I had such a perfect title for this post, but blogspot cut me off becuase it was too long, so it is below...

“I don’t want to go to your wake and have your parents look at me out of the corner of their eyes saying ‘He’s the one who told Joe he’d take a picture if he sat on the edge of the Cliffs of Moher.’”

Saturday October 27, 2007

11:37 p.m.

Dublin

I have a paper and a presentation due on Tuesday, so I decided it would be a good idea to take the first two days of this long (Ireland Bank Holiday) weekend and head out to Galway and the Cliffs of Moher. Ricky and Josh had gone to Spain for the weekend, so on Thursday night, when James suggested a west-coast trip that would not include missing any baseball games, Rory had I hopped on board, and added Liam first thing Friday morning. I bought train tickets online for the four of us while James and I waited for Rory and Liam to get back from their morning classes, and then we set off for Heuston Station to catch a 2:30 train to Galway.

We pulled into Galway station around 5:00 and bought tickets for the bus to Doolin, about an hour and a half’s drive south where Rory and booked a B&B the night before. Besides rises and dips and the road that made us think we were going to lose the McDonalds we’d grabbed while waiting for the bus, the ride down to Doolin along the coast was remarkable. The brightest full moon I’ve ever seen hung out over the water and illuminated the rolling hills of the Burren that whipped by us on the other side. We got to the little town and settled into our room by about 8:30 and then headed for the pubs that Rory and I had read about in our guide books.

Our first stop was McDermott’s, where James lost the bet he made to Rory when he said that Rory couldn’t finish the Beef and Guinness and French Fries stew that he got, on top of the double cheeseburger that was already sitting in him. We had read in our books that the three pubs in Doolin were, up until recently, a Mecca for Irish trad music, where people would come from far and wide to play. We hadn’t been in the pub for 5 minutes when we met a guy from Atlanta who had flown to Ireland for the weekend with his banjo just to come to Doolin. We were all pretty impressed. After a few pints and a few songs from both our banjo friend and the house band of the night, we headed down the street to McGann’s. The pubs in Doolin are completely different than those in Dublin, unsurprisingly. There were very few young people around (except for the little kids dressed up in Halloween costumes hanging out at the bar while their parents had a few drinks). We also sat next to the woman who ran our B&B and petted the mutt that was running around that apparently belonged to some dude sitting at the bar. Nobody really seemed to mind (definitely a long way from Dublin). The guy with the banjo followed us in a few minutes later, and before we left he gave us a crash course and even let me play it for a few minutes, which was really cool. I mean, who doesn’t like a guy holding a banjo?

After a long day of traveling and having put way too much food in our stomachs, we all slept very well in our strange beds. In an effort to make the most of our 24 trip, we woke up early this morning and, already showered and packed, arrived at breakfast promptly at 8. We devoured our meals, talked about crummy jobs we’d had in high school, and watched Liam (who admits to having a slight case of OCD) carefully cut the egg white from around the sides of his sunny-side-up egg, so as to not break the yolk, then one by one eat the pieces of egg white, and carefully place the remaining yellow center of the egg in the “discard” pile on his saucer.

We got a ride down to the Cliffs of Moher from the husband of the woman who’d checked us in the night before, and, happy to see that we were some of the first people there of the day, walked over to the visitors’ center. We had three and half hours to explore the cliffs before the last bus of the day left for Galway, so after doing the officially sanctioned touristy things, taking the “Look I went to the Cliffs of Moher” pictures, and reading in our guidebooks that there was a not-so-safe cliff walk if you jumped the fence at the end of the observatory platform (Rory’s book “strongly discouraged” jumping the fence, whereas my Rick Steves book mentioned how it was really cool to lie down and stick your head out over the edge), we opted to live dangerously, jumping the fence, taking a behind the “DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT” sign, and heading off on the little path along the tops of the cliffs.

I was throwing caution to the wind (literally, the gusts were incredibly strong and the rain was no prize either) a little more than the other guys as I asked them to take my picture sitting on the edge and opted to take the paths closer to the edge when the dirt trail split in two. (Keep in mind when I say “path” I mean a slippery, muddy, dirt ditch about twelve inches wide and 4 inches deep that ran anywhere from 3 feet from the edge to about 8 inches from the edge.) We walked and walked out to what seemed to be the highest point of the cliffs, at which point we were about a mile away from the visitors’ center which had since vanished in the clouds and fog. This seemed to be the point where most fence-jumpers stopped, undoubtedly for a great picture, since the path seemed to get even less official after this. From up at the top, however, we could see a little castle/watchtower about 4 cliffs further out, and that became our new goal. We stopped and took some more pictures on the way, slipped on some rocks, jumped some barbed wire fences, and watched and listened to James inadvertently grip on to an electric cow fence with both hands. Overall, we were making good decisions.

The wind and the rain picked up as we got out there, but once we reached our goal (an estimated four miles from the center) we felt pretty good about what we had done and etched our names in a little rock at the bottom of the castle. At this point we had to hustle back to catch the bus, though, so we took the less-scenic route once we turned around, cutting through some grazing pastures and doing our best to avoid huge clumps of fresh manure. Tired, dirty, wet, a little dazed, but undoubtedly accomplished, we reached the visitors’ center with about 15 minutes to spare. After putting down a celebratory ice cream, we headed back outside and caught the bus that brought us back to Galway. We killed our two hour layover in a pub in the city, and then headed to the train station and came home. From out our front door and back again, the whole trip took about 33 hours and was a great success.

Other news and notes: Thursday night was a long, but very exciting night as a few of us stayed up to watch the Red Sox win game two and watch the little ESPN gamecast box showing BC’s remarkable comeback at the end of the game against Virginia Tech… Zach Friedman, a friend of mine from BHS who is studying in Galway, and his two friends are in Dublin for the weekend and stayed at our place Thursday night, last night, and are staying tonight before leaving for their respective cities tomorrow afternoon… Ashley is stopping by for the game tonight (she watched game 2 with her friend Natalie, and the Sox still won, so that was a relief)… Flag/touch football started on Wednesday. There were about 5 Americans and 30 Irish kids who were very okay with being atrocious at football. We didn’t actually play any games, just ran some drills and put some plays together in hopes of running some scrimmages in a few weeks…Thursday night the program sponsored an “Irish House Party” which was a lot of fun. I’ll write more about that later, I just didn’t want to forget…Lyd is coming out on Friday, and the next few weeks after that are pretty busy, but for now I’m just going to worry about this presentation and paper. I should probably start writing more about Irish history and less about my rompings around the country.

Go Sox.

Later.

12:55 a.m.