Saturday, August 10, 2024
This past May I finished my last class on a Thursday afternoon, then went to my department's end-of-year party. The next morning I got up at 3:30 am, showered, and left my place at about 4:30. As usual, I walked to the airport--it's about fifteen minutes door-to-door--and then flew out to Michigan to see my parents.
I spent a weekend in Ann Arbor before traveling out to Philadelphia for a week to do some research for a new project that I'm working on. The research in Philly could only be conducted in the first week of the month, while some other research I had planned in DC could only take place in the last week of May.
So, I had two weeks on my hands and decided to spend it traveling. From Philly I went up to NYC for a weekend, and from there flew to Ireland, where I stayed for twelve days.
It was a short trip, but a memorable one.
Twelve Days in Ireland
Ireland was beautiful. I'd never thought much about going there, but in March of this year I watched a documentary on PBS about the so-called "wild Atlantic way" and became intrigued. Once it became clear that I'd have a couple of weeks to spare between my two research stints, I decided to go and check it out.
Mostly, though, I wanted to celebrate. My book on Nâzım Hikmet came out last year, and on July 1st I was promoted to full professor at MSU. As I did back in 2015, when I was promoted to associate professor, I decided to spend my own money on a vacation, going somewhere where there are no archives for me to visit. Prior to flying to Ireland, my main concern was about driving. Other than Iceland in 2018, I had never driven outside of North America. And Iceland had been easy in that respect--there was very little traffic, especially outside of Reykjavik, and the roads between towns had big shoulders suitable for pulling over and taking pictures.
The prospect of driving on the left-hand side of the road in Ireland, meanwhile, was a bit intimidating. Nevertheless, I wasn't going to let something like that get in my way. While there's good train and (especially) bus service in Ireland, the places I wanted to go to really required having access to a car.
So, that's what I did.
Dublin
Flying into Dublin from NYC was easy and relatively fast--about six hours. The ticket, on Delta, cost roughly what I would have paid to fly back to Montana between my two east coast archive stints. From the Dublin airport I took a bus into town and found the place I was staying (a private room at a hostel called the Clink I Lár, which I liked very much).
Dublin was very nice--and quite a bit smaller than I'd expected, at least in the center. After checking into the Clink I Lár, I took a quick shower and headed outside.
The rain was light and thin, almost like a mist, but consistent and driving, blown sideways by the wind. I was, however, dressed well for the weather, wearing a few thin, dry layers underneath my raincoat, and lasted for a couple of hours before getting totally soaked and deciding to head back to the Clink.
The next day, the weather was absolutely beautiful, and I had a great time walking around and checking out the different neighborhoods. There wasn't a lot, site-wise, that I really wanted to see, so I wasn't in full tourist-mode or anything. Nevertheless, Dublin's a really pleasant city. I hung out in parks, read the novel I'd brought along with me, and wrote out my thoughts in my notebook. And meanwhile, I was just hanging out.
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| Long indeed |
The highlight of my time in Dublin was meeting up for breakfast with my nephew, who studies there. I also really liked the Long Room at Trinity College, and walking around town was really fun--especially on my second day, when the weather cleared up.
As pretty as it was, Dublin wasn't really what I had come to Ireland for. For that, I needed to head north to County Donegal and the "Wild Atlantic Way." The Road North
After two days in Dublin, I made my way back to the airport and picked up my rental. I gotta say, I was feeling a bit skeptical about things. The car was brand new, but had no GPS service. I had a telephone that ran on SIM cards, which I use exclusively for foreign travel, and never use in the US. Prior to leaving Montana I had tested the battery of this phone and things had looked good, but as I learned in Dublin this telephone had an unfortunate tendency to shut off once the battery got down to about 40%.
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| County Donegal |
The friendly dude working for the rental company at the airport did his best to sync my phone to the car but alas, this appeared unsuccessful. Moreover, the cables that came with my phone, which I bought in 2018, did not fit those of the car. So, I had a phone with a limited battery that I would be relying upon for GPS over the next week. Somewhat reluctantly, I pulled out of the airport parking lot and drove onto the highway. It was a dual carriageway, so driving on the left or right wasn't an issue, except with regard to slow lane/fast lane and traffic margining generally from the left, rather than the right. After about thirty minutes or so on the road, I pulled into a service station to see if I could find any road maps (none to be found). I also picked through my computer bag and found a plug that I use for connecting my camera's memory card to my Mac. This plug, it turns out, fit the one on my car, enabling me to connect my phone. Starting the car with everything plugged in, I was delighted to hear the GPS lady telling me obvious things.
I'm not a big fan of GPS and would prefer not to use it. Prior to leaving Dublin I'd just written down numbers of the roads I needed to take and figured that would be fine for most of the ride. And indeed, on the national highway that I took on the first day with the car, it was a more-or-less straight shot north, with only the numbers of the road changing.
The road went through Northern Island (ie, the UK), which meant that my GPS lady stopped talking to me. Still, the driving was pretty easy. I was no longer on the dual carriageway, but rather just a regular two-lane road. Here I had to actually drive on the left, but it wasn't hard remembering not to drive on the right: there were far too many cars zipping at me on the right-hand side of the road for me to forget that.
And this was the hardest part, for me, of driving in Ireland: the roads are quite narrow and there are a lot of places without a proper shoulder. While the big dual carriageways were easy, the smaller roads led to many flinches as I sought to avoid sideswiping the curb and oncoming traffic. Some roads, meanwhile, were absolutely tiny--but these were actually some of the easiest because, on a one-lane road the question of driving on the left or right becomes moot.
Anyway, most of Northern Ireland was rather easy, and I stopped and had a nice lunch there. Even better, just south of Derry my GPS started working again as my phone connected to towers in Ireland once more.
Getting past Derry, however, was a bit of a nightmare for me. Now listening to the GPS again, I circled past the same apartment building three times in the span of an hour. The problem, of course, was me, and each time I screwed up the GPS lady took me back to the same starting point. I'm sure this made sense, technologically speaking, but after our third pass I was getting rather frustrated. The last time down this road I'd had, in quick succession, two near-misses as I attempted to pull out onto the road without looking properly. (Looking back, this was probably the trickiest part of the left-driving aspect of the trip: not having as strong a sense of where traffic would be coming from).
I pulled into a residential parking lot to collect myself. Then I looked up and saw a car pull up and a family get out. I decided to follow them, knocking on their front door just a few seconds after the man of the house had closed it behind him. He opened the door and I asked for directions north toward Ballylifin, which was my immediate destination.
The guy didn't know the best way, but his next door neighbor--whom I tried next--gave me good directions, telling me I needed to cross a bridge that I had avoided each of the three times I'd passed by. After crossing the bridge, I quickly found in succession each of the little towns (Muff, Quigley's Point, Moville) that Man #2 told me to look out for en route.
I stopped in Moville, and some of the Moes were able to confirm that I was indeed on the right track. From there I drove onward to my destination further north.
County Donegal
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| The view from Ballylifin |
Eventually I made it to Ballylifin, which was my base for two nights. Night #1 I was pretty tired, having driven six hours or so en route from Dublin. It was about six pm when I arrived at my AirBnB, and I went out and got dinner immediately, then I retreated to my room for a shower and a bit of reading before I hit the hay. The next day I toured the northern and western sides of the Inishowen Peninsula, again sleeping in Ballylifin.
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| Malin Head |
It was pretty stunning. I drove up to Malin Head, the most northerly point in Ireland, and from there made my down the Inishowen Peninsula's eastern coast, driving southeast back down through Moville and Muff again before heading west back to Ballylifin.
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| Glenveagh National Park |
After two nights on the Inishowen Peninsula I drove west, passing through Glenveagh National Park en route to an AirBnB I'd booked a few miles south of Magheroarty. Magher-oarty's attraction was that it was the place one could catch a passenger ferry out to Tory Island.
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| The harbor on Tory Island |
Tory Island was of interest due to both its landscape and the animals one can see there. It's a small island, which is good, because the passenger ferry didn't transport cars--I left my rental by the pier in Magheroarty. I'd been hoping to rent a bicycle at the hotel on Tory Island (my guidebook had claimed this was possible) but there were none on offer.  |
If you look closely, you can see the
seal inviting me in for a dip. |
So, I walked around for about six hours, taking in the cliffs and dramatic scenery from most parts of the island's coastline. I saw lots of birds--according to the Merlin app they were Oystercatchers--and one friendly seal, who kept bobbing its head up over the waterline to stare at me as I looked down from a little viewing area that had been carved into the cliff. It was as if the seal was saying "Come on in! The water's fine."
After two nights at the AirBnB near Magheroarty, I made my way down the coast, stopping in various places to hike along the cliffs rising out of the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes there was a path down to a gigantic, empty beach, on other occasions I just hiked along the cliffs.
When I got hungry, I'd stop in a random village and look around for a place to eat. On a number of occasions, people directed me toward hotel restaurants, all of which were outstanding (and in many villages, the only place where someone could eat out for breakfast or lunch). Pretty much every place I went there were really lovely soups on the menu, followed by a club sandwich or a BLT, which I washed down with a Guinness, Smithwick's, or Killian's. In the evenings, I ate a lot of fish and chips.
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| En route to Arranmore Island |
I spent the last three nights in Donegal County at an AirBnB in Donegal town. As was the case with Ballylifin and the place outside Magheroarty, Donegal town was basically just a base for me as I explored more of the coast in my car. I spent a day on Arranmore Island, where, according to my guidebook, Irish is the most-commonly spoken language (and I heard people speaking what might have been Irish). On this island I had my car, which was nice because Arranmore is considerably larger than Tory.
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| Beach at Arranmore Island |
On Arranmore I also experienced my own really chill experience inside an Irish pub, which was filled with (it appeared) mostly local inhabitants singing songs while a couple of musicians played old standbys.
In that pub and basically everywhere else I went in Ireland, people were incredibly friendly and outgoing. In fact, I can't really think of another place in Western Europe where people seemed as interested in making conversation with me. Sure, in Turkey, where I speak the language, waiters and other people often ask me where I'm from and what I do in the States, but it's pretty uncommon in Europe. In Ireland, though, lots of people--not only service personnel, but also other customers in restaurants or pubs--asked me about myself, where I lived in the US (telling them I lived in an exotic place like Montana always drew more questions), what I do for a living, whether or not I'm of Irish heritage, etc.
Slovakian Digression
I made up for it by picking up three hitchhikers on my way back to Donegal town from the beach. They looked to be about twenty years old--two girls and a guy. It turned out they were from Slovakia, a country I've visited a few times, to their astonishment.
I mentioned to them that the last time I'd hitchhiked was back in 1998. I'd flown from Istanbul to Moscow on a $100 plane ticket, then spent the next six weeks making my way back to Turkey overland via bus and train. In Bratislava I'd been unable to find a hotel room for less than $200, so I'd bought a sleeper ticket for a night train (the only one in Slovakia) from Bratislava to Košice, in the far east of the country. Not only was I the only person in my compartment, but the entire sleeping compartment wagon was empty except for me. For $9, I'd secured a (comfortable) bed and a (clean) shower.
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| Košice in 1998 |
From Košice I'd traveled south to the nearest border crossing with Hungary, only to be told upon arrival that the crossing was available only to Slovakians and Hungarians. There was, however, another border post about ten miles away, and at that post citizens of any country could cross. I had been carrying a somewhat heavy rucksack and, unwilling to walk the ten miles, I put out my thumb and sought to hitch a ride. After about twenty minutes, a Slovakian truck driver stopped and picked me up. He had studied Russian in school, so we were able to chat, and I was even able to translate for him once we crossed into Hungary.
Picking up these three kids (who, as EU citizens, were working in Dublin and exploring Ireland's western coastline on a break from their jobs), I finally managed to pay off my debt to Slovakia.
Last Days in Ireland
After a week driving around County Donegal it was time to return the car in Galway. On my last day with the car, I just drove around the peninsula, visiting random towns that I came across. In St. John's point I stopped at a the beach and sat at a picnic table listening to the birds--one of which was a cuckoo. I pulled out my notebook and, over the course of about fifteen minutes, wrote down the outline for what might be my next book.
The next day I drove down to Galway in a straight shot, relieved to be liberating myself of the car. It was great and very convenient having my own wheels, but I frankly prefer public transportation. Dropping off the car in Galway, I felt like I was relieving myself of a burden.
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Galway is a city of brightly-colored
houses and murals. |
Galway was delightful. It's quite small, but outside of the jam- packed-with-tourists Latin Quarter, the people I met were friendly and, as usual, quite chatty. After two nights in Galway, I took a train to Dublin, spent another night there (having dinner with nephew), then flew back to NYC. From New York I traveled down to DC for another week of research, then flew to Michigan for a week. From Michigan, I finally made my way back to Montana after nearly six weeks on the road.
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Last day with the car at
St. John's Point |
Overall, the trip to Ireland was really superb, and I'd love to go back. I really lucked out with the weather-- other than my first day in Dublin, I had blue, sunny skies and practically no rain.
Traveling in mid-May, I felt like I was there a bit ahead of the tourist season--a number of people in Donegal County noted that I was the first tourist they'd seen so far this year, and I had no trouble securing AirBnB rooms just a day ahead of time.
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| Taking the train back to Dublin |
Ireland might not be the most off-the- beaten-path place that I've ever visited, but it was a great vacation. I feel like I could have spent months more traveling around. There are lots of other places I'd like to see. Maybe one day I'll get the chance.
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More photos from this trip can be found in the Borderlands Lounge.
For other JMB travelogues, look here.
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