Éire go Brách - Part VII

Yesterday was get out of Dublin day so I took a bus to the airport to pick up my rental car. I was expecting some ridiculously tiny thing but ended up with a spiffy little Volkswagen Golf TDI. Driving here in Ireland has been an intimidating prospect since I started planning the trip. Driving on the left side of the road from the right side of the car just feels all kinds of backwards to me. There are so many little nuances you don't think about when driving in your native country that suddenly come front and center and constantly require thought and reaction. Which lane is the fast lane on the highway? Can you turn left on red? Will reactions to sudden changes kill me since I'm programmed backwards? Then getting in the car is a whole other host of issues. Looking over my left shoulder to back up is suddenly full of blind spots I've never seen. Is my left tire even on the road anymore? I have no sense of awareness of where the car is on the road. The first hour was a mixture of "Oh fuck I'm going to die!" and "Fuck it, I can only die once." Surprisingly I've only been honked at once and that was trying to get over on a roundabout because I had no idea where I wanted to go until I saw the exit. What I thought was certain to end in an international incident has been, at worst anxiety inducing, and at best just another road trip. Driving in the dark down narrow back roads with no shoulder and stone walls immediately on either side with some assholes bright lights in my eyes is definitely on the anxiety side. Rolling over hills through lush green countrysides, with sheep on one side and the ocean on the other...well that's pretty damn nice.

Anyways, to start I left Dublin and headed north, going through Belfast on my way to the Giant's Causeway on the north coast. I underestimated the speed and sundown so that when I actually arrived the last bits of sunset were fading behind the hills. Lucky for me there happens to be a rather nice, small hotel right on the premises. I imagine in peak season I wouldn't be able to stroll in last minute and get a room and a table in their restaurant, but it's not peak season so that exactly what I did. My room was on the far end of what looks like a farmhouse turned hotel, turned slightly larger hotel. The room had a door to a gravel patio that lead to fenced off lawn. Beyond the fence is a small walking trail that lines the cliffs and then a rise of dirt and grass about 6 feet high and then it's cliffs straight down to the rocks. With the window in the room open you can easily be lulled to sleep by the sounds of the ocean. Being hot-natured and only having an incredibly thick, warm blanket that's exactly what I did. I had dinner at the hotel restaurant which was quite good - I had a roast of some sort that looked and tasted an awful lot like a good steak, some weird but tasty chili-flavored potatoes, and a large caesar salad with an assload of bacon on it.

Quick note - bacon in just about everywhere except the US usually isn't the bacon you think it is (though confusingly, sometimes it is). What we call bacon is called streaky bacon or American bacon. What goes by the name of bacon in much of Europe is pork loin, which is much less fatty, but also includes some of the belly (which we call bacon) so there is a cap of fat on it. It's a bit different of a taste, and a much different texture. But there are also rashers of bacon, which is basically what we call Canadian bacon. It's what I thought was kind crappy ham with my breakfast back in Dublin.

Back to dinner...it was good. I had desert for the first time since I've been here (which is odd because I typically use vacations as excuses to eat lots of deserts). I ordered something called sticky toffee pudding at the recommendation of the server. What showed up was a small, personal-sized sponge cake (I think it had dates in it) with a superb toffee sauce and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. It's not the kind of pudding I expected, but it was delicious. And then I went back to my room where I proceeded to have the crappiest night sleep of my stay so far. No particular reason...it was nice and cool in my room (as I like it), the bed was mostly comfortable (no worse than the one in Dublin), I had to soothing sounds of the sea, and it just didn't want to happen. I did eventually pass out, but was woken earlier than I wanted by the sounds of my neighbors disassembling their room in their efforts to clear out. And yet it was still too late for breakfast...yet another missed one. Semi (but not really) rested, I went to the visitor's center for the Giant's Causeway where I did a horrendously lazy, shitty tourist thing...I took the bus down to the Causeway instead of the relatively gently sloped half-mile walk. I took the bus back up too. But...while I was down there I was quite taken back. It was windy, misty, and for the first time in Ireland I was genuinely shivering cold, but the rock formations that make up the Giant's Causeway are simply cool as hell. They're roughly hexagonal shaped spires of basalt that were forced up by volcanic eruptions and pressure created by the shifting of tectonic plates. The formations are bunched together near the cliffs where they're probably 15 or 20 feet tall and tapper down and as they trail off into the ocean. Many of them are covered in moss and lichen, some of them group together to form low pools full of algae water...they're powerful looking, especially when they seem to fight off the constant onslaught of the North Atlantic battering them for eons. The formation doesn't cover as large an area as I had expected, but I never found myself feeling disappointed.

I climbed over the rocks and walked up and down some of the trails in the bay where the Causeway sits for about 2 hours when I finally go cold and tired enough to call it quits. I took the lazy bastard bus back up and then drove away from the Giant's Causeway. I had intended to take a coastal highway that hugged parts of the cliffs and conveniently went past an abandoned castle but I managed to take a couple wrong turns and by the time I found myself on the correct road I was about 45 miles west of the castle and didn't think it was worth what I figured to be 2.5 hours of lost time to go back, check out the ruins, and then return to where I had gotten to - it will have to wait for another trip. Instead I aimlessly drive along the coast for a couple hours until I found myself just outside the town of Letterkenny, about 60 miles west of the Causeway. I decided to head south in the general direction of an area called The Burren and the Cliffs of Moher. I hadn't really intended to make it all the way to the Cliffs, which is about 200 miles south of Letterkenny, but once it got dark I couldn't see any of The Burren and I was on all these tiny backroads where next to nothing seemed to be open. For a while I kept driving in the dark because I figured that was still plenty of hours left in the day even if the light was gone (it gets dark around 4:30 or 5:00). But then I kept driving because there didn't seem to be any place to stop. It was too late for most of the B&Bs and most of the hotels were either closed for the winter or were bursting at the seams. After a while I realized I was closer to the Cliffs than not, and made it to the town of Lahinch just east of the Cliffs where I kinda stumbled on a hostel that was open. I got a room and the owner pointed me to a restaurant within walking distance, which I realized was also a hotel but at that point I didn't care...an empty hostel is basically a hotel. And now I'm out of steam and ready for a decent night sleep. Cliffs tomorrow, I may backtrack through The Burren, and we'll just see where I end up. Not sure the Ring of Kerry is in the cards for this trip.