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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201c100 KPH\u201d. 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\u2019s sunshade, and over 100,000 kilometers on the odometer. They don\u2019t have a lot of automatics at the rental counter in Ireland).<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2026which in turn opens on an outside patio that lets out onto a lower street on the back side. It\u2019s 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\u2019ve found it in two places on Earth so far. One was Kyteler\u2019s, the other was Fibbar Magee\u2019s in Sunnyvale California. Which means I\u2019m going to be spending a lot more time in proximity to Fibbar\u2019s even if they closed their own smoking deck. (Those duty free Cohibas don\u2019t smoke themselves.)<\/p>\n
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\u2019d 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\u2019t 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\u2026Glendalough was every bit as affecting as Trinity College Dublin, and it wasn\u2019t hard to see myself content at either one.<\/p>\n
I have to mention the Wicklow Heather, where we had dinner. I\u2019ve 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, \u201cthe day will come when I can go abroad without Americans showing their ass and embarrassing me, but tonight is not that day.\u201d If you\u2019re going abroad as an American, my advice is to skip the ball cap, learn to feign a convincing Canadian accent, and for Godsakes don\u2019t join a tour group.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u201cyou feed him already before flying?\u201d I said I\u2019d feed him on the plane and he replied \u201cbest be sure he\u2019s not the food on the plane\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019m trying not to fight it).<\/p>\n
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\u2019t know how much of that baseline\u00a0joy<\/em>\u00a0could be parsed out to being away from work, or away from America, or actually in Ireland, or other stuff, but there\u2019s a lot of regression analysis to be done there.<\/p>\n Of which…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … <\/p>\n