It was a cold morning but the sun was shining and the clouds were huge and white against crystal blue sky. Spectacular day. There was snow on the low mountaintops outside Tralee. Sheila said that doesn't often happen. The cold weather here is making news. Single digit Celsius readings are a big deal. (European Travel 101: to convert C degrees to F degrees, add 10 to the number and double it.) (P.S. Our server at breakfast in Galway on Sunday used the word "desperate" to describe the cold. She'd be so unhappy waking up in western PA at this time of year, wouldn't she?)
The Irish harvest their abundant wind and convert it to electricity. We see big white wind turbines grouped together on hilltops as we travel along. The design is quite pleasing against the sky. (In the middle of the country, where all the peat bogs are, the Irish convert peat heat to electricity. Those plants are not quite as pretty to look at as the windmills.)
We headed out toward the Dingle Peninsula with a stop at Inch Beach. My jaw dropped when I saw it approaching and realized where we were. If you know the film (or "fill-im," as they say here), Ryan's Daughter, then you've seen Inch Beach. It's that broad stretch of gorgeous beach where Robert Mitchum's character, the schoolmaster, walks with his students on the day when Sarah Miles (it's Sarah Miles, right?) is having a rendezvous with the British soldier, in the dunes. The fill-im was set in and around Inch Beach, in Dingle, which Sheila told us was, until recently, considered to be the "back of beyond" in its remoteness. It's still not too developed, and I would live there in a heartbeat (if I could have a half-dozen residences to travel among during the year... and if I could persuade Jo to live somewhere without cable).So we got to walk on Inch Beach on a clear, stunningly beautiful morning, and I had another one of those moments of incredulity that I am actually in Ireland. It hardly seems real, sometimes.
All the signs as you travel west are in Irish first, English second. That's been the law since about 2000, Sheila said. In an attempt to preserve Irish language and tradition, Irish is taught in schools now, and all college students are required to pass an Irish language exam before they graduate. (We heard young people speaking Irish (Gaelic) in the streets of Galway over the weekend.) I am beginning to recognize some parts of words ("Baile" is town, as in Ballyvaughan, and "kil" is church, as in Kilkenny). The Gaelic names got Anglicized here when the Brits moved in. Kind of the way they went to India and made turned Mumbai into Bombay. Bad, bad imperialist Brits. This is Ireland. I'm joining the mob (and pretending not to ignore, for the moment, my own country's imperialist tendencies).
We stopped briefly in Dingle, a fishing town founded by the Normans and currently busy with maritime industry, and, in better weather, tourists. It's got colorfully painted buildings lining narrow streets that wind up from the docks. All kind of boats are docked there, and even in the drizzle that had started to fall by the time we arrived, it had that fresh fish and diesel fuel smell that I love. Note to brother Frank: You would love Dingle. You would have ditched the group, pulled on your foul weather gear and talked your way onto a boat for the afternoon. Me, I'm happy taking photos of boats and fish monger barrows.
From Dingle we drove out onto the peninsula, where the vistas were nothing short of awe-inspiring. What a breathtakingly beautiful part of the world the Dingle Peninsula is! Huge sky, vast sea, massive clouds, steep cliffs, rugged sheep and cattle, snug cottages, squalls giving way to rainbows... I don't have the words to describe it. I'll post some pix so you can see, too.
I'll put more pix together and give you a link to them later, now that we've downloaded or uploaded or whatever you do to get them from the memory card to the laptop. (Guess who handled that technology maneuver? Hint: Initials are JML, not AML.)
We went along very narrow roads, stopping from time to time to see what we could see. Sheila said the original roads were made to be about two cows wide, so two farmers coming from opposite directions could each take their cattle past the other's. The roads aren't much wider than two cows now, so John's driving was even more impressive than it had been (and that is saying something!). The man has nerves of steel.
Slea Head, the westernmost point of Europe, has a crucifixion statue looking out to sea, at a bend in the road. The Blasket Islands lay just beyond--as far west in Europe as you can go.
We saw some beehive huts--small, round dwellings made of stones placed without mortar,
where ancient monks lived. There were three or so standing on an impossibly steep hill that had been cultivated as grazing ground for sheep. That the huts have withstood centuries of wind and rain, not to mention human and farm animal traffic, testifies to their amazing construction. While I was snapping pix, I wondered what it was like to live in one of those huts. But I didn't wonder long, because John told us that the owner of the house adjacent to the huts gets ornery and comes out and makes tourists pay 2 euro for photographing her property. Seems fair to me, but she didn't come out in the rain while we were there.We made a stop at the Mulcahy pottery studio, overlooking the bay. It would be so cool to have a business like that on the peninsula. Of course, I'd need to produce something that people want to buy, so that might be problematic. He makes pottery; she weaves things; together they sell it. We've seen his pottery in shops in Dublin. It's really nice. So nice, in fact, that we bought some and had it shipped home.
It was unsettling to see the "famine huts" along the road--tiny little stone dwellings where whole families subsisted during the famine years in the 19th century. Can't imagine such hardship. We are so soft, so untested. It is believed that St. Brendan set sail from Dingle Bay in the 6th century, in boats made of wood and lanolin-treated leather, and reached North America. The courage of such an endeavor--seeing the cliffs of the Dingle Peninsula receding in the distance as he sailed away--gives me shivers.
There was rain and some sleet as we drove back from whence we came, toward the town of Dingle again, and then on to our next destination(s). John has been playing Van Morrison CDs on the coach, and that makes me happy. Except that he fast-forwards over "Gloria" (G-L-O-R-I-A Glooooria...) every time. Probably wants the group to stay relatively mellow while he's behind the wheel. I'll never hear Van Morrison the same way again, though. Just sublime, as we move through the Irish countryside.
When we made a quick pit stop on the way back through Dingle, Jo and I scooted up the main street through the rain to a grocery store to get some sandwiches. There was a Nirvana song playing in the store. Did not expect to hear Nirvana in Dingle.Back on the coach, John played a video about Tom Crean, whose pub, the South Pole Inn, we were going to pass that afternoon. Crean is a local legend because of his involvement with Antarctic exploration with Shackleton and Scott. He was part of the 1914 expedition on the Endurance, with Shackleton. So another note to brother Frank (whose borrowed copy of Shackleton's account of the Endurance experience is on my bookshelf in Grove City): I saw Tom Crean's pub. How cool is that?
We passed through the town of Listowel en route to the ferry at Tarbert, and we crossed the River Shannon from Tarbert on our way to Lahinch, where we spent Saturday night. The sky was darkening over a broad vista of rocky beach and crashing waves as we came into Lahinch, a little seaside-y kind of town. Not Seaside, NJ. More Victorian seaside-y. In fact, we stayed in the Atlantic Hotel, built toward the end of the 19th century and utterly charming, from the plush lounge with the fireplace, to the thickly carpeted stairs and warren of wallpapered hallways, to the gleaming brass fittings and curtained windowseats. Just a lovely place to end the day. I am a total sucker for civilized niceness. I may daydream about living the monk's life in a beehive hut, somewhere overlooking Dingle Bay, but I'd have the nickname of Brother Cranky by sundown on the first day.
Dinner was served in the pretty dining room of the hotel. The menu made choosing difficult, but we both started with a rich chowder full of all kind of fresh swimmers and scuttlers. That was followed by an entree best described as roasted chicken breast over a layer of some kind of stuffing with fruit in it, over a thin slice of baked ham, over very creamy mashed potatoes. Yeah, it was good. (Anyone care to venture a guess on the points value of that meal so far?) This being Ireland, one of the side vegetables served was a plate of fried spuds (a.k.a., chips). I passed on those, partly because I'd already consumed a few pieces of the grainy brown bread that is in every bread basket here (I tell myself it's high in fiber). And also because I knew there was an order of profiteroles coming with coffee later. (No, I'm not clairvoyant. I know because I ordered all three courses myself.)Re profiteroles: What is not to love about itty bitty walnut-size creampuff pastries filled with chantilly cream and drizzled with chocolate sauce? Six of them, to be exact? Someone in the kitchen of the Atlantic Hotel in Lahinch, Ireland, fully comprehends the concept of profiteroles. I respect that in a person.
We went out to walk after (read: walk off) dinner, but the town is very small and it was drizzly, and besides, we wanted to find some live music at a pub, and we heard that there was some next door. So we went there first, and we heard music coming from the back, and the lad in front said to go into the back room, but what we heard there was Elvis singing, and we knew that, most likely, he was not live. So we went across the road and down a-ways, and we ran into some of the SRU kids in that pub, helping one of the guys celebrate his 26th birthday, and there was live music... but it was reggae, played by local Lahinch lads. Not quite what we were looking for. So we went out to another pub, but we struck out there, too. So we climbed the stairs back to our lovely room at the Atlantic, and Jo watched bad TV while I blogged a big and rationalized the eating of profiteroles with a vow that the ones at the end of our excellent dinner were the last I'll have for a long time. Big sigh.
Somewhere during the afternoon we deposited Sheila back near Tralee and sent the Dean and his lovely wife off to the train to Dublin so they could return to PA the next day. There may have been some non-essential spending of euros along the way. It's all a blur. John packs a lot into a weekend trip! So much to take in and process. But such a wonderful Saturday it was!
More to follow, if you'd care to come along...
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