There and Back Again, Again

Continuing with the theme of travels, I find myself again (relatively) recently returned home, this time from Ireland (and a brief jaunt to St. Louis, but that wasn’t half so exciting – sorry Sarah). The trip was only ten days long, yet we – my parents and I – packed all the action we could into those days, beginning our trip in Dublin, driving south to Glendalough, Cashel, and Waterford, across to Killarney, then up the west coast through the burren to Galway and then back to Dublin.

Perhaps the first thing to stand out was the sublime beauty of the country. I know everyone says Ireland is lovely but it’s easy to think “Of course, in the same way that every countryside is lovely.” Apparently, however, they simply call it “lovely” because they lack the words to describe it. We kept a joint travel journal while we were there and by the second day it became a running joke that we would have to think of new superlatives each day to describe the sights we had seen. My best description could simply be that it was stable and sheltering, intensely majestic, and joyfully wild. Walking in the prehistoric stone fort of Dun Aonghus was a case in point. There the ground was covered in the softest and greenest of grasses, dotted with little yellow and white flowers; yet just an inch below that grass (and in some places poking through) was solid rock, which sheared away at one edge of the fort, leaving a knee-weakening 600-foot drop into the Atlantic. Not a tame country, but certainly a good one.

There were too many exploits and adventures to recount them all here, but perhaps a few snapshots will suffice to give the general flavor:

- Walking into a dimly lit room at Trinity College and seeing laid on a table before me the most ancient and beautiful manuscripts Ireland (and perhaps the world) has to offer. Their ornamentation was a flurry of saints, animals, knots, and spirals in patterns of constant play. And equally importantly, one could discern in their midst the beautiful and ancient words, faithfully copied that they might never be lost – In principio erat Verbum…

- Seeing the mountains and lake of Killarney National Park. Like the rest of Ireland, it was gorgeous – but even Ireland looks better from horseback (to which the Irish themselves would readily agree). And tearing down a muddy, tree-lined lane at a full gallop was a wild adventure not to be missed.

- Asking one of our guides what he thought about the Lisbon Treaty (an EU thing that there were lots of signs about) and getting a brief history of modern Ireland with the answer. He favored us with the story of his two uncles who fought in the IRA under Michael Collins in the revolution, one of whom assisted in bringing down the only wireless trans-Atlantic communication station of the time. He was everything one thinks of an Irishman being – eloquent, welcoming, independent, and fiery-tempered.

- Standing in the prehistoric tomb of Newgrange in the pitch black, watching for the light to appear as it would on Midwinter Day; seeing the outer stones bathed in warm gold and a thin shaft of light pierce even the deepest recesses of the tomb. It was a sign filled with hope and yearning. It was as if with this structure, man joined nature in saying, “Even the longest night cannot last forever. My deliverer is coming.”

It was, in total, a lovely trip. But, having been gone for four weeks of the past two months, I think I will be happy to hang my hat at home for a while… At least until adventure – and weddings – call me back to the open sky.