Sooooo…. whenever you travel anywhere there is the question of….how am I going to get around? There is walking. A lot of people do that. There is public transportation (every other civilized place in the world has advanced train systems) or… you can rent a car. Why rent a car? Because I am a Becker. Beckers hate tours, have short attention spans and like to look around, come when they want to come and go when they want to go. Now my wife, surprisingly backed the idea for me to rent a car saying, “you would not be happy without a car”.
So I got online and found that it was about as easy to rent a car in Dublin as it was in America. So I landed in Ireland, collected my daughter and headed for the rent a car booth. The European partner to National Rent A Car. Perhaps Hertz or Enterprise would have been a better choice. After declining a manual transmission and more stupidly GPS I ended up with a beat to shit Renault. It had a 100,000 Kilometers on it and based on my rudimentary understanding of the metric system (remember when we were kids and they told us it was just a matter of time till the US adopted it? HAH!) I think that means it had 60,000 miles on it. The guy at the place with the actual car meticulously marked down all of the dings of which there were a lot. Later I would be grateful that I had not got something gleaming and new.
First problem. The steering wheel is on the wrong side. You say “OF COURSE IT IS IDIOT!” But it provides a lot of problems. Generally it is a problem related to:
1. Being old
2. Being accustomed to certain spatial relationships
3. Being old and deteriorating
4. Not dealing with change
5. Not liking change
6. Hating everything different or strange...pathologically.
So I try and get in the wrong side of the car… where my daughter is already sitting (I will do this approximately 3 more times while she is with me. I walk around sheepishly and get in and we are off. The directions are easy, out of the airport and then onto the M1 north to Balbriggan. It is nerve racking and I run over a couple of curbs on the left side but… we get on the highway. HEADING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION. I had always wondered how the drunks do this and now I was doing it sober, and jet lagged at 9:00 A.M. in the morning. But I was handling it.
… heading north on the M-1. Which lane is the fast lane and which lane is the slow lane… thinking...thinking...getting honked at...THE LEFT LANE IS THE SLOW LANE IDIOT! So I stay there and as our exit approaches… I start moving over into the fast lane to exit the highway but of course...THE EXITS ARE ON THE LEFT TOO...IDIOT! They tell me that as I am aging the plasticity of my brain… my ability to grasp and learn new things… diminishes. It is always nice to be living in a proof of the theory.
So I swerve back to the left lane and make our exit. Then the real nightmare begins. 4 way stops in Ireland are for sissies. Instead they have Russian Roulette/Chicken game called “The Roundabout”. The roundabout is basically just a way to kill foreigners. My mind was able to contemplate it abstractly… in the same way as I might understand an Escher print. I am supposed to merge and keep to the...RIGHT OR LEFT… I don’t know and then casually swerve to the left to get out of the penalty loop and proceed on my way. This requires, since I don’t know my way, some combination of reading signs, making sure I don’t hit any of the other vehicles and listening to my daughter giving directions, saying “no not here!, (when i make the wrong turn) and occasionally hearing her shriek and seeing her curl up on her side of the car as I almost kill us by hitting a car, a sign, a curb or a cow. Surprisingly this makes me tense and when I am tense...I drive even worse.
We negotiate several of these with a variety of fear and panic… and we finally hit town which is when the fun really starts. I failed to mention that once you get off the highways (which are lovely) you end up on these scenic, rolling NARROW roads. For some reason judging the distance between my car and the cars careening at me head on from the right is extremely difficult for me so I keep us far to the left. We keep going off the soft shoulder because there is not real shoulder. My daughter dies a little each time I do so but in fairness I am mostly only doing it when a car passes going in the opposite direction. But we finally hit town where the streets get even narrower… and there are more cars… and stop signs… and...people. My daughter keeps saying “you're real close to these cars” and doing that annoying flinching thing again. *CLUNK” my mirror clips another car mirror. I drive on pleased I did not hit a person. The roads are so narrow most folks have their mirrors bent in so… it wasn’t even my fault… too much… really… but there is likely an Interpol warrant out for me.
Fortunately the hotel came up quickly after that and we decamped, checked in and… found out where the train station was to ride into Dublin.
***
The car sat… somewhat ambivalent in the hotel parking garage. It had been difficult for me to negotiate my way into a spot after driving down one of the parking lot circular ramps ON THE WRONG SIDE...until someone coming up the ramp almost hit me. Best leave driving alone and take the trains. But the next night we were going to see a concert so I thought that since it would be late, I did not want to walk across downtown Dublin late on a Saturday night and wait for a train. We could drive! My daughter got directions while on the hotel WiFi (you see you cannot use your phone for maps in Europe unless you are a TMobile customer) and she saved the screen shots with the directions. She got two sets, one for a nice gluten free restaurant I had read about and one for the Olympia Theater where we were to see a show.
I made a number of mistakes in not thinking this through:
1. I could have sent the maps to the hotel desk and gotten printed out.
2. I had not counted on the difficulties of traveling in a strange country with difficult to read street signs at night.
3. I did not count on the abject confusion and panic related to driving on the wrong side of the road, not knowing your way IN THE DARK!
I think you can guess that the driving part of the excursion did not go well. And then, besides it being dark… it started to rain. We never could find the restaurant. Laura had directions in miles and I had a car that measured distances in kilometers. There were perhaps 75 or so close calls before we finally gave up and miraculously found our way back to city center, found a car park (the silly Irish word for a parking lot) and found the theater.
***
I did the smart thing and had several drinks at the concert because when you are driving home and you don’t know your way, nothing makes it easier than a cocktail or two. 
THE BEAUTIFUL OLYMPIA THEATER!
BRILLIANT! We left and because we had tried to go the restaurant first we couldn't just backtrack the way we had come, although we tried… and we tried. Now the Irish people are really nice but I must say as direction givers, late on a rainy night, they suck. Between me being tired and still jet lagged and having a few cocktails… we were lost. I clearly missed a turn or three.
Laura, also tired. When tired we Beckers tend to get very passive aggressive. That helped too. I kept driving but had absolutely no idea which way was north which is where I wanted to go. Epic fail. Finally at one gas station a cabby gave me some directions to get back to the M-1 by going to the 3rd main intersection about 5 kilometers down the road. I am absolutely confident that I missed it but from that we were able to find M-20 and follow the signs for Belfast which I knew was north and eventually… we got back to the windy road with the roundabouts but there was no traffic and we were just happy to be at home.
***
The next day I took my daughter to the Guinness Brewery and to Leopardstown Racetrack for a big race and then I took her back to the airport and I headed across ireland to Galway. It was an easy pleasant trip although I missed my daughters company but it was fun streaming down the wrong side of the highway at 100 km per hour listening to Manchester United play a game v. Fulham F.C. It was really exciting with Fulham having a 1-0 lead until the last five minutes and Manchester scores two goals and is about to win a much needed game until they get to whatever the injury time or whatever they add on to regulation and Fulham scored to salvage a tie and further damage Manchesters chances of remaining in the Premier League next year. Heady stuff.
But then I got to Galway. And it was dark. And I didn't know where I was going. I was supposed to be staying in The Western Hotel in the City Center so I followed the signs to City Center Galway… and then hit a bunch of one way streets. They also have a lovely pedestrian mall which i discovered as I almost drove through it. But after stopping and asking a few folks and driving around the block four or five times I finally made it to my hotel and was able to park and get some food and plan for the coming day of driving the next day.
***
I woke up and had a nice Irish Breakfast and some tea and discussed my agenda with the 
WHEN YOU THINK “OH...IRELAND...THE ROAD SIGNS WILL BE IN “ENGLISH”
WHEN YOU THINK “OH...IRELAND...THE ROAD SIGNS WILL BE IN “ENGLISH”
hotel receptionist. She recommended that I drive north to Cong and see the Abbey and a friend had recommended that so I grabbed a brochure with a typical low quality brochure map in it and I was OFF! Getting out of town with the traffic was a little bit of a challenge with the requisite amount of fear and confusion but finally I was headed north for Cong in a light rain swerving off the shoulder every time a car was coming the other way. The Abbey at Cong was stunning. It had literally existed for a millenium and been ransacked and torn down… before our country was even a consideration. It is such a humbling thing being in the presence and walking and driving around something truly… ancient. Because in the States if it is 200 years old we pretend to care but eventually we tear it down to make room for the strip mall. There was not a strip mall within 50 miles of Cong.
I drove through the town and then headed north and just drove and drove. Narrow roads. Rain and sunshine. Rolling fields and just awesome, glory of God type beauty. It was in so many ways and like so many beautiful, perfect, God sent things… humbling. And with that kind of humbling, if you're lucky… there is also joy… and peace. And tooling alone through western Ireland in a piece of shit Renault, fearing for my life at every turn… there was a bunch of peace to be had. Piece and Peace. Funny. But I felt blessed and that is just not a feeling which most people get. Might have been better with my wife, or with my daughter, or with my priest. But I will never know and never need to because it was excellent with just me, and beautiful Ireland, and God. Sometimes God just rocks!
SERIOUSLY? WHEN ARE YOU EVER GOING TO SEE ANYTHING LIKE THIS?
SERIOUSLY? WHEN ARE YOU EVER GOING TO SEE ANYTHING LIKE THIS?
I TOOK THIS PICK BECAUSE CORNELIUS MC GRATH RECOMMENDED IT!
The next day, against the advice of the hotel desk lady at the Western Hotel in Galway I drove south to Cliffs of Moher. She implied that the weather was going to be somewhat “sketchy”. I felt like she was totally disrespecting me as an American! Seriously! What could go wrong on narrow roads with rock walls 18 inches from your car diving 60 or 70 MPH (and God only knows how many KPH) through windy, undulating roads in weather that started at 50 degrees, dropped to 26, and rose back to 53...all in 4 hours of driving?
It was… a glorious nightmare! I saw all kind of things. Beautiful blue skies. Rain. Snow. Sleet. Ice. Beautiful skies. ICE, Cars sliding into rock walls. Busses moving sideways down narrow roads towards me. Beautiful sunswept rock breathed with the Atlantic crashing against the road I was driving on and soaking my poor, freaked out little car… and it’s driver. It was an awesome trip.
I headed south from Galway into the County Clare. The County Clare was flooded. I knew this because it was all over the news. On my car radio and on the TV and in the papers. Politicians were being crucified and the suffering was dramatic and the people were outraged and I was driving down into the northern reaches of it.(what was really amazing to me upon returning to the States was that no one here was aware at all of the suffering that was going on in south Ireland and south England. This huge Katrina like disaster with 100,000 or more households displaced… was not even remarked upon in the states. It reinforced what a huge, protected silo I live in where if it does not affect my drive to work….fuck it.)
THIS IS WHAT A CAR LOOKS LIKE WHEN IT HITS ONE OF THESE 1000 YEAR OLD ROCK WALLS…. THE WALL WINS!
But Clare County was flooded and I was driving into the northern reaches of it to see the Cliffs of Moher. And it was frightening. 60 miles took about two hours and I saw 5 different accidents in snow, rain and ice. But I lives, driving the wrong way, slowly, but like an American! With only a modicum of fear. The quickest way there was a windy road that would be beautiful in any case but for me was covered by a fresh snow and it was breathtakingly gorgeous. The type of beauty which humans are not meant to witness from their awful beaten up Renault but which was right with me every mile… or kilometer… whatever.
The cliffs when I got there, after driving through ten beautiful villages were awesome. After driving through the apocalypse I arrived during beautiful clear blue skies and 60 mile per hour winds and made my way to the top of the cliffs where I got to watch a maelstrom flow in from the Atlantic until I was admonished by a park worker that I was an “IDJIT” (I believe he meant idiot which sounded correct) as a needle like 60 mph rain poured in on me from the cliffs. It was painful and...awesome.
THE CLIFFS OF MOHER!
From there and I have to say, the best part of my driving tour, I headed north from the park,staying off the main road and along the coast and saw some of the most beautiful Atlantic, stone beach landscapes that I could have imagined. Sadly I was too busy attempting to stay alive that I could take no pictures but…. it was awesome. I headed back north to Galway along the coast, looking at Galway from across the bay and in the ocean spray and was frightened at the prospect of an additional 40 miles of driving on those unnerving, twisty, slick, stone walled, frightening roads… and i was profoundly grateful that God would allow me the chance to die alone in such a beautiful place. God is good, all the time.
I RETURNED TO GALWAY IN A RARE, BRIEF, SNOWSTORM IN IT’S PEDESTRIAN MALL
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