Banoffee = Banana + Toffee

Today was a simple perfect day. It was our last day with a car so we decided to drive in a direction we hadn’t yet been: east and then south around Galway Bay. The car was due back midafternoon so we actually only made one stop in our drive and that was in Kinvara. We saw a sign just before town that we don’t see every day. It said “Drive Carefully—Castle Ahead” so we drove carefully and visited Dunguaire Castle, named for Guaire, the King of Connaught who died in 662 A.D. ^th century, the castle welcomed notable Irish literary figures to come and associate and share their work. In that tradition, the castle continues to host medieval banquets in the evening and at those banquets anachronistic Irish poetry is read. Alas, we would have to return the car before such a banquet could be attended.

The castle was not built until 1520 and is not a military castle, but a tower house or fortified residence that remained in use as a residence until the mid-1960s. In the early 20

We continued down the road, intending to drive on a bit, but the village of Kinvara was just around the bend. While it seems every town here is charming, this one had a certain atmosphere and a Friday’s farmer’s market so we stopped. The first tent at the top of Main Street sold gooseberries and Wexford strawberries. Moving on from there were tents with kelp-based bath salts, homemade lanolin soaps, kale, pea pods as long as my forearm, teas and sweets. We decided quickly we would forgo driving further and settle in. There was a trio of musicians playing—the Fair Weather Band, the singer of which mentioned that this was the single best day of the year so their name didn’t have the same ironic appeal it usually does. We choose a Sri Lankan tent from which to get lunch and while the woman was making our curry and pancakes, Chris asked a man where he had gotten his beer. There was a bit of a laugh and the man told him he had gotten it from the pub. Here, you can walk right out of the pub with your beer and drink it wherever else; please return the glass. Chris went in for a shandy—an idea to which bottled American beers do not do proper justice. In Ireland, a shandy is a beer with lemon soda poured right in. I don’t know how popular they are in the winter, but on a day like today it is totally refreshing. 

Returning to Galway was a pleasant drive, although on the way back we had to find the Enterprise office which, now that we’ve done it, I have no idea how Chris found it the first time when he was there by himself earlier this week. It’s in an industrial park and you can’t see it from the frontage road and it’s in a location that makes you believe you’re not in the right place the entire time until you pull up in front of it. We negotiated a fair-ish refund for the troubles we had with our rental and the whacky day Chris spent at the mechanic and Colin and Padraig brought us back to the Spanish Arch in the Latin Quarter. Along the way, they regaled us with their stories about being pizza delivery guys in a city with no street signs, making us feel better about how difficult it was for us initially to find our apartment. The Irish language is confusing and, according to Chris who took two weeks’ worth of classes in it, difficult to learn because there are no pronunciation rules. Padraig explained that his name is pronounced Porrig and the Irish think it’s funny that Padraig Harrington is called “Patrick” in international golf coverage. We asked them if there was a minimum wage in Ireland and there is. At one point recently, it was lowered, but had to be raised again for the politicians to be re-elected. 

There was a pottery fair in the plaza along the quay when we got back to our neighborhood which was fun to window shop our way through. When we headed out this evening for dinner, we had a destination in mind. Last night, we passed a tiny three-booth restaurant named The Pie Maker and we wanted to return there for a meal. It was one of the better meals we’ve had here. Perhaps obviously, they make pies. Chris had a pie with chorizo, mozzarella and pesto and I had one with chicken and mushroom and both were delicious. They came with salad with tomato and beets and it was a treat to have something other than carrots and cabbage. They also have sweet pies and we had a banoffee pie for dessert which was terrific. Again, everyone should go to The Pie Maker.  After dinner, we walked in and out of shops and then along the quay, where it seemed all of Ireland had come to drink their beers and ciders in the sunshine. I’m sure it’s always a busy spot on a Friday evening, but something about this weather is calling everyone out of doors (we’ve seen a lot of badly sunburnt red heads in the last few days) and something about this place makes it seem like everyone is relaxed and having fun. I like it here.  

Gaeltacht Islands

To the west of Galway are tiny coastal towns situated on bedrock shores that seem unbelievable and uninhabitable. We drove along the northern coast of Galway Bay towards the Atlantic. About 30 kilometers out of town, the road splits and we chose the leg that brought us to a small series of islands beginning with Leitir Mohr. The island is connected to the mainland by a long stone bridge and, after passing over it onto Leitir Mohr you no longer feel you’re part of the world. The buildings are ancient and far removed from one another.  The next stone bridge brings you to Garmna, which is more desolate, and the last bridge ends in Leiter Meallain, where we spent some time. The roads are narrow, barely a single lane, and it’s amazing to think about them being paved when there doesn’t seem to be two inches in a row of flat land that isn’t interrupted by crags. It appears that the glaciers receded on Tuesday, just before our arrival. There are huge boulders, The topsoil is shallow, it can be as little as six inches, but grasses and wild flowers take root in between those rocks and the contrast is lovely. The soil must be acidic, because hydrangeas grow here and the blooms are vibrant peacock blue and plum purple. On this last island in the string, it’s possible to drive a distance without seeing another person, although there are homes here and there, with captivating views of the ocean.  There’s no apparent commerce on the island and Chris and I wondered what people did for work.
taller than me, and more of every other size between that and a pebble. In some places, it looks like winter because the hills are capped in white rock that looks like snow from a distance.

It didn’t seem possible that there could be a brown sign on this pin prick of an island, but at the farthest point on Leiter Meallain there is a Heritage Center. It is one man’s collection of anthropological and sociological artifacts from the area that he accumulated over a lifetime. There are ration books from World War II and rosters from famine ships. There are photos and newspaper clippings and commemorative JFK decorations. There are squeezeboxes and wooden phones. And there is a charming young girl who is out there by herself manning the Heritage Center, who explained that there isn’t much possibility for work and while people come to the island to study Irish language because it is a Gaeltacht area, people are suffering the high level of unemployment. She pointed us in the direction of a must-see Tra (beach) and a Napoleonic tower on another island just offshore. 

We were able to walk to the beach from the Heritage Center, and it was a special little spot, with sand enough for several people to lay on with their toes in the surf, surrounded by craggy, impossibly grassy fields and there were horses all about grazing and neighing. Again, it didn’t feel like we were any longer in the world I live in but had been transported somewhere idyllic. Occasionally, you find yourself in a place that feels like a threshold and this was one of those: just special and quiet and natural and reminiscent of the geological past. 

The farther one drives on these tiny islands, the more narrow and less paved the roads become and I didn’t know if we would make it to the tower, but we got close enough to walk over the bedrock to see Golam Island and the tower that was built in case of a French invasion. On Chris’s tablet, it is possible to take 360 degree panoramas and this was a fun part of the world to play with that feature. 

We retraced our steps, driving back through these tandem islands until we were again on the mainland and continued west. Connemara ponies are famous and they’re everywhere here, like sheep in Donegal. That said, all the shops showcase Aran wool and the Aran Islands are just off the coast of County Galway, so one is never too terribly far away from a serious lot of sheep.

Chris commented today that he thought he would probably dream of trucks driving straight at him for months to come. He’s done a commendable job keeping us both safe, but we return the car tomorrow and I don’t think either of us will miss it. 

We ended our day with dinner at The Front Door on High Street in the Latin Quarter and had piles and piles of food, including a bowl of carrot and coriander soup that was rich and delicious enough to have served as the meal itself.  There is a lot of good soup in this country. I could eat it every day. Oh wait, I do.

So I Thought He Was Dead Again

Today, I thought Chris was dead and at just the same time he was ready to kill someone. It was a bit of an off day, the kind of day when you realize you’re absolutely blessed to have so very many days of vacation. One of the things that was so stressful about nearly running out of gas in the middle of somewhere not on a map yesterday was that the car was wheezing and limping along like a soldier who can only drop to his death but wants to free himself of the actual battlefield before he actually lets go. When we were finally pulling out of the gas station, it sounded as if we were pulling along Oscar the Grouch and his garbage can behind us and when we made the tight turn into Crescent Close the terrible scraping noise resumed. It was loud enough and of enough concern that Chris and I both got down on the ground to see if we were, in fact, dragging ironworks behind us but there was nothing visibly obviously wrong with the car. Chris decided, for safety sake, that we should return it to the rental agency in exchange for another car that worked and he took off this morning to do that. He mentioned that the office was on the way out of town, but Galway City is small, so I anticipated it might be an hour or so before I saw him again. I took a shower, practiced the tin whistle, read my book, tidied up, looked out the window, wondered where he was and read my book some more. An hour passed and then two. We only have one key to our apartment and he had it with him so I wasn’t able to leave. I looked out the window some more and wondered some more where he was. A played through a number of scenarios: one in which he was lost because he didn’t have a navigator in the passenger seat; one in which he  experienced irreconcilable differences with the rental car agency and had to take public transportation back to the apartment; one in which he was distracted by something shiny like traditional Irish music; one that looped and looped again: that he had run into car trouble before he even reached the car rental agency and was either desolate on the road somewhere out of town or—of course—dead. A third hour passed and I wondered how one contacts the authorities when one doesn’t have a phone (or a key to their own apartment, for that matter). A fourth hour passed and I wondered if my sister would come to Galway to help me with the body, even though she was just in Ireland last month and it would be an expensive proposition. And when there was a knock on the door, I thought perhaps the authorities were alerting me and dreaded to answer, but Chris was on the other side of that door, though he no longer had the key to the apartment and he was no longer as happy as he was when he left.

His time had been different from mine because there was no reason for him to think that I was dead. He had made it relatively easily to the car rental agency, only taking one wrong turn or two, but when he arrived, he wasn’t met with the kind of customer service he had hoped for. Every day here, we’ve talked about how stunning and simply soothing people’s kindness here is, but that isn’t what he experienced. Instead of doing an easy switch of cars, the agency had Chris bring our rental to a service station, where he had to wait while the mechanic replaced the brakes on the car. The mechanic mentioned that he has the rental agency contract and the car was long past due for service. It was maddening enough that Chris was losing precious hours in Galway sitting at the Irish equivalent to a Midas, but the mechanic then took the car out for a spin with him to check out his work on the brakes and discovered that the unfortunate, grinding, ripping sound that motivated us to bring the car in the in the first place continued and the mechanic deemed it unsafe to drive. He dropped Chris back at the rental agency and drove away in the broken car… with the only key we had to our apartment on the ring. Only after several hours did the agency then give Chris a different car, and they drew him a map to get himself back to the service station to pick up the key to our apartment. Unfortunately, the map was a straight-ish line, a curved line and a line that ended in a hook. The verbal instructions didn’t help and Chris never made it back there so our key was lost, probably quite a bit after he lost his good mood.

Luckily, he found some humor in our attempt to get an additional key from our host, Ugne, who wasn’t home at the time, and her worker George asked us for our key so that he could run out and make a new cut of it. We finally got that settled and, with new car parked in the lot and new key in our hand, we went for a walk to re-start the day. And it was a beautiful afternoon, full of sunshine and breeze. The Galway Arts Festival is currently running so there are musicians playing everywhere in the streets and music spills out of pubs, so a walk through the neighborhood is like a progressive concert. We went to music stores searching for bouzoukis for Chris to bring home and found a bakery from which we could buy brown bread and raspberry muffins that we started to eat even before we crossed the threshold back to the street. We had dinner at a tiny place with pub food and Chris had shepherd’s pie and I had bacon and cabbage. The meals started with seafood chowder for him, which had huge chunks of fish in it, and vegetable soup for me, which was delicious and between our two entrees we had six scoops of mashed potatoes and probably an entire head of cabbage. It was good comfort food after a stressful day, even if we did leave behind four scoops of mashed potatoes.

We ended the day at the pub across the street for the session there, in which a fiddler played, a squeeze box, a flute and a drum and then another fiddle when Chris joined in; I love it that the music is communal and anyone can play, and I’m sure Chris likes it all the more. Tomorrow we’ll go somewhere outside of Galway to take advantage of having the stupid car that we have… maybe southwest. We’ll see.

1000 Miles of Ireland

Two years ago, our summer travels brought us to the American southeast on a road trip and one of my favorite stops there was at Connemara, Carl Sandburg’s estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Today, we left the city of Galway to drive through the land after which he named his estate, and it is equally lovely. Several people we’ve talked to here in Ireland have named a place or two that we must see and Connemara is consistently among them. It is celebrated for being rugged land, untapped, vast and beautiful. It is certainly these things. 

On the road from Galway to Cong, we stopped at the side of the road and climbed out of the car (Have I mentioned yet that Chris is like Gulliver to the Lilliputians in this country? So I mean it when I say he climbed out. He’s so much taller than Ireland.) to take some pictures because the views were spectacular. We were out of the car only a moment before a man came out of his house and approached us. He told us he talks to people from the world over because everyone stops just there to take a photo, and he asked us what we were taken with about his land. We mentioned the stone walls and he pointed out the stone wall he helped his father build in the 1960s and then pointed out another that was over a hundred years old. The Quiet Man and about his friend Nally who lives two kilometers down the road who had a run in with some Travellers who weighed 14 stone and were half his age.
He reminded me of Robert Duvall, if Duvall had ever been willowy instead of sturdy, and he told stories about being a boy and having John Wayne give him pennies for candy when he was here filming

We drove on to Cong, the primary set location for The Quiet Man and parked down the road from the house where the dying man scene was filmed. There’s a mail slot in the wall on the façade of that building that says “Tips Please” in exchange for walking past. I can’t imagine that the town will be able to capitalize on John Wayne for too much longer, but we passed groups of people on the movie tour. We opted instead to visit the 13^th century Augustinian abbey, gothic ruins set against the backdrop of a river bank and forest. The architecture itself is gorgeous and the lands surrounding the abbey are, as well. We walked a trail through the woods, passing fishermen in the river, the water of which was so clear we could see fish passing us.

We stopped in Westport for lunch and had turkey and stuffing sandwiches, something Chris has always thought the Shimons were brilliant for having invented and now the secret is out. We drove on to Murrisk which is where the National Famine Memorial sits at the base of Croagh Patrick, to which there is a pilgrimage each year in which the faithful climb the mountain barefoot. The memorial itself is a sculpture of a ship and the mast is comprised of skeletons. 

The rest of our day was an empty drive through mountains and past streams and slowed by sheep
in the road, sheep that do not move just because a car is barreling along. By mid afternoon, we had seen a thousand miles of Ireland so far on our trip. Connemara is known for being more traditionally ethnically Irish—Gaeltaecht—and in this part of the country the signs are not necessarily in English. It is also remote and there is a longer distance between villages and the villages may only have a handful of houses. So when the gas symbol on the dashboard lit in the middle of nowhere, it was cause for anxiety. And that we weren’t entirely sure where we were didn’t help. So we drove quietly for a time, both of us hoping that we would make it and we did—obviously. I can’t help but think that someone would have helped us if we had run out of gas on one of those remote roads, however, and Chris agreed.

When we got home, Chris totaled his receipts to date for his fellowship and has enough money left over to buy himself an instrument and just received email confirmation from the foundation that this is a fine way to spend his dollars so I suspect we have some shopping to do tomorrow.  

Hey, That's Michael Wille!

Last night, Chris played with the band so to speak. The night time session was full of both professional and amateur musicians and when someone started a song he knew, he put bow to the strings. It was a late night for him, so we eased into today. Now that we don’t have to fit ourselves into Anne and Eugene’s breakfast schedule, that’s a bit easier. 

From breakfast until lunch, we walked. We visited the Galway Cathedral which is a much newer church than those we’ve been to here so far, but it is majestic. In fact, it is the most recently built of all European cathedrals, dedicated in 1965. The altar sits in the center and is surrounded by bas relief stations of the cross, rose windows and twinkling mosaics. It’s quite stunning. Like the cathedral, Galway itself seems newer than the rest of Ireland we’ve seen. It is a bustling, modern city full of workers and tourists and shops and taxis and buses and street performers. Our neighborhood has restaurants outside of which people wait in line for tables and pub and clubs, small theaters, tea shops and boutiques. We’re close to the city center and today walked the perimeter of Eyre Square and then walked through it, as well. It’s close to the bus station so many of the people sitting in the square have their luggage with them and you hear words and phrases in every language as you move through them. We window shopped wool for me and instruments for  Chris and were just wandering about when we ran into an old family friend—someone I haven’t seen in person in twenty years. We passed him and his family completely before his face triggered something in my brain and I called out his name as I was turning around to catch sight of him again. We chatted briefly and discovered that he and his family have been in Ireland the same amount of time we have and that they were in Donegal last week, too. Small world and all that.

We came back to Crescent Close for lunch and then went to the Salthill Prom, a place made famous by Steve Earle in his lyrics to Galway Girl and walked along the ocean endlessly. There are both rock and sand beaches and even though the city is at your back, you feel you’re in the wild. One of the things that captivates about this country is that instead of capitalizing, they seem to trust that their assets will speak for themselves. There are no signs for the promenade. It doesn’t begin and end in something reminiscent of Pigeon Forge. It is just a windy, salty, wonderful walk along the coast. 

We took a break to map our route to Connemara tomorrow and then had dinner at Monroe’s. Everyone should go there and everyone should order the Irish stew. Actually, only one person needs to order it because a serving will feed the table. The waitress said when she was clearing my plate that in order to eat the whole serving one must make a day of the pub and have a little for lunch and a little more for dinner. We were getting ready to leave the pub when in walked the same old friend again and this time we sat and spent time catching up. It’s a gift to have time to do so. I suppose it’s unlikely that we’ll run into anyone else we know here in Ireland, but now I’ll be wondering as we turn each corner who we might find around the bend, or at least if we’ll see Michael and his family again.

We excused ourselves so Chris could get to the session, and he played more this night than he did last night. I stayed in and read my book when I discovered that while we have lots of channels here, most of them are airing Knots Landing and other American exports that accurately reflect the richness and intellectual sophistication of our culture today. In any case, it’s growing late and it doesn’t look like we’re going to get any earlier of a start tomorrow than we did today. It’s a good thing Anne isn’t waiting with a fry pan full of eggs for us to wake…