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We went to the Giant’s Causeway, land of funny rocks, to the Bushmills Distillery, oldest distillery of all time, and to Belfast, where a guy named Walter gave us a black cab tour of the city, and showed us a lot of the murals from The Troubles, immortalizing people who were killed or who played a part, people from the IRA.
That’s the briefest of all summaries, but I’ve taken way too long to wrap up my tales of Ireland, and I’ll sum in up with this:
In Belfast, we said goodbye to Squidget.
Apparently they weren’t bothered that we dripped honey on the backseat. Whoops.
A pictorial of the rest of the journey:
We crossed into Northern Ireland without seeing so much as a sign, let alone a border, but suddenly there were British accents on the radio, and the shops accepted pounds.
We could only take pictures in the bar at Bushmills, because everywhere else in the distillery the use of a camera might cause the alcohol in the air to ignite. Apparently.
Walter, our tour guide, showed us the Peace Wall in Belfast, that seperates Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods. Its gates still close every night.
***
G doesn’t want me to tell people he reads poetry, but as we lounged in the grass in Galway one afternoon, he handed me a copy of this, that he kept in his notebook. I copied it down, and refer to it often.
Ithaca
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon — do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.
Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber, and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.
Always keep Ithaca on your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean.
- Constantine P. Cavafy
Apparently I’m trying to draw the Ireland blogging out as long as possible, because it’s been two weeks since I got back now. On with it!
In Galway, we lounged.
Mike is a genius packer who not only fit ipod speakers in his bag, he also brought a hammock. We read. We wrote. We napped. We ate…wait for it…peanut butter and honey sandwiches. (I know, I was also shocked).
After one particularly revelry-filled night in Galway, Dustin announced that he’s written a song about Squidget in his dream. We really loved our car.
Driving north of Galway we saw some of the most striking scenery of the trip. Squidget hugged the curvy roads through green mountain ranges, and narrowly missed the spray-painted sheep that liked to eat the grass right beside the highway.
In Clifden we stopped at the tourist office to ask how to get to our next destination – the holy mountain that people climb all the time.
G nudged me at the counter. “Hey, you ask where Mount McKinley is.”
“Excuse me, can you tell us how to get to Mount McKinley?”
“McKinley?” The tourist-office woman was perplexed.
“You know, the one that people make pilgrimages to every year…” G said.
“You mean Croagh Patrick?”
“Yeah…sure…Croagh Patrick….”
“Now that I think about it,” he said later, “Mount McKinley is in Washington.”
Having heard that some people climb the mountain barefoot, Dustin decided to give it a go.
The guide book said the walk to the top took about two hours. I took one look at it and decided it was going to take me all day.
Jeff, Mr. Uber Athlete, made it up in just under one hour. Dustin, with no shoes, took a little longer. By the time I got up, after picking my way carefully up the very rocky peak, it had been about an hour and a half. Not bad.
It is very hard to keep up with three boys on bikes, when all three of those boys also play NCAA Division 1-level hockey. They are in shape. I am not.
We rented bikes in Killarney, from the fastest-talking Russian on the planet. He had our money, ID, had given us our bikes, shown us the map of the park we wanted to ride and was back in his building with the door locked behind him in 26 seconds. Flat.
We rode for quite awhile before realizing that we were on the walking, not the biking, path, and that we were going the wrong direction. We decided not to let it bother us.
We found a waterfall…
The boys frequently had to stop and wait for me to catch up. Occasionally one of them would ride along with me and my tired, tired legs.
“I like going your speed,” G said, at one point. “It’s relaxing.”
Outside the pub one night in Killarney, after being escorted at closing time out the back door, Mike and I met a chipper local and asked for advice on where we should next steer our car.
“Go to Dingle,” he said. “And you gotta to see the Burren.”
Until the next day when I looked it up in our guide book, I was sure he’d said “The Burn”. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know what that was.
It turns out The Burren is where Ireland gets its rocks. We’d been wondering, as we drove along, how so many houses, fences, churches, castles could all been made out of stone. Ireland must be out by now, we’d mused. Not so. I don’t know if we have any good pictures of The Burren, because the roads were so narrow and windy there was no place to safely stop and take one. Add that to Dustin’s theory of going as fast as possible, and our attempts to get pictures out of the car windows were fairly futile. Let’s just say there’s rocks there. Lots of them.
What we did get pictures of was our next stop – the Cliffs of Moher. 
(First though, we had a peanut butter and honey lunch with Squidget).
Sure you can see the Cliffs only from within the safe confines of the tourist-approved area, but no one actually does that.
(G enjoyed making Jeff nervous by getting as close to the edge as possible).
Dublin had redeeming qualities other than the Guinness brewery. One was Sam, the Aussie who worked at the desk at the Bunkhouse Hostel, who led us bravely to the Temple Bar district each night. Also a plus was Booze2Go across the street, where you could buy off-license by shouting your order through glass at the staff, who would assemble your order and slide it to you in a drawer.
We also managed not to get hit by a bus, which I consider an accomplishment.
Other pluses for Dublin:
+ 24-hour Burger King stationed neatly between Temple Bar and our hostel. Good for both late night snacks and bathroom breaks on the way home.
+ Our introduction to the Lisbon Treaty issue, by banner-waving protestors outside the General Post Office, site of the 1916 uprising.
+ Hen/Stag-do season. This meant packs of women in bars dressed in matching t-shirts or Moulin Rouge getups, and men in the streets with feather boas and dresses.
+ First hearing ‘Galway Girl’, a song that would become a favorite on the ensuing road trip. Unfortunately the man who played it in the pub largely interpreted Traditional Irish Music to include John Mellencamp. And the Irish love Johnny Cash, specifically Folsom Prison.
By the end of the weekend we were aching to get out of the city, and on Monday we got to pick up our rental car. Dustin picked up other-side-of-the-road driving quickly, which may or may not have been helped along by his philosophy that if you don’t know what you’re doing, just do it faster.
The car needed a name, and as we cruised out of Dublin, Dustin declared it “Squidget!”, a word presumably pulled from thin air. It sounded good, until the boys decided it wasn’t manly.
“It needs a middle name, like Crusher.”
“Yeah, or Thunderdome.”
The Thunderdome is a building in Dublin, whose name they liked to randomly say in a Hulk Hogan voice.
“But it’s Irish, so….O’Callahan,” Dustin concluded.
Our silver Ford Focus was thereafter known as Squidget Thunderdome Crusher O’Callahan. And it was good.
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