\

Wanderung 9

Idly Eyeing an Idyllic Emerald Isle.

April 2005

Epilog

We learned a lot on our trip to Ireland. Some of these were Big Things such as the role of Irish monasteries saving the written records of civilization in the Dark Ages, the progress of Irish-English conflict over the centuries, the devastating effects of the great potato famine, and the endurance of aspects of ancient Celtic culture in contemporary Irish society. For example, I spent some time wondering if the rather rich tradition of Irish humor and music as well as certain kinds of superstitious beliefs could be traced back to Celtic times. These Big Things are important in understanding Western Culture, the course of Human Civilization, the Fate of the Universe, and All That Jazz.

But most of the things we learned were Little Things, such as how to drive on the left side of the road, how to select a bar for eating dinner, and how to make the bloody showers work. I've already described the first harrowing encounters with the driving, but in all fairness I must add that on the major roads during the latter half of our trip I did not have nearly as much difficulty as the first half, so there was a learning or adaptation curve of some sort. I found that the most disquieting aspect of the driving was the sharp left-hand bends on the tertiary roads that were so blind that I was reduced to crawling around at 5 mph while continually honking my horn, and I later had a Bright Idea about how to fix that. The fix would be to mount a wide-angle type of rear-view mirror on a suction cup or big magnet and then affix it to the right front fender out near the headlight so that I could better see around those sharp left-hand corners.

In Ireland, neophyte drivers mark their cars with a big red "L" on a white background (for "Learner", I presume), and I definitely used the ones I had printed at home before we left. I found out that the proper place to affix them was in an upper corner of the front and rear windshields, so I taped them there during the two weeks I drove the Corolla. The "L" seemed to help Irish drivers be a bit more forgiving about my slow and cautious driving, but I still was honked at several times. My second Bright Idea for driving in Ireland would be to take one of those illuminated rooftop "TAXI" signs and replace the word "TAXI" by a big red "L", maybe followed by some exclamation points. To make it more noticeable, I would have a flashing light inside, and it could be temporarily secured to the middle of the roof by a strong magnet such as those used for CB radio antennas. That type of signaling system would also work well at night and make it absolutely, positively certain that every driver you encountered would know that you are apt to be slow, cautious, and do occasionally unexpected things like driving on the wrong side of the road!

In any case, if you ever rent a car to drive in Ireland and plan to drive on the secondary and tertiary roads I would strongly suggest that you rent the SMALLEST car suitable for your needs. We rented a Toyota Corolla, which was an "intermediate" in Ireland but would be considered a compact in the U.S., and it was almost too big for driving on the very narrowest tertiary roads and doing the Broken Field Driving in the small towns. In fact, things got so tight while I was doing Broken Field driving in some towns that I found myself yearning for something like a Citroen D2V, a Fiat 500, or a Mercedes "Smart" car, which are cars most Americans would probably just laugh at, at least until gasoline creeps up to a cost of $4 to $5 a gallon.

But the difficulties in driving that I speak of are real. My left-hand mirror was knocked back twice during about 1,000 miles of driving, so I came just that close to sideswiping another vehicle (twice). The guy beside me at the rental check-in counter had, in fact, had a minor accident of some kind that he was trying to explain to the rental people (and exculpate himself in the process). Please take my word for it that driving in Ireland in small towns and on tertiary roads can really be a game of inches, and smaller is better.

Furthermore, in my humble opinion you can certainly skip any big engine options. My Toyota had the smallest possible 4-cylinder engine coupled with a slushy automatic transmission and it could barely get out of its own way, but that was plenty of power for driving in Ireland. Most of my driving on the tertiary roads was done at speeds of 20-30 miles per hour maximum, so power was really irrelevant on those roads. The primary roads seem to have a maximum of 100 kilometers per hour, but the sections I drove were quite flat and it was not difficult at all to keep up with traffic.

Although I was glad to have an automatic shift car this time to reduce my mental workload while adjusting to the left hand driving pattern, next time I will "chance my arm" so to speak and rent a stick shift car. (That phrase was, I learned in Ireland, a literal phrase derived from the gunner who would have to reach down into a cannon and retrieve the cannonball if a cannon failed to fire!) I can't wait to sit on the wrong side of the car and shift with the wrong hand while driving on the wrong side of the road and watching traffic approach me the wrong way. Although everyone knows that two wrongs don't make a right, I figure it is just possible that four wrongs when sincerely and quickly executed do make a right! In any case, it should be quite a source of innocent merriment for the Irish onlookers, especially if I have a big, flashing "L!!!" sign on top of the car, the big brass horn I bought in Kenmare mounted on the left door for Monika to honk with, and an extra mirror clinging to the right front fender!

As for eating in Ireland, our morning meals came with our bed and breakfast stays, of course, and they were uniformly excellent. An "Irish Breakfast" is one fried egg, two sausages, two pieces of "bacon" that was really ham, fried tomato, and white and black "pudding", which was really a type of blood sausage. Brown bread, white toast, and cereal are always available options, so you needn't leave the table hungry! Of course, anyone on a low-fat diet (like me) might despair at the typical breakfast offerings, but I just kind of gave up for the weeks we were in Ireland. Coronaries aside, the advantage of that kind of dose of protein and fat was that we all had enough energy to last us until 1-2 o'clock in the afternoon, by which time we would be searching out a pub, café, or bistro for a big meal. "Restaurants" seemed to be open only in the evening and to offer only large meals at large prices, so we never ate there.

In choosing a place to eat out while traveling during the day, almost all of the small towns in Ireland have pubs that serve decent basic grub. If you are trying to eat only a light meal, consider the "soup of the day" option that is typically offered for a price between 3 and 4 Euro. Those soups were almost uniformly some sort of creamy, filling soup with two slices of brown bread plus butter, and that was enough for me. If you want just a bit more to eat but still keep the price down, try the "Toasted Special", which always seemed to be a toasted ham, cheese, tomato, and onion-not very low fat, but very filling. If you want more of a full meal, you can't go wrong with entrées such as Irish stew, cottage pie, or homemade lasagna. The homemade lasagna, by the way, had a high concentration of ground beef and few if any noodles in the places we tried it, so it was different than a typical U.S. slab of lasagna in having proportionately more meat.

The pub grub also had a strong tendency to favor potatoes in any form, but most especially deep-fried "chips", which would be called French Fries in the U.S. Still trying to cling to my low fat diet as well as I could, I avoided ordering things with chips but even so I could not escape the ubiquitous potato. At one café I ordered the Irish Stew entrée (delicious, as usual) and not only did the stew have boiled potatoes in it, but it was also served with 4 scoops of mashed potatoes and the side salad included another scoop of potato salad along with the greens! I ate everything, as usual, and had a tremendous amount of carbohydrate-fueled energy for that entire afternoon (and evening, as I recall), but anyone on an Atkins low-carbohydrate diet might be driven to despair. At one pub we even saw a couple of guys ordering a big side order of chips with the above meal and they finished it all before presumably returning to work.

As to beverages, tea usually came in a pot that holds 2 cups, and you could ask for a refill of hot water without worrying about being charged extra for it, and that was a good deal. Coffee, however, came in one small cup and refills would cost extra. Soft drinks were a ridiculously small size, 150 milliliters or somewhere about 8 ounces, also had no possibility of refills, and cost about the same as coffee or tea. Since I tend to be a bit price-sensitive (bra hah, hah, hah, hah!), I obviously converted rather early to drinking tea in Ireland, but by the end of the trip even Monika had given up and was slurping down tea with the rest of us unless a Guinness or Murphy's was available. Murphy's was dark Irish ale that looked like Guinness but tasted lighter and had less of a bitter aftertaste, in my humble opinion. Monika and I felt that we would much prefer Murphy's to Guinness, but it wasn't generally available even in Ireland so you'll have to look for it. And for heaven's sake don't drink and drive in Ireland; not only do the Garda take a very dim view of that, but with all the strange traffic, the very last thing you want is to be impaired by alcohol.

Now about the showers; the showers were problematic in about 50% of the places we stayed. The most common problem was low water pressure, and by "low" I mean water gently dribbling out of the showerhead-enough to get the floor wet, perhaps, but not enough to take a shower! But even when we had good water pressure, the in-line water heaters often did not work at all or worked only in fits and starts. An in-line water heater, for those Gentle Readers who have never met the beast, consists of an electric heating element in the unit itself together with a heat vs. cold setting switch and some kind of temperature control knob. Given our experience I would recommend that when you are checking out the facilities at a B&B prior to renting a room for the night, that you turn on the shower unit and made certain you get sufficient hot water to actually take a shower. Otherwise you might end up, as we did, skipping showers occasionally and ending up somewhat "whiff-y" by the end of the trip.

But that being said, our accommodations were otherwise uniformly nice. Now except for the last night, we stayed at B&B's marked with a green shamrock sign, but there is also a different group of B&B's with a title something like "family homes of Ireland" that used a sign with shaking hands. I would be quite cautious about checking out any B&B facilities that didn't have either of these two credentials, but we never had any problems in the places we stayed other than with the showers.

We never had any problem with the proprietors of these B&Bs either. They ranged from being quite open and friendly to being rather reserved, but they were all considerate and competent. One difficulty that we did have occasionally was simply to understand the Irish version of English. We had naively thought that since all the Irish speak English we would have zero problems with language, and for the most part that was true. But something about the Irish lilt plus a soft pronunciation of some diphthongs and different enunciation of some vowels prevented us from understanding our hosts, particularly when they spoke fast, low, and soft. This unexpected difficulty happened less at the end of the two weeks, so once again some type of acclimatization or learning curve was occurring.

A second difficulty involved drinking the water. Being designated driver, I could not "lift a pint" when we ate in pubs, so I initially was drinking tap water (cheap, eh?). The morning after one of our drives out onto the peninsulas I came down with a light case of diarrhea, which is something you really don't want to have when driving out in the boondocks. Rounding up the usual suspects, namely the tap water, I switched to drinking 7-Up in the pubs and bottled distilled water otherwise, and I never had any recurrence.

For choosing the sites to see during our two-week trip we relied on an old Frommer's guide to Ireland, a guide to driving tours, and Rick Steve's guide. On other trips I have used a Fodor's guide and found them helpful also. You might consider taking several of them along since they often cover distinct things. In our case, Rick Steve's guide emphasized the Dingle Peninsula while Frommer's covered the Ring of Kerry. To get from place to place we used the Frommer's guide to driving tours in Ireland and just bent our route to pick up parts of each tour as appropriate. The driving tour guide covered the Beara Peninsula, and after driving all three of those peninsulas I can quite honestly say that I enjoyed each one and we found each of the three to be quite different. Specifically, the Dingle peninsula had more historical sites than on the other two, and the unique experience of our visit with Fungie the dolphin in the bay. The Ring of Kerry on the Iveragh peninsula was longer and had more rugged mountains and spectacular vistas than the other two. The Beara peninsula had a more varied ecology than we experienced on the other two peninsulas, including rain forests in the lowland areas, and the beautiful gardens on Garinish Island as a high point. They were all so interesting that I couldn't even recommend one over the others. The driving on each one is challenging, and I expect that when the tour bus season is in full swing, driving the Ring of Kerry could become something of a hassle.

For our next visit to Ireland we would strongly consider a walking or bicycling tour rather than driving a car. Although I would like to try a bicycle tour sometime, the complete lack of shoulders on any secondary or tertiary road in Ireland is to me a huge drawback. The Irish drivers are, on the whole, considerate of bicyclists and we often saw folks both young and old cycling along on the highways, and even mothers pushing baby carriages. Personally, however, given the blind corners and hills that typify many of those roads, I would feel like a 2-wheeled duck in a shooting gallery.

A walking tour would cover far less ground than either a car tour or bicycle tour, of course, but as long as we could find paths that did not follow any well-traveled roads it would also be far more relaxing, I think. Walking tours seem to be available in the more rugged areas of Ireland. Each of the peninsulas, for example, had a "way" or walking trail associated with it, and I would really like to go back and try those. Especially for the Ring of Kerry, walking the trail along the interior roads and mountain paths might be a way of seeing it in the summer while avoiding the high season crowds to some extent. Except for the Germans, of course, because the Germans I know will always be out walking the trails with you and typically at a faster pace!

Seriously, even in the off season we saw French, German, Spanish, and British visitors while touring the western and southern coasts of Ireland. Monika found a neat way to mark what tourists were coming to Ireland, and that was by continually inspecting her change. Each country in Europe that has adopted the Euro has unique symbols minted on the back of each coin. Monika found mostly change from Spain, France, and Germany, which directly confirmed the languages we overheard.

I think this cross-country tourism has been facilitated by the European Union and the resultant simplification of passports, elimination of visas, and standardization of money (except for England, of course). In my opinion, this is a great thing for the future of Europe and their chances of bringing off a "United States of Europe" type of political and economic unity. But that is, I guess, another of those Big Things that only time will really tell. As for us, we enjoyed our trip to Ireland very much and would recommend other folks come and see it. You might want to see Ireland before global warming causes catastrophic changes to the climate, by the way. Although Ireland lies far to the north, its temperate climate is solely due to the influence of the Gulf Stream, and if global warming shuts off that current, Ireland will be a very, very different place. The computer models I have seen predict a much colder climate for Ireland if that happens, so see it now while Ireland boasts palm trees instead of igloos!

Monika, as everyone knows, likes to know the exact time at all times. After all, she grew up in Germany where clocks are on every street corner and all of them are correct. Nowadays, clocks in Germany are synchronized by an official government radio signal, and the last time we were in Germany (Wanderung 5) she bought a radio-controlled clock, a "Funkuhr", which could be depended upon to give the correct time down to the split second in Germany. When we returned to the U.S., of course, the Funkuhr couldn't receive a signal although it faithfully tried to receive one every morning and evening. Since it could not find a signal, it accepted our best estimate of what time it was and displayed that although it still forlornly attempted to receive the official German signal twice a day. To be sure we really, really, set it to the right time back at home, we bought an American radio-controlled clock that received the U.S. Government time signals and used that to set all the clocks in our house.

Of course, Monika took the German Funkuhr along on our trip to Ireland thinking that it might work there as we were back in Europe, technically speaking. Surprisingly, it did at least occasionally receive the official German government radio signal even though we were several hundred miles from the German border. Whenever the Funkuhr received the signal, it set itself exact to the exact hour, minute, and second with one minor problem. Namely, it set itself to official German time, which is one hour ahead of Irish time. Of course, the Germans had designed the Funkuhr so that once it received a synchronization signal and knew it had the correct time, there was no way to re-set it one hour back. After all, as long as it thought it had the correct German time given by official government radio wave, the Funkuhr was going to display that time, Jawohl! Every once in a while, it lost the signal from Germany and Monika quickly set it manually to Irish time. But within a few hours the darn clock would try again, receive the official German time signal, and proudly shift over to the exact time in Germany rather than Ireland. Monika got quite good at telling time by subtracting an hour, but I could never figure out whether it was displaying German time or Monika had temporarily reset it to Irish time, which was more than a little frustrating. Having a clock that was either approximately right or exactly wrong by one hour reminded me of the old joke about whether you want to have a clock that's broken or one that runs an hour slow a day. There were times, especially when I awakened in the early morning and was trying to figure out if I had enough time to get back to sleep, that I felt like breaking the darned thing so that it would at least give me the correct time twice a day!

The saga of the Funkuhr continued even after we returned to the U.S. In a mail order catalog Monika found an international version of the Funkuhr that could find radio time signals in Europe, Asia, or the United States and Canada. Naturally, I bought that for her on Mother's Day (Count on me for buying the most romantic gifts!). You can't imagine how much joy Monika took in setting up our new international radio clock and then checking it against the American radio clock we had purchased earlier. As she saw the exactly corresponding hour, minute, and second displays, and double-checked that the seconds displays were shifting over at exactly the same instant on the two clocks, she breathed a huge sigh of relief. So now we are equipped to travel anywhere in the world and stay absolutely, exactly on time as we careen about in odd traffic patterns or cope more or less successfully with local cuisines! Stay turned for our precisely timed upcoming trips to wherever, published on a web site near your.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
April 2005
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Epilog

Return to the Wanderungs Homepage.
Sign the Guestbook or Read the Guestbook.
Comments about this site? Email the Webmaster.
Contact Bob and Monika at bob_monika@hotmail.com.