At the Edge of Ireland Read Free Page A

with the vast Atlantic undulating under a huge pearlescent sky. And along the water’s edge, tiny dunlin and sanderlings skitter in hyperactive clusters and village children play in the rock pools and, way out there, on the horizon’s edge, and along the beautiful Allihies beach, the great colonies of kittiwakes, razorbills, guillemots, and gannets regain and aggressively retain their precarious perches on Little Skellig and other offshore sanctuaries.
    And we smile. The bone-chill and blackness of winter are gone. The days are warmer, longer, and full of fresh beauty and hope. And we’re moving in…
    Sláinte!

1
Coming into Dublin
    W AY BACK IN MY NEOPHYTE DAYS as a wannabe adventure-travel writer, a curmudgeonly editor of a long-defunct travel magazine once insisted that I should avoid all negativity in my submissions because “people reading pieces such as yours really don’t need to hear about the ‘reality’ of places—just give ’em the cheerful, positive, upbeat stuff,” he said. “Tell ’em only what they want to hear.”
    In hindsight I realize that most of my erratic life has been based on the motto “learn the rules first and then break them fast.” So I begin this particular chapter awash in negativity. For example: it was not a good idea for us two neophyte “blow-ins” (tourists, visitors, and other “outsiders”) to head straight into the heart of Dublin on our first hour after arrival from New York in a hired, right-hand-drive car with manual shift and all the turbo power of an egg-laden sea turtle. In fact, following the dire warnings from the rental car staff about Ireland being one of the three most dangerous places in the world to drive in and about how all credit cards, even the elite platinum cards, refused to provide ancillary insurance coverage in the country—it was possibly not a good idea to hire a car at all.
    We even began to have doubts about the country itself as we detected little from airport personnel of the “Warm Irish Welcome” that we’d been promised in all those positive brochures. And it was not a good idea for me to say to Anne, “Look, I found the street on the map where our prebooked hotel is located, so all you have to do is to guide us there.” It was not a good idea first, because Anne hates reading maps and will sit slightly traumatized staring at all the colored squiggles and barely legible type and forgetting to actually lift her head to check the passing scene for street names and the like (not that it would have made any difference in Dublin, because the street signs are either nonexistent or so small and cramped with bilingual Gaelic translations that you can’t read them from a moving car anyway).
    Second, because Dublin is the proud possessor of one of the world’s most illogical and diabolically confusing one-way-street systems, which makes you wonder how even experienced residents ever find their way to anywhere around the inner city. Even the taxi drivers are flummoxed to the point where we later found it useless to request their services. They were invariably more confused by all the one-way systems than we were.
    And third, because despite a very enticing Web ad that had lured us to advance hotel booking, the hotel was actually not a hotel at all, but merely a front office for a random scattering of rentable apartments all around St. Steven’s Green park. And the office, of course, had a different name from the one on the Web site. And the name-plate was so small and insignificant that when, after hours of inane looping around downtown Dublin, we were finally parked outside the office, and it was still impossible to confirm from the car that we had in fact arrived. And, in fact, we hadn’t. We signed in, parked the car in one of the murkiest, deepest subterranean garages it has ever been our misfortune to negotiate, and then followed a poor