time. We parked in what they call here a multi-storey parking lot, which was almost big enough to park cars in. Someone was nice enough to jump out of her car and help me back into the tiny little spot off the narrow lane. And I'm a pretty skilled parker, even with the left side thing. Can't imagine how Americans from suburban communities handle it.

Then back to the hotel. The hotel. The fabulous g Hotel. It's an odd place. We've come across this kind of thing before- a hotel with pretensions and intentions of being a 5-star hotel, but just not quite able to put it all together. It's a couple of miles outside the city center, which is fine, but it backs up on a shopping mall of some sort and shares a parking lot with something resembling a Lowe's and a movie theater. So unless you pull in front and get valet parking, you go into the mall parking lot and park by the lift.

The lobby is very glitzy and there are a series of salons with cocktail tables and chairs and finally a room with a bar in it and even more finally a restaurant. On the other end is a nightclub of some sort. It's all done in pink and silver. Our room is huge and luxurious, with a double shower and a strangely long space between the bed and the sitting area (the TV, which is in the sitting area, is easily 20 feet from the bed). I must note that, for the most part, the people working in the hotel were very nice and more than helpful. Just couldn't recommend it for the price.

The "nice" front of the fabulous g Hotel

The trash from my car in the only kind of bag they could offer me at the fabulous g hotel, relaxing in the lobby

They do have a nice spa here and Ronnie was able to get a birthday massage. Then we had a very nice dinner in part of town that was absolutely mobbed, so we walked around and then had simply had enough of it, so we went back to the room.

The next morning I walked around again. Here's the town square and an old cemetery nearby.

Across from the cemetery, there was a vicious argument going on between a young man and woman, the woman sort of running away but still interacting with the guy, and eventually stopping. He was just screaming at her (I'm wasting my f---ing life on you!), I think about someone hitting on her and her not doing enough to discourage it. I really didn't want to get involved (and I was across the street anyway) but I did keep half an eye to make sure it didn't get violent, which it didn't.

And then we headed out of town.

It's that time

It's towards the end of Tuesday afternoon now. Around the time in a trip like this you start to feel a little lost and begin to second guess yourself. Why did we do this? Why go there? Should we have planned it this way? Planned it more or planned it less? Visited fewer places?

How do you do a country in 2 weeks? It's absurd. You hit a few highlights, and then the more you try to cram things in, the more you get frazzled. It's frazzle time. Fortunately, we've done most of the heavy duty driving at this point. We actually could do the rest of the trip with less driving than we did just on Monday, if we decided to take freeways and get place to place.

Vacations like this are almost by design going to be a series of highs and lows. You have a new place and limited time to see it, and so the stakes get raised on everything if you let that happen. I don't always let it, but this is the portion of the show where I'm tempted to do so. But you don't want to overthink it (not that I would ever do such a thing), but really the only thing wrong is we just spent too damned much time in the car these past 2 days.

In closing, (I like the formality of that)) I'd just like to say that this is everyone else's fault. It's obligatory dishonesty. Nobody wants to hear anyone whine about their vacation. It's a vacation, for goodness sake. It's barely even real life. It's just not all unicorns and rainbows though. Okay, got that off my chest. Now time to get back to the trip.

Friday and Saturday, I think

Today is Saturday, I think. Yesterday we drove from Derry to Galway, which is a long drive. Have I mentioned that I'm not enjoying driving on the left side of the road? Driving is not supposed to be relaxing but it's not supposed to make your hands hurt from gripping the steering wheel either. It just wears me out. People say you get used to it but I haven't after a few hundred miles. I guess I have in that I know where to look and how to make turns, and I've gotten very accomplished at roundabouts. But every second takes intense concentration.

Our route was semi-scenic, including a drive across an island in the middle of a huge lake, It's best known for having a little cemetery that includes these sculptures, if you can call them that.

It's called the Janus statue, because those are two sides of the same stone and there's a Roman god with two faces called Janus. But it's not, because the Romans were never in Ireland and it's a Celtic deity of some sort.

From there, it was a long slog (almost literally, as it rained for much of it) to Galway, but we made it to the very nice but very odd hotel where we're spending 3 nights. More about that later, but it was already fairly late by the time we go here, so we had dinner and went to bed.

Today, we went to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands off the shore of Galway. It's a nearly deserted, small island. Why people ever chose to live here is beyond me, but they did, and for a long time. One thing they did here was build a lot of stone walls. I'm not sure why, but there are hundreds of them, dividing the island into a lots of little parcels, which I can only assume were significant at some time.

We rented a tandem bicycle and rode all the way across the this ancient fort called Dún Aenghusa. By the way, a lot of things on this island start with Dun, but only some have the little accent mark. I have no idea why. All the signs are in Gaelic and there's no real way to figure it out. The is huge and made of stone, which is appropriate for a stone age fort. It's dramatically set up on top of a sheer cliff. Again, I don't know what it was they were trying to defend, aside from themselves.

I realize, I never took a picture of the fort. It's a huge circular ring of piled up rocks at the top of a hill strewn with stones place for the express purpose of making it difficult to get at. Fortunately, there's a path through some of the hill but it was not an easy walk up the hill, which I guess was the idea. The views were incredible.

Then we rode back. I'd never ridden a tandem bike before. It was fun. The island is hilly but nothing steep or really hard. I should note that as we've seen most places, there are not a lot of Americans here. We heard lots of languages, some Spanish and French and some unrecognizable, but really as much Irish as anything.

We went to and fro by ferry, which was that weird mix of efficiency and chaos that seems very Irish to me. We ate dinner back at the hotel in one of the many lounges, the 'highlight' of which was a server tripping on I don't know what and dropping an entire tray of food on the floor. He was visibly very upset, like to the point of tears, and our server, who was in the middle of taking our order, ran over to console him. I thought his empathy was very charming. Apparently the guy was brand new here and is a shy young man and was therefore crushed by the mishap. Hope he's okay.

After that to bed. Sunday is Ronnie's birthday. We're going to the Galway Races, but the weather has put kind of damper on that, so to speak. It'll be worth a look anyway.