Cead Mile Failte, part 5

After leaving Kinsale, we finally found ourselves heading into the proper historic East. There was a whirlwind of a stop in Waterford, mainly just to see the crystal. I did get to hold the crystal football that goes with the college football national championship trophy, which is probably as close as Vanderbilt will ever get to it if I’m honest, and then we decamped quickly for Kilkenny, the next to last in our series of short-hops. One long drive up a scenic autumn motorway later, there we were.

An aside: the European Union requires its member states to upgrade a certain percentage of their roads to be 100kph-capable. Ireland managed this by merely sticking some signs up reading 100kph and calling it a day. So you can be going down a one-lane country path with a hairpin turn and an oncoming tractor right next to a sign reading “100 KPH”. Which would be awesome if you were filming an Hibernian remake of the Dukes of Hazzard, but which tends to be a little scary in a rented Skoda Octavia (which had a noisy diesel engine that shut itself automatically at every stop until we figured out how to disable it, a broken mirror in the driver’s sunshade, and over 100,000 kilometers on the odometer. They don’t have a lot of automatics at the rental counter in Ireland).

Anyway, Kilkenny is a town of about 9,000 with another 15,000 in the hinterlands. Its town charter predates the Magna Carta and its origins are hundreds of years before even that, and it has transformed one of its deconsecrated churches into a wonderfully-done Medieval Mile Museum as the cornerstone of its well-preserved high street, which includes Kilkenny Castle and a public house called Kyteler’s Inn. The inn dates itself to 1324 and is a whole warren of rooms and chambers on different levels before descending into an outright catacombs…which in turn opens on an outside patio that lets out onto a lower street on the back side. It’s easy to believe that this pub has been running in some form for 700 years, because it was cozy and welcoming enough that my teetotal wife sat at a comfy barside stool soaking up the music and the atmosphere for hours while I nursed a couple pints of Kilkenny Cream Ale – which is kind of like Smithwicks, but nitrogenated like Guinness. I’ve found it in two places on Earth so far. One was Kyteler’s, the other was Fibbar Magee’s in Sunnyvale California. Which means I’m going to be spending a lot more time in proximity to Fibbar’s even if they closed their own smoking deck. (Those duty free Cohibas don’t smoke themselves.)

From Kilkenny we delved into the Wicklow mountains, came the back way through the Sally Gap and its almost Scottish moors, and found ourselves at Glendalough. Which was everything you’d expect. Very old, very scenic, wrapped in gray cloud and gray stone and autumnal chill. When Christianity came to Ireland, there were no cities (Dublin wouldn’t be founded until the 900s) so the bishoprics and ecclesiastical structure was based around abbeys and monastic communities rather than towns and existing settlements as in Europe. In their way, they were as much universities as churches, because it was there that the Irish preserved learning and knowledge until it could be reintroduced into post-Roman Europe. Cool gray solitude in the pursuit of knowledge…Glendalough was every bit as affecting as Trinity College Dublin, and it wasn’t hard to see myself content at either one.

I have to mention the Wicklow Heather, where we had dinner. I’ve dined in some posh establishments in my time, but none of them has ever sent a car to collect me and drive me home at the end of the night, gratis. We had a lovely dinner, only mildly irritated at first by a literal busload of Americans on tour which provoked me to comment on social media, “the day will come when I can go abroad without Americans showing their ass and embarrassing me, but tonight is not that day.” If you’re going abroad as an American, my advice is to skip the ball cap, learn to feign a convincing Canadian accent, and for Godsakes don’t join a tour group.

And then it was back to Dublin, divest ourselves of the car – when we tried to board the shuttle to the terminals and said it didn’t matter which because we just needed a cab, the driver got out and went into the Avis office to call a cab to pick us up on the spot and be spared the airport surcharge – and one last night in Howth with one of my wife’s old work colleagues for dinner and pints and gossip before that big bird home. And Ireland gets you through the security line expeditiously; the biggest slowdown was when the security man pointed at a stuffed sheep in my bag and asked “you feed him already before flying?” I said I’d feed him on the plane and he replied “best be sure he’s not the food on the plane” with a wink. And then, after another short hop to Heathrow and a scramble for last-minute goodies, that long daylight flight home that added up to a 21 hour day awake and from which I still haven’t properly recovered (but waking up wide awake at 5 AM PDT is actually working for me and will through the end of October, so I’m trying not to fight it).

It was a dream come true, to be honest. Even when things were getting squirrely on those back roads, or we had gotten down to only three Euro cash between us, it was a delight to be there. And I don’t know how much of that baseline joy could be parsed out to being away from work, or away from America, or actually in Ireland, or other stuff, but there’s a lot of regression analysis to be done there.

Of which…

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