Image source: Merlina McGovern
This past Friday, I landed back in Boston after a two-and-a-half-week vacation in Ireland. As our plane descended into the lush and rolling lands of this “emerald isle,” I sighed and thought, yes, there actually do seem to be forty shades of green here.
My husband is a great trip planner, and what a trip he planned for us. We started in the cosmopolitan city of Dublin and then rented a car to drive around the southern coast, up through the southwest coast, and then back across to Ardmore. I have so many pictures and memories and thoughts about this ancient island, and I’ll spread them over a few posts in the coming days.
My husband and I are in our late forties, and we were traveling with our daughter and my mother-in-law. Traveling with family is different from when we used to traipse across Europe all on our own in our twenties. Back then, we thought nothing of walking around cities full of historical sites for hours on end. Now, we needed to balance our need for adventure with the desires and needs of our family.
Our first evening was spent struggling to stay awake after our midday arrival. Jetlagged and sleepy, we checked into our hotel (a clean and wonderfully located Hyatt Centric Liberties, Dublin) and then wandered the streets trying to stay awake. The skies were thick with dark clouds. Everywhere you went, there were seagulls crying overhead.
We walked and walked until we made it to The Landmark pub. It was dark and loud, the faux embellished tin roof low. We ordered beers at the bar while waiting for our table.
We had heard about how friendly the Irish are, and we found that they lived up to that reputation wonderfully. As we sat down to have a pint, a lovely woman at the bar just started chatting with us. She asked us how our trip was and then gave us recommendations for tourist locations. She was soon joined by another friendly gentleman who echoed her recommendations and gave some of his own.
I wasn’t used to this loquaciousness, but I decided I loved it. After years of pandemic isolation, to be out and about and talking to people, laughing, and enjoying ourselves, it made me feel human and connected again.
A young man with long dark curls, a guitar slung across his shoulders, strode up to a corner of the bar and began singing lively cover songs. We dug into our fish and chips, drank our pints of thick Guinness, and soaked up the lively chatter of happy pub goers.
It was a brilliant introduction to Dublin life.
Over the next few days, we explored the complicated history of Trinity College and witnessed the amazing Long Room that still managed to impress even though many of the books there have been removed as part of a month’s long protection project; a project that began after the terrible tragedy and scare of the Notre Dame fire. Despite being one of the more crowded sites we visited, the glory and brilliant jeweled tones of the Book of Kells still managed to lift my soul to the heavens as I thought of the painstaking process involved in producing these colorful manuscripts.
We wandered around the literary museum and soaked in the words of Joyce, Stoker, Wilde, and Beckett. We visited the shriveled up bog bodies similar to the ones described by Seamus Heaney (“Some day I will go to Aarhus/To see his peat-brown head,/The mild pods of his eyelids,/His pointed skin cap.”) at the National Irish Museum, witnessing the thousands of years of history curled up in the mahogany skin. We went on the best food tour, sampling Guinness and Irish stew, and we learned how to make the perfect Irish coffee.
I learned so much about Irish history that I don’t want to cram it all into one small line in this post, so I will save that for another post this week.
The history, the food, the people, we experienced so much and yet left yearning for more in Dublin. I could feel the weight of history and the love of place and of each other that the Irish people had. It was so good to feel connected again.
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