10 Days in Ireland

We landed in Dublin at 3AM.

Not the most glamorous arrival story, but we earned it. The departure from Tulsa had been harried — double booked on both United and American trying to connect through Chicago before boarding Aer Lingus for the transatlantic leg. By the time we settled into our seats we were already running on fumes and adrenaline in equal measure.

One of our wedding gifts was business class seats and we took full advantage. Lay-flat beds, four-course meals, champagne, tea service. Aer Lingus being an Irish airline means even the small touches land — the silverware had clovers on it. We could have watched a movie but I prefer to read and David much prefers a game on his phone, so about an hour in we both went horizontal and tried to sleep our way across the Atlantic. I kept pulling up the map to watch us pass over Labrador and out over the ocean. It was all dark. I watched anyway.

Dublin

We landed and I made an executive decision: we had business class lounge access, it was 3AM, and we were going to use it. David thought I was nuts. But what else was there to do at 3AM in Dublin Airport? We freshened up, killed time, and waited for the rental car desk to open.

The rental was a Citroën C4 Diesel. Perfectly sensible car. What was less sensible was that we now had to drive it on the left side of the road, from the right side of the car, in Dublin city center, on no sleep. It is probably good that David was a school bus driver in a past life. I never did tackle driving in Dublin and I can live the rest of my life without that changing.

We dropped luggage at our lodging and went straight back out. Jet lag is best defeated by movement and stubbornness and I was committed to both. First stop: Dublin Castle. The artwork, the throne room, the dining room, the press room — it’s one of those places that keeps revealing itself the longer you walk through it. Then the Guinness Storehouse, which I have now renamed Spaceship Beer. It had the same polished, immersive, slightly overwhelming energy as Spaceship Earth at EPCOT but with better beverages at the end. I did learn how to properly taste Guinness. The view from the top was the real highlight.

We turned in at 6PM. I woke up at 9, started getting ready for the day, and realized it was 9PM. I immediately switched my phone to 24-hour time and we did not speak of it again.

Galway

The next morning we were off on the M6 to Galway. We stopped at our first of many Irish petrol stations for a meal and I cannot stress enough how much Americans are missing by not having these. Ceramic dishes. Metal silverware. Someone who clears the table behind you. Multiple food options. Some of them have multiple levels. One had a laundry facility. These places are an oasis and I thought about them for the rest of the trip.

I had arranged a surprise pit stop in Athlone at Seán’s Bar — the oldest pub in all of Ireland. We went in, found a seat, I had a pint of Smithwick’s and David had a Coke, and we sat with the particular satisfaction of being exactly where we were supposed to be. This was one of his big three for the trip. Consider it handled.

The drive to Galway introduced us to something I would remark on for the rest of the trip. The Irish countryside was blanketed in yellow flowers in every direction — thick, thorny hedgerows lining every road and field, so densely packed they looked like something between a garden and a barricade. Beautiful and slightly ferocious at the same time. We eventually learned the name for it: gorse. It turns out those brilliant yellow thickets serve the same purpose as a fence, marking boundaries and keeping livestock in check. Barbed wire with better marketing. It was everywhere, the way Indian Paintbrush is back home in Oklahoma — not remarkable to the locals, just the color the landscape turns in season. I never stopped noticing it.

Galway undid us both a little. We wandered in under the Spanish Arch without fully realizing what we were walking under, which felt exactly right. The city has a pace and an atmosphere that is entirely its own — buskers, centuries of history, ocean air, trails stretching along the water for miles. Our American brains kept short-circuiting at the discovery that they had built a shopping center around a fortress wall in Eyre Square and were using it as a retail display rather than a museum. Mannequins propped on top of a medieval structure. Completely casual about it. We were not casual about it.

Murphy’s Ice Cream was a highlight. We both had honeycomb but the brown bread ice cream was the real revelation. If you know, you know.

We stayed in The Snug Townhouse a tiny lodging in the Latin Quarter where I could look directly out the window onto the street below without it being too noisy — the perfect observation post. Our second night we went to the Crane Bar for trad music, arriving early enough to secure seats before it packed out completely. It was exactly what you hope a trad session in Galway will be and rarely is.

Northern Ireland — Bushmills, the Coast, and a Day We Won’t Forget

From Galway we made the long drive north to Bushmills in Northern Ireland. I was driving. There were highways under construction, roads that had no business being as narrow as they were, and at least one encounter involving a tour bus, a box truck, and a lane that could only generously be described as one and a half of those things. We arrived at the Peatlands and recovered quietly.

The next morning we found David a haircut at the Bebop Barbershop before heading to the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. The walk out gave me my best look yet at the gorse up close — thorns like barbed wire, blooms like something you’d want in a vase — and I finally got the photo I’d been trying to take since Galway. I had also been hoping for puffins at the bridge. There were no puffins. I have made peace with this.

We dashed back to our lodging — the Oat Box — to change before meeting Victoria at Dunseverick Castle. We explored the ruins and the sea cave below before continuing on to Giant’s Causeway.

There are places in the world that photographs simply cannot prepare you for. Giant’s Causeway is one of them. The hexagonal basalt columns stepping down into the North Atlantic, the scale of it, the sound of the water — it asks something of you just by existing. We were there on a day with real weather, real wind, real Atlantic sky. It felt significant in every possible way.

Afterward we had dinner at the Bushmills Inn, which earned every bit of its reputation.

The following day we toured the Old Bushmills Distillery — the oldest licensed whiskey distillery in the world — where we learned what actually makes a whiskey single malt, why the aging barrels matter, and what accounts for the color variations. David took careful notes. I took careful sips.

Sligo

From Bushmills we backtracked south to Sligo and our first of three luxury hotels on the trip. David walked in, took in the room, and said: “Why is the door so far away from the bed?”

The adventure was beginning to wear on him. He needed to slow things down. We ordered room service, watched the river below from our window, and did not feel guilty about any of it.

Belfast

Belfast was another big one for David — the Titanic Museum had been on his list since we started planning and it delivered on every count. It is one of those museums that manages to be both technically impressive and genuinely moving, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

We stayed at the Merchant Hotel, which is the kind of place that makes you feel slightly more glamorous than you actually are. Fine dining, an apricot martini, and a bathroom so extravagantly art deco it dwarfed the combined square footage of every other place we had stayed in Ireland. I soaked in the tub and read several chapters and felt no shame whatsoever.

Breakfast the next morning featured David once again remarking on how much he was going to miss Irish orange juice when we returned stateside. A fair point, as it turns out Irish orange juice is genuinely superior and we are not sure what they are doing differently and we are not sure we want to know. For her part, Laurie had porridge and tea and was quietly devastated to be leaving a country that had introduced her to Irish Fanta — a fizzy revelation made with actual fruit juice that makes American pop taste like a chemistry experiment by comparison. She had given up on finding decent coffee sometime around day three, fully committed to the Irish solution, and somewhere along the way lost her heart entirely to a soft drink. She does not regret this.

Dublin — The Return

Our final stop was back to Dublin, the Temple Bar district, and the small matter of returning the rental car at the airport. We had nine solid days of left-side driving behind us and neither of us was particularly enthusiastic about Dublin traffic for the finale. As the Irish say: feck that. I had quietly decided this honor belonged to David.

At the airport we met a cab driver from Kashmir who was so genuinely wonderful that we took his number on the spot and arranged for him to drive us back the following morning. I cannot recommend this approach to Dublin airport highly enough.

We spent our last evening walking the Ha’penny Bridge, strolling Temple Bar District, and having dinner at an Italian restaurant that had no business being as good as it was. We took our time. We weren’t ready to leave.

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Before we left Oklahoma, I had collected postcards from Tulsa. On our last nights in both Northern Ireland and Ireland, we addressed them to every place that had been kind to us — the pubs, the lodgings, the small businesses that made the trip what it was. Little notes of thanks. Most of them probably had no idea who sent them. I hope they prompted a smile anyway.

Ireland was ten days and it wasn’t enough. We are already talking about going back. Next time: puffins. And maybe one more long look at the gorse.

— Laurie & David