Maybe it was Cillian Murphy being in the news all last summer while promoting Oppenheimer that spurred me on. Or maybe it was trying to connect with my ancestry, (although my DNA test says I’m only 16% Irish). But I’ve wanted to travel to Ireland for a long time, and my girls finally being old enough to attend sleep-away camp was the perfect opportunity for my husband Chris and I to finally get away for more than a long weekend.
Chris is the travel planner at our house. He is a good researcher and he enjoys doing it. I just have to sign off on itineraries. It largely works for us. When I invisioned our trip, it was by train (Cillian Murphy to blame for this, too. Him and his Calm Sleep Story…). Ultimately we decided that driving was the best way to see everything we wanted to see.
We flew into Dublin and picked up our rental car (we paid extra for a car with automatic transmission; driving on the left was challenge enough–we didn’t need a stick shift!) Our first hotel reservation was in Connemara, but it’s quite a long drive (after an overnight fight) from Dublin, so our first stop was Athlone and Sean’s Bar, reportedly the oldest pub in Ireland. Chris declared that the Guinness did, indeed, taste better in Ireland. (I’d never tried it before, always imagining it would taste like mud. It doesn’t.).
Our first hotel-stay was at the gorgeous Ballyannich Castle in Recess, Connemara. At check-in, we heard the magical phrase “you’ve been upgraded to a suite”. I had mentally prepared myself for tiny European rooms on this trip, but this one was larger than my first New York City apartment (I’m not kidding, actually the bathroom was almost as large as that first apartment).
We prowled around the grounds. There are walled gardens to explore and also wooded trails and a hidden lake which reminded of us of our trip to Attean Lake Lodge in Jackson, Maine last summer–that being truly remote–you get to the resort by boat). We had a great dinner in the hotel restaurant before passing out from jet-lag.
In the morning, we had breakfast in the lovely dining room. Hubs ordered a full Irish (yes, he ate the black pudding-he liked it). We explored some more and then headed off to Kylemore Abbey; the first manor house of its kind in Western Ireland. You can tour some of the house and the chapel and the grounds, which include a 6-acre walled garden. Looking out of the front doors up into the hills over the lake was breathtaking. I took a few moments to imagine myself with my morning coffee savoring that view. I could have stood there all day.
Originally, we had 2 nights booked at Ballyannich, but had we cancelled the second because we felt like it was “in the middle of nowhere,” and that we would be spending a lot of time in the car getting from one attraction to another. But we figured out pretty quickly, that the middle of nowhere is where the magic is in Ireland. If you’re lucky enough to be the passenger like I was (there is not money enough in the world to get me to drive there) you will likely enjoy, as I did, gazing out the car window at the patchwork-quilt hills in every shade of green, dotted with sheep or cows as far as the eye can see. Throughout our trip, but especially in those first few days, my husband and I found ourselves blurting “wow!” at the incredible scenery. The landcape was beyond our imagining and left us, nearly, speechless.
Dinner at Ard Bia in Galway City near the Spanish Arch was the highlight, in particular my appetizer of grilled peaches with ricotta and pistachios. Afterwards we wandered the City. We purchased our obligatory Aran sweaters. I gave a boy who looked to be about six years old playing the violin with no obviously-attached grown-up in sight five euros. The pubs were spilling out onto the street with tourists, so we made our way into the neighborhoods to see how the locals lived. We were shocked at the tiny space available for parked cars in front of the houses and marveled at the canal that ran under others. We hadn’t planned any specific stops in Galway other than the restaurant and sweater market–we had left our itinerary open in case we passed a church or museum that piqued our interest, or a pub with traditional music, but I think we were both eager to get out of the city and back to the countryside. Those hills were calling us.
We would spend the next big chunk of the trip driving in a large loop-to Limerick and then onto the Ring of Kerry and finally back towards Dublin. We saw abandoned abbeys, gravestones with my father’s family name, standing stones, a waterfall, sheep wandering the sides of the road and wandering in the road, the absolutely breathtaking Kerry Cliffs and the Cliffs of Moher, more sheep, lots of cows and a dog riding a donkey. We flew hawks in Kilkenny. I drank lots of tea and a little beer (Smithwicks). I ate brown bread every time it was offered. We found ourselves lost for words surveying the landscape more often than not.
I don’t want to dump on Dublin, but after 6 days of pastureland and waves crashing against sky-scraper-tall cliffs, it was a bit of a let down. I was glad we listened to our falconer who suggested we not be in a hurry to get up there and we dragged our feet in Kilkenny. As I said, we hit the tourist spots—and every one was crowded and expensive. The Guinness Storehouse was a late addition to the itinerary becuase a colleague said I shouldn’t miss it, but she was wrong. It was Timesquare-crowded and while the bar overlooking all of Dublin at the top of the building was cool, there as nowhere to sit and it smelled like a port-a-potty. (Save your euros for the Jameson Distellery-the tour is guided, informative and far less crowded.) The Book of Kells (another FOMO addition) was likewise crowded, expensive and I couldn’t get the audio-guide to work on my phone. The Reading Room at Trinity College was breathtaking, but so packed all I could think of was COVID. I wished I was back in Connemara. Maybe we are getting older (I mean, obviously we are all getting older), but I was really yearning to be back in the peace and quiet. When I was growing up in rural New Hampshire, all I wanted was to live in New York City, and when I was right off the bus at 18, I loved the hustle and bustle and the full 24-hourness of every day there. Now I was relishing the fact that the whole country of Ireland had a population smaller than New York City by about 3 million people. Maybe COVID did it to me, and I have a little PSTD when I get closer than six feet to a stranger indoors. Or maybe the hustle and bustle that I used to crave is now just exhausting. I’ve got a full-time job I do in part of the time, 2 kids, 2 cats, a husband, a side-hustle, a dog, a house and an un-ending To-Do list. Like a lot of people (most?) I’m overwhelmed. We are all so busy. I feel, often, like the walls are closing in. I’m constantly over-stimulated. The wide-open spaces were where I want to be. I don’t ever want to feel myself squished up against a stranger like I did at the Guiness Storehouse. I don’t want to be cooped up or hemmed in. I don’t want to hear car alarns or other people’s music or even other people’s voices most of the time.. I want fresh air and landscape. I want verdant hills as far as they eye can see. I want calm. Serenity. I want to hear birds or waves crashing or silence. And when I go back to Ireland (and I will go back—I’m already planning a hiking trip with my daughters) my mantra when chosing stops will be “more sheep, fewer people”. I will head straight back to the middle of nowhere.
JKLJourneys.com 