June 11th.
BA286 San Francisco to London Heathrow.
On a jumbo jet bound for London. I love these monsters! So
heavy and ponderous, thundering down the runway, taking off despite everything.
We didn't get seats together, something about getting seat assignments at the
gate (what is this, Ryanair?) but a nice guy agreed to move further back in the
plane so we could all sit together. Only caveat: he said he'd come back for his
seat if he ended up beside a really big person. Out the window, California
already burned dry in mid June. Not enough rain, not enough rain. Snow still
scant on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. We flew round the edge of night,
skirting the rounded mountain of dark on the Journey Map on our TV screens.
Grazed the southern tip of Greenland. Godthat the only city shown in the giant
white waste. Does anyone ever go to Greenland? Does anyone even live there??
Middle brother and family flying in to Dublin tomorrow
afternoon, youngest and eldest brothers already there. Dad's 80th
birthday lunch on Saturday with 25 family members, the four Berkeley kids and
the four Berkeley cousins all together in one room for the first time in many
many years, with many of the partners and kids. This is going to be a great trip.
June 12th-14th
Marine Hotel, Sutton, Dublin.
It's weird coming home to Dublin and staying in a hotel
instead of my parents' house. They can't accommodate guests anymore, with my
mom having her own room for all the equipment, and the night carer the third
bedroom. Staying in a hotel is a still a big luxury for all of us. We were remembering
Jessie's first stay in a hotel – a faceless motel on the way home from camping
at the Eel river. She bounced on the beds, then checked out the bathroom and
came runnng out crying "Mom! Dad! They gave us soap!" Our room in the Marine is bizarrely huge, with a
sitting room down one end. By leaving our gluten free cereal box on the
windowledge, we could see from outside that our room was four windows at one
side of the hotel. Really brought some class to the place, the cereal. Turns
out that everywhere you go in Ireland, you can get gluten free products. So
that box of Annie's rice mac'n'cheese travelled to Europe and back in my
suitcase. Best travelled mac'n'cheese in the northern hemisphere.
The Marine has a swimming pool. Indoor. Heated. Like all
hotel swimming pools in Ireland, it turns out, you need to wear swim caps. This
news was relayed to us by an apologetic hotel employee as about ten of my
family members bobbed about hatless in the pool one afternoon. We all just
looked up at him, said "okay" bemusedly, and kept on swimming.
Outside, the weather suddenly turned to gale force winds, so when we came out
of the swimming pool we had to battle the wind across the lawn back to the
hotel. More on Irish weather later. As you will find if you ever visit, it is a
constant topic of conversation on the tiny island.
June 15th.
Dublin, and dad's 80th.
Saturday morning we made a quick sortie into the city, after
a few days doing family stuff, which involved numerous pints in the hotel bar
of an evening.
Long time since I sat down for a pint with my brothers in a
Dublin pub. (Hotel bars are not, strictly speaking, pubs but they have the
advantage that you can just roll upstairs to bed at 1am instead of having to
hail a taxi.) First stop, the Stephen's Green Center and a stroll down Grafton
Street, the pedestrian shopping street at the heart of the south (more
fashionable) side of the city. Many street performers down Grafton Street, and
coffee at the famous Bewley's Café a must. In my college days, Bewleys was a
grand old café with waitresses who wore black with white lace-trimmed aprons. It's
still very grand with lots of stained glass and velvet upholstery. I once did a
poetry reading with Seamus Heaney in the James Joyce room on the 3rd
floor. There goes my 15 minutes of fame…
Of course I had to take Talc and Jessie into Trinity College
where I was an undergrad. Lots of changes since my time, but the cobblestones
are the same, and Front Arch, immortal meet-up spot before the days of
cellphones ("mobiles" in Ireland). The rooms where I lived, House 13
on Botany Bay and House 37 on New Square, are all locked now. In my day, a more
innocent one apparently, anyone could walk in and out of the houses.
I'd
forgotten how amazingly old the trees on New Square were.
We thought of
visiting the Book of Kells till we saw the line. Much more interested to poke
around the Arts Block where I whiled away my undergrad days. Tried to poke our
noses into the Lecky Library, scene of much study, but the rude security guard
made it suddenly less appealing. We did wander into a lecture hall. They were
named for famous Irish writers. I could see the ghost of myself, aged 20 in row
13 nodding out over my handwritten notes. In 1988, it was still okay to submit
a handwritten essay for undergrad English. I used to type mine on an old
electric typewriter. Tell that to the 10-year-olds of today for a laugh.
A quick tour of the Temple Bar, trendy section of Dublin just south of the Liffey which was all
old tumbledown warehouses when I was living in Trinity. Took off during the
boom years, falling over itself being cool. A warren of tiny cobblestone
streets with tattoo parlors, chic restaurants and snazzy new-old pubs like The
Quays and of course the eponymous Temple Bar.
Sad to say, the Bad Ass café had
completely lost the funkiness of my college years and is now a fancy restaurant
retaining only the name and the big red-paned windows. Crossed the Liffey on the
Ha'penny Bridge (you used to have to pay a half-penny to cross, that coin
became defunct during my childhood) to the less fashionable North side.
The
Winding Stair book café is still there, though not under the ownership of
Kevin, who founded and ran it when I was a teenager. Scene of the first poetry
reading I ever did, aged 16.
On to The Church, a real church cunningly
remodeled as a restaurant complete with impressive bar right down the center,
pipe organ still in place, fabulous stained glass and wood everywhere, and
weird catacomb-like bathrooms (no skeletons though). Great place to eat if you
ever find yourself at the top of Henry Street.
Dashed back to hotel just in time for 80th
birthday lunch/family reunion. All four of us Berkeley kids, plus all four
Berkeley cousins in one room with numerous partners and kids, and my aunt Joy,
and of course the guests of honor. Since mum turned 78 on June 9th,
we celebrated her too. Great to catch up with everyone but distressingly little
time to do so. Four hours passed in a flash. Dad made a brief and very dad-like
speech, I read out a poem I wrote for him, some silly bits, some sensible
tearjerky bits, and it was all wrapped up with cake and copious bottles of
wine. The festivities carried over to mum and dad's house and later a nearby
hostelry. Turning 80 is not for sissies, but my dad carried it off in style.
"No big deal" was the presiding sentiment. "Anyone could do
it." That's my dad. Bit of a cool customer.
June 16th:
Onward south and west!
Sunday afternoon we left Dublin for Kilkenny, a beautiful
medieval town two hours southwest. Brief stop on the Dublin ring road at
Dundrum to drop in on my friend Niamh, miraculously over from Sydney so our
paths could cross in Dublin for the first time in living memory. We were
roomies at Trinity, after which we headed off for opposite points on the
planet. Met Niamh's 4-year-old Caoimhe (wonder what the Aussies make of that spelling) and had a couple of hours to cram the past ten years into. It's a
theme of my trips back to Ireland. So many people to see, so little time…Still
it was great to have the reconnection.
Checked into the Newpark in Kilkenny and when I said my name
the concierge said brightly "Ah Tolchin, yes, we have your
passports." Momentary utter confusion. You
have our passports? Is this some kind
of alternate universe? Turns out I very uncharacteristically stashed our
passports in a drawer in the Marine hotel room, then left them there.
Housekeeping found them, the staff figured out from my handwritten notations
where we were staying that night, and some random staff member happened to be
driving to Kilkenny so no bother, he delivered them to our hotel. Welcome to Ireland! This was just one of many
such small miraculous moments on our trip.
The Newpark was a fabulous place, run just like a hotel
should be run. Everyone kind, friendly, helpful beyond the call of duty. They
had a mini zoo in a big enclosure out back: miniature horses, donkeys, lamas,
ostrich, goats, sheep, plus a room with rabbits, chincillas and other critters
all available for petting and feeding if you caught the feeding guy at the
right time.
Rashers and Sausages, as we called them: extremely friendly.
The animals were really well cared for and had plenty of space.
Just for the pleasure of the guests. They also had an indoor pool and gym, plus
a "Tranquillity Pool" – warm outdoor pool with the perfect view of a
400-year-old copper beech tree. Even in the economically slammed climate of
Ireland today, the Newpark had a feeling of ease and good humor. The manager
chatted with us as we admired the zoo. Obviously loved his job and thrived on
providing the best service to his guests. We loved the Newpark! Yet there are
signs everywhere of the economic pain: the fella feeding the bunnies told us
that most of his friends have emigrated to New Zealand now. You never know how
good the local hurling team is going to be season to season, he said, because
the best players may have emigrated since last year.
June 18th:
Bantry Bay, West Cork
West Cork deservedly has a reputation for lush beauty,
rivalled only by its immediate neighbor Kerry. Ireland was so green and wet as
we drove down through it. Great signposting – big change from my childhood –
easy to find everything. Fun driving the tiny beetly car, gobbling up the
kilometers southwest. Of course, once you get off the major routes (the
motorway system remains half-hearted since the bust put an end to it) you have
the challenge of sharing seriously narrow roads with seriously large silver
double-decker tourist busses. These come lumbering towards you without even the
pretence of moving over, as if there was anywhere to move. You squeeze into the
hedgerow, hoping there's no ditch to get stuck in, and the giant glides by.
There's usually at least a hair's breadth between the two vehicles, sometimes
even two.
Took a morning in Cork City, enjoying the shopping and the
oddly-named English Market, a good old-fashioned meat and produce market
complete with wrought-iron and wood-beams like an old train station, plus
upstairs café serving fantastic soups and the best gluten-free bread Jessie had
ever had. West Cork has some of the most classic Irish town names I know:
Clonakilty, Skibbereen, Ballydehob. Bantry, where we stayed the night, was an
odd sort of seaside town with a huge concrete central parkade where the town
fair has always taken place.
Bantry Bay
The town didn't feel quite woken up, and we were
excited to head out onto the Beara Peninsula, probably the least travelled of
Kerry's three (Dingle, The Ring, and Beara).
Irish architecture tends to be very unadorned, but they love their bright colors.
June 19th:
Allihies, Beara Peninsula
We'd booked a couple of nights in a B&B in Allihies, a
tiny village at the tip. Looked like about two hours from Kenmare, the
peninsula's gateway town (deserved winner of the national Tidy Towns
competition 12 years in a row). Actually, it took about four hours. We didn't realize
that the Rural Route round the peninsula, which was narrow and windy enough,
divided at one point and we took the even narrower windier coastal road that
seemed to follow every fjordal inch of the coastline. But the views! Every
corner we came around was better than the last. Some places the road just
looked like a tiny ribbon across this wild lush coastal landscape. Very few
cars, very few houses.
Finally made it to Allihies, a one-street village with just
a single pub (highly unusual in Ireland where there's usually a pub for about
every twenty inhabitants)
and asked a local where the Beach View B&B was.
She directed us out of town and said to say hi to Irene. Everyone knew Irene
and she knew everyone. She told us some guests the previous week had wanted to
hike the peninsula but didn't know what to do about getting back. She told them
to hike as long as they wanted, then call into the nearest house, tell them to
call Irene and she'd come and pick them up. When I asked if she'd lived there
her whole life, she said yes, but then qualified that she'd been born in
Eyeries but moved to Allihies. Eyeries was the tiny one-pub village about six
kilometers away. People survive there with "the bit of farming." Up
the mountain, small rocky farms separated with rock walls. A few sheep, a few
beef cattle. Everyone shares the hay cutting machine, taking turns. She has
three kids, two have left. Gregory, a guy I met on the beach, had another
story. People largely survive in this officially 'disadvantaged' area on EU subsidies.
Irene was so warm and friendly, she made the stay wonderful.
Fabulous buffet breakfast plus of course the "full Irish" (rashers,
sausages, grilled tomato, eggs, toast, black and white pudding…you don't want
to know what's in it) and when we were leaving and weren't sure we had enough
cash she told us to take an envelope with her name on it, go to the ATM in
Castletownbere (nearest town about 20km away), put the money in the envelope,
leave it in "the shop next door to the bank," and she'd pick it up in
the next few days. Welcome to rural Ireland!
June 20th:
Kenmare
Allihies was a little too far from the madding crowd for 2
days out of our 10, so we headed back into Kenmare and booked into a guest
house on the main street over Foley's pub.
Hard for me to believe it was 35
years since I was in Kenmare. The six of us in our green 1971 Volkswagon
Variant. Now it's 2013, a boom and a bust later. That night, I drove Jessie out
the Ring of Kerry road to Sneem where we holidayed as kids. Still a sweet little
village with two greens joined in a figure-of-eight by a bridge over the river.
We bought a packet of Milky Moos, my favorite sweets from childhood and a taste
that brings me back there.
Along the roadsides in the West, you often see the bog cut with the stooks (piles) of turf stacked to dry. People own small plots of bog that they cut by hand. The turf takes a few weeks to dry enough for fuel, but it gives off that great peaty smell that you can smell all over the West of Ireland.
June 21st,
Midsummer's Day
Being so far north of the Equator, and so far West in
Ireland, the longest day of the year was even longer, light till 11pm. And
since we're doing so much, and it's light from 4:30am., every day feels like
about five days. Stopped on a whim at Muckross House, which had the most
spectacular gardens and grounds we'd ever seen. We got chatting to one of the
gardeners as we wandered. He happily stopped what he was doing and launched
into a history of the house, sending Jessie into fits of suppressed laughter as
he talked in his strong Kerry accent about how it was built in "the
eighteen-farties" for the Herbert
family. Herbert, a British member of parliament, was originally
"given" 10,000 acres of the land by Queen Elizabeth I, as though it
was hers to give. The Herberts and friends used the house only sporadically as
a hunting lodge. Gorgeous place, sitting empty most of the time. They sold it
to a guy for his daughter as a wedding present, but she died on the boat to
America to visit her parents in 1932. Her husband couldn't bear to keep it, so
he gave it to the State, who couldn't afford to do anything with it until they
renovated it in the 1960s. Giant wing-nut trees. A sunken dahlia garden. A
stream garden.
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| Jessie temporarily shrank into a tiny person, meditating among the giant leaves. |
View from Muckross House down to their private lake. Not bad, for a second home!
