travelogue: ireland part 2

Hello again to my paid subscribers! I wanted to write some non-music things about this trip and I also wanted to thank all of you for your actual, tangible support, so here's the second of two posts (first one is here if you missed it)  that are only for you. Thanks again, and let me know if you have any ideas about what you'd like to see in future paid-subscriber-only posts.

Sunday mornings are quiet, Sunday mornings are empty, Sunday mornings are weird in commercial corridors that are usually full of people. It was early on a Sunday morning when I walked to Connolly Station from my hotel on the northside of Dublin because it would have taken longer to take public transit and I stubbornly didn’t want to get in a car from the taxi line parked at the adjacent hotel for a 15 minute walk. It irked my sensibilities as a city dweller and as a smart traveler and as someone who hates to spend money when it’s not necessary. The walk was empty and uneventful; the signs at Connolly warned that this was a busy transit weekend and travelers needed to prebook their travel in advance. (It was too early to have that many Swifties on the train.)

If you have traveled by train anywhere outside of the US you are familiar with the various forms of the dance of “where is my carriage and assigned seat.” There were so many times in India I would just make a guess because of a lack of signage only to be woken up later by a conductor when the seat’s rightful owner would have found them and enlisted their help, a thing I was somehow never able to do efficiently. This morning in Connolly Station I have an assigned seat but the train is not showing car numbers or seat assignments and trying to guess which end of the train is the beginning meant I was moving my suitcase and sprinting to the other end two minutes before it was due to leave the station. I am told by multiple folks that it doesn’t matter where I sit unless the sign designating that the seat is assigned is turned on. 

Despite spending way too long when I bought the ticket trying to prevent this occurrence, my assigned seat (which does not have the indicator lit, fwiw) is facing the wrong direction and I cannot deal with that today so I just sit in the one facing it, which is fine until the grandmother that specifically booked the seat I am sitting in gets on a few stops down the line. I pick up my possessions and prepare to move; she says not to bother and sits in the facing seat. I am sure it is fine but I still feel bad. I am using these three hours heading to Ireland’s west coast to write my essay about the Thursday/Friday Patti Smith shows but my brain feels like it is made of swiss cheese and it is slow going. I text a friend when I delightedly see a baby sheep in a field next to the train. It is green and gray and windy as the train heads west and then north towards the western terminal at a city called Sligo, with a long “i”. My brain sees this word as “Sluggo” and I cannot stop it. 

From Sligo I take a bus from a stop across the street from the station, the same Leap Card, green with a hopping frog on the front, that I purchased at a convenience store in Dublin works here and would work anywhere across the country. It would have worked to buy me a train ticket, even, from the proper train, as opposed to the tram I took south to Bray or the Luas I rode around the city or any of the buses I hopped on (get it? leap) to get around. (I would show you the card except I have mailed it to a friend who is headed for Dublin at the end of the week. It required a 5 euro deposit and there was still money on it!) I am once again riding a form of transit to its terminus, in this case a beach town called Strandhill, which is an international surfing destination. It is not why I am staying there – it was there or Sligo town proper, which didn’t seem very interesting (and it wasn’t) – but it is why there is enough tourist trade for there to be this lovely set of rooms turned Airbnb over a cafe. 

I have never had great luck with Airbnb and use them infrequently for both that reason and because I dislike how they have removed rental properties in cities. But sometimes, like Uber/Lyft, it is the only viable thing so you use it. In this case these were already holiday flats. They sat on top of the cafe right across from the beach. There was no television but who would even want one when you could just sit on the couch and stare at the waves for hours. It is pretty much what I did, a bonus to what was just me trying to find a place to stay that was near the site I was coming to visit, one of Europe’s largest megalithic cemeteries. I had also hoped to do some walking around the beach and the dunes as well as trek up a mountain to visit yet another ancient site. I walked the four minutes from the bus terminal to the Airbnb and met my host, who showed me the flat and then promptly hopped out onto the roof to clean the salt spray off the front window. 

I dumped my suitcase and backpack and headed out into the delightfully sunny and unexpectedly warm day to walk a mile to the Strandhill People’s Market, which billed itself as a farmer’s market and local incubator for small businesses, held at an empty hangar at the tiny local airport. I had a kind of Turkish baked potato, bought a candle, and perused the other merchandise, which was, sadly, all the kind of stuff you would expect to find in a weekend market: artful photographs, lines of natural skincare, handmade soaps, multiple candle dealers, jewelry vendors whose work was mostly wire-wrapped crystals strung on leather cords. I wanted to try some of the local kombucha but it was sold in heavy glass bottles and I wanted to try to walk back along a coastal trail I’d seen on the map, so I filled my water bottle and set off to see if the map was correct. There was indeed access to the trail off the airport parking lot and I set off for the shoreline, along with groups of teens, senior citizens getting their steps in, and a variety of local dog owners. 

It was on the walk that I decided I had to admit defeat for my plans to hike the mountain in question, named Knocknarea, as I scoped it out in the background of my hike. Despite every piece of information out there insisting that it was a suitable hike for walkers of “all abilities,” the closest access for me, as a traveler without her own vehicle, was going to be up what was called “the boardwalk,” which sure looked like a long, steep staircase up the hill’s northern approach. It might have been fine but I didn’t want to chance it on my own on Monday as per plan, when there would be less people on the trail. It was a bonus activity so I decided to take what through-hikers refer to as a “zero day,” or a day in town to do laundry/reprovision/rest. I didn’t need to provision but I wanted to catch up on writing, and literally for decades I have been trying to create vacations where I could sit and stare at the waves and read. I have managed to do this exactly twice within recent memory and now here it was, right at my doorstep. 

The traffic from the three local surfing schools and the town’s status as a beach town meant that there were several restaurant choices. The closest minimart was about a 10 minute walk and anything more than that would have meant getting the same bus I took into town back out of town and all the way back to Sligo and access to various supermarkets. The flat had a stove and microwave but I was uninterested in cooking. I walked down to the minimart to get milk and tea and laundry soap and snacks, and then came back to the flat for a nap before dinner.  The closest pub rented out its upstairs to a local chef who ran a restaurant Thursday-Sunday, local ingredients with a Southeast Asian influence. Even with all of that I opted for the cacio e pepe gnocchi, great comfort food after walking for miles. There was also a food truck with a pizza oven, the pizza oven downstairs at the pub, and a neighboring farm-to-table market/deli that had a restaurant. I could have walked 20 minutes to get to two other pubs for dinner if I needed to, but this arrangement right outside my door was enough for me.

Monday I slept in a little and made a cup of tea and watched the waves before heading out the door to walk as far south as the beach path would take me before it petered out. You can’t swim at Strandhill, which is what’s prevented the town from becoming more of a holiday destination than it is. There’s a hotel attached to a golf course and there’s a campsite/RV park, but not being a location where you can set up and frolic on the beach means that it’s less attractive to families, who come into town to watch the surfers, eat ice cream, or go to the seaweed baths. I had hoped that the latter was something funkier than what it actually was, which was a lovely little day spa where you could avail yourself of soaking in hot water with seaweed or getting wrapped up in it (among other spa-like things). After averaging a minimum of 12,000 steps a day the previous week I was only too happy to soak in a hot tub and any health benefits from the seaweed were just a nice bonus. But once left alone with the tub full of seaweed, the idea of sitting on top of what is, by design, fairly slimy, seemed daunting. I decided that the trick was to push the seaweed down to the end so I didn’t have to sit on it right as I climbed in, and once I was less weirded out by it it was fine. I pretended I was a sea otter as I floated in my old-fashioned claw foot bathtub in a candle-lit room while the waves roared outside the window. Afterwards, I walked down to the pizza truck to get a pie for dinner. I slept very very well that night.

On Tuesday I had to figure out how I was getting to Carrowmore. Originally the plan had been to rent a bike but I was worried that the distance would be a little too far for me on a regular bike (which it would have been, plus hillier than I could have likely handled). Google Maps showed me a way to get there via bus, but in two places online I read that there was something weird with the connecting bus and I didn’t want to chance it. My solution was to use the local taxi app to get a car to drive me there. Once I got picked up I grabbed the driver’s card and planned on calling him directly when I was done – he suggested that we could set a time for him to come back and collect me but I didn’t know how extensive the grounds would be or how much time I would want to spend there, so I said I’d just call when I was done. Unlike Bru Na Boinne, Carrowmore is a much less formal experience. I got there just as a guided tour was starting, a delightful surprise because there had been no information about tours on the website. Our guide had been coming to the site since the 90s, when it was still divided up into individual fields due to a decree made by (wait for it) Queen Victoria about farmlands needing to be designated. Then again, she died in 1901 which isn’t really all that long ago, I guess. 

Like in Newgrange I found it absolutely fascinating how transparent the guide was. The main monument at Carrowmore was rebuilt in the 90s from stones that came from other parts of the monument and they now believe it looks absolutely nothing like what was there originally. We heard about the local tomb robber who basically pillaged anything that looked like it might have been a tomb and threw the bones that were in the graves just… wherever. He was planning to open the cairn that’s at the top of Knocknarea but died before it could happen. The things that he took out of the graves have mostly never been found; some relics are in the Archeology building of the National Museum in Dublin. He also explained that the worst damage to any of the graves happened during COVID lockdown which means it had to have been actual Irish people doing the vandalism because no one else could get on the island. It was just kind of refreshing that there was absolutely zero spin. 

Every single guide at any of these monuments clearly loves their job and are so smart and so knowledgeable and happy to answer questions or dispel misconceptions. There are few things I enjoy more than access to experts in any field. I walked around the site for about three hours, talked to some sheep, considered walking into a field to see the monuments that aren’t on public land, but then rejected that plan once I realized they were in fields with horses and cattle.  I was sitting down once I was done to figure out what to do next; I decided I’d go into Sligo for lunch. I was browsing through Google Maps trying to decide where to go when it tells me that there’s a bus coming in 10 minutes, the same bus that the online people had said was iffy. I figured I’d give it a try and if it didn’t show up or I couldn’t get on it I could call the taxi then.

Everything you will read about taking buses in Ireland tells you that you have to signal the bus to stop. One night after Patti I was riding the bus back to the hotel when the driver got into an argument with a fellow who had chased the bus from an earlier stop, which the bus did not stop at because he did not signal the bus to stop. The driver explained that he had been standing at a stop that was not compulsory and that he needed to signal. The dude was not having it but the rest of the passengers were on the driver’s side about the need to signal. If you use Google Maps for local transit, it has a feature that allows you to minimize the map in order to save battery and it’ll vibrate when there’s information you need. I was pretty sure I had figured out what side of the road I needed to stand on, and sure enough, the phone buzzed and a bus appeared from around the corner and I stuck out my hand and it stopped. (The other thing about taking buses that you won’t read, but will observe, is that everyone says “thank you” to the driver as they get off the bus. Sometimes that didn’t happen in Dublin but it absolutely happened everywhere else I took a bus.) 

“Markievicz Road,” I said, putting my transit card on the card reader. It beeped and the driver nodded. 

It was like being a local. Or more like, being somewhere with actual functioning public transport! There’s a whole section on the Transport for Ireland website how there are bus lines that are run as a public service, that are not meant to be profitable, that are in place simply to allow people who live in the middle of nowhere to get to the closest city. IMAGINE THAT. This was one of those buses, full of kids going to hang out, grandmas going to the doctor, moms with babies heading for the stores. I had lunch in a cafe and walked around for a little bit, and did some shopping in a store that aggregates local craftspeople. There was a cool book and record store where I even saw a copy of Amy Rigby’s book; sadly, the building housing the Yeats Society was closed, and I only found out on Monday that the home of my new favorite historical figure, Countess Markievicz, is only open on weekends (and was a serious schlep from Sligo anyway). I stocked up on some snacks at the grocery store and caught the S2 bus back to Strandhill. For dinner I opted for a hamburger at the farm-to-table place, figuring that if I was going to have red meat anywhere, it might as well be as local as I could make it. 

I had to repeat the journey back to Sligo early the next day, getting an early bus into town in order to get to the station in time for the 9am train. There is absolutely nothing about me that makes me look like a local and yet so many people walked into the waiting room where the entrance to the platform was cordoned off and, with great concern, asked me 1) when it was going to open 2) how they could get onto the platform 3) something about the ticket office. This was a postage stamp sized waiting room. The train was outside, on the platform; the 9am train is the first one; just – common sense, people! I am not from here and I walked in and sussed it out. I answered everyone with a variation of “I am also waiting for the 9am train to Dublin Connolly” which seemed to satisfy the concerns of most of them, except for the ones who walked over to the dude who arrived at the station not long after I did and was very confused about the rope line blocking the entrance to the platform; I deliberately kept looking at my phone and did not make eye contact. It was 8am! The train leaves at 9am! Nothing about this situation was concerning! 

I was originally supposed to leave Ireland on the 4th but after my delayed arrival, decided that I wanted a day to not have to rush around and pushed my return back to the 5th. Both days were warm and sunny and I ran around the city ticking things off my original list. I did some book shopping, tried to do some record shopping (less successful), went to art galleries and museums and after going by the Abbey Theater by accident (it was just on the way to something else) booked a ticket to see the current production. The Abbey Theater was started by Yeats and Lady Gregory and it’s not in the same building but it is still Ireland’s national theater. The drama, The Sugar Wife, was frighteningly relevant, about commerce and capitalism and poverty and slavery and economic imbalance and maybe a little more on the nose for the last thing I did in Ireland before returning to an America that is falling apart in new and spectacular ways, but it was a solid way to spend my last evening in town. 

The next day I stubbornly refused to take the 8 Euro direct airport bus in favor of the 2 Euro regular people bus at 6am. There’s a luggage rack, it exists for both locals who work there and people who are traveling. It wasn’t about the price so much as the point, dammit.

I didn’t get to see everything I would have liked to have seen but I also didn’t come home so exhausted and jet lagged that it’s going to take me a month to recover. I had a solid balance of doing as much as possible vs. just watching some waves for an hour. You will never see everything on a vacation no matter how well you plan. I was happy with the level of planning versus my ability to wing it / change things / add things / amend things, even if it was something as simple as going back to the hotel for a different jacket. Or the moment when I was on the Luas going past the Abbey Theater and with one minute of a web search I confirmed “Oh it is that Abbey Theater. Is there a production on? Oh that looks good. Can I buy a ticket?” I had exactly the same amount of unexpected and spontaneous occurrences happen to me on this trip with a phone that happened back when I didn’t travel with one. I always worry “Am I doing it right?” This trip helped me let that go, at least a little bit. 

[More photos on Instagram.]