Dublin and Galway

With Ellen in our dust, we touched down in Dublin. I had convinced Mom and Gigs that they didn’t need much time here. It is afterall, just another big city. I’ve been to Dublin a few times and while I like it just fine, I found myself feeling like I was in any big city in the U.S. except that everyone had charming accents and a quick sense of humor. I mulled over what I knew about Dublin and what I know about Mom and Carolyn and thought, “Meh, I’d give ‘em one day.” We arrived in Dublin in the late afternoon, checked into our hotel and then set out for supper. We walked through a lovely little park and just like that, they fell in love with Dublin.

“Oh it’s so beautiful!”

“This is so charming.”

“We’ll have to come back here.”

You think you know a pair of middle-aged snobs.

We spent just one night in Dublin before hopping on a train west to Galway. I insisted they visit Galway. I knew they’d love the little town and the bright colors and the ocean views and the music. We arrived to grey drizzle and empty streets and I felt foiled again. There were a number of fun notes from our Galway visit. To start, we stayed in what closely mimicked a South Carolina beach condo that required us to take an elevator underground, then traipse along a dark corridor, exit through a parking garage, take an unmarked staircase up, walk along the roof of a building, and unlock a trick lock in order to enter our residence. I really liked it in there.

Our first grey day in Galway consisted of trinket store shopping. I’ll admit that trinket shopping can be fun on cold rainy days for two reasons. One, I love a reason to not stand in the cold rain. Two, trinkets and tourist bobbles are an ever-changing realm of plastic and themed colors where the bobble in question will be cleverly modified in each place you visit. The Irish trinkets somehow had a sense of humor. My memories of Galway included brightly colored buildings and lots of flowers and ducks waddling through pedestrian streets while buskers and singers added happy sounds and giggles. Doesn’t that make it sound magical? Well it really is like that but somehow the rain took away all the colors and scared off the birds. It was so dismal and …British. So we entertained ourselves with mental games and jokes tailored to simple minds. We invented a Broadway play called “Meat Trap”.  Mom has a gap between two back teeth where things get lodged and require flossing to fish out. I know this is gross. Stay with me. For a while now she and I have referred to this as the Meat Trap. She’ll say things like, “My whole dinner is stuck in the Meat trap!” or “Gotta go floss the Meat Trap!”

At some point Carolyn made up a Meat Trap theme song that would become the opening number for “Meat Trap the Musical.” We happily hummed this tune for days and later on, one of those two came up with the slogan, “Get caught up in Meat Trap” and we lost all composure.

But enough about that. Later, in the afternoon of our rainy day, we sought warm shelter and ducked into a café for some hot tea and sweet pastries. Here, we met Ms. Fletcher. We don’t know what her real name is but Carolyn named her Ms. Fletcher. Ms. Fletcher was a sweet Irish lady, probably in her early sixties, and she was the waitress at this café. Ms. Fletcher walked with purpose and plunked things down on the table with enough force that you flinched when ceramic hit wooden table. She was the only one working the floor and kept herself busy clearing tables and washing dishes. Ms. Fletcher was a hustler. She never stopped moving. She shuffled around slamming dishes in bins, tossing forks at patrons, and refilling water glasses so quickly you were certain you would feel the effects of the splash zone. Ms. Fletcher politely took our order and then ran off to mop floors. She would blow past us with a bus tub full of white ceramic dishes and disappear into the kitchen. Moments later you heard loud slams and clanking and rattling and then she would reappear with an empty tub. Ms. Fletcher smiled at us every time she galloped past and made sure we had what we needed... and then around the corner she’d disappear and then clinking, rattling, and the tumble of dishes on countertops would bellow through the restaurant. Ms. Fletcher was like a barn animal and we would flinch and gasp each time we heard a destructive roar come from the tiny frame of Ms. Fletcher.

That night, we retired to our beach house and watched a TV show about honeybees while bundled in our coats on the sofa. I had purchased a woolen knit cap and Mom used newspaper as a blanket.

Our second day was equally dismal when we woke up in the morning. We ate our Irish breakfast, brushed our teeth, and then bundled up for another day of trudging. On this day, we rode an embarrassingly juvenile tourist train through town, ate lunch in a tea shop decorated with creepy porcelain dolls, and continued the hunt for unique Irish bobbles. But the best part of the day was just after lunch when the sun came out and all the colored houses looked bright and the flowers opened and the ducks waddled out and soon the streets were filled with music. The rain-to-sun transformation in the town is truly astounding. Mom agreed it looked like an entirely different city and suddenly we didn’t recognize a few places we had already visited. I’m bummed now that I didn’t have my camera with me that day. I didn’t bring it because of the rain and because I was tired of carrying it on my shoulder for the last three weeks. Don't take my phone pictures as proof. You've got to go see Galway for yourself.

On our last day, we ventured back to Dublin and stayed in an enormous Disney World-esque airport hotel for the entire evening before our flight home the next day. I remember very little about these last hours. I had mentally checked out a few days back and knowing there were no stops left on my summer venture let the rest of the air out of my balloon and I just remember being very sleepy. 

This was a rare occasion that I was happy to be coming home from a trip. I usually fight it and frantically search for ways to extend the trip or tack on a new stop - anything but going home!

But I was very tired and felt oddly sedated by the whole thing. I came home with the new concept that I didn't want to go anywhere else but then I got home, stepped into my house, and I didn't want to be there either. Suddenly my decade of tormenting wanderlust seemed to just stop. 

Since coming home I've been as restless as ever. I do not want to be in Charleston and I want to be somewhere else even less. I don't where that puts me. I have since looked at property in Virginia and Vermont. "And what are you going to do when you get there?" I asked me, "What's your 'Big Plan' Sparky?"

I didn't respond to this. That Laura is impossible to please.