Green Alligators and Long-necked Geese

Last weekend, I met a couple at my mother's house who is about to leave on a trip to Ireland. They were talking about the long, winding roads with hedgerow or cobblestone walls on either side. The vast number of sheep in the road where traffic comes to a halt. The remote areas where English is barely spoken. The street signs pointing in a million directions toward towns you cannot pronounce.

I suddenly wanted to go to Ireland. I want to stay in little inns, drink Guinness in old pubs and eat fresh fish pulled from the sea that morning.

The first time I stepped foot on Ireland was Easter of 1974 when I was nine. I remember the endless green scenery, my dad driving on the wrong side of the road directly into the path of a large tour bus (almost annihilating our entire family), picnics on the side of the road (during which my sister was mortified) and one inn where we put money into the bed and it shook (ah, nothing screams family vacation like a pulsating bed!).

I also remember our American cheeseburger-oriented family entering one B&B that served prix fixe meals where a little boy was running down the hall filled with excitement, "Mummy, mummy, they're serving salmon and lamb. Salmon and lamb!" At the time, we were all thinking "WTF?" and began sulking. My poor parents. At what may have been the same inn, my father swore at the dinner table and the entire restaurant turned to look at him. I think he had difficulty slicing a particularly rough cut of meat and it landed on the floor. The next morning, during breakfast, it was still there. Yum!

And lastly, I remember my brother Mark and I calling out the name of our hotel in Cork for days, The Arbutus Lodge, but we stressed the long vowel: Arbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutis.

I posted about my second trip to Ireland, actually just to Dublin, last year. That was merely a long weekend when we were living in London that served as an extended drinking binge vs. a cultural visit. Fun, yes. Memorable, perhaps, depending on the brain cells at any given moment.

My last trip was during the fall of 1986 when I was with two Irish girlfriends from Drogheda. We had just spent what little money we had traveling through Europe and ending up in Lagos, Portugal where we ate fresh rolls every night filled with cheese and mustard. It was our only meal of the day. By the time we arrived in Ireland, we were penniless and down to eating just the mustard out of the jar. I stayed for less than a week at their parents' house but it was glorious. We went to Dublin for the day shopping and sightseeing (i.e., they now had money again thanks to their parents) but, for the most part, we stayed in and around Drogheda. We went out for tea, attended a church service with their parents, hung out with their friends, went to the blistering cold beach and had ploughman's lunches at pubs in the countryside.

One friend lived across from the butcher in town where she could hear the little hooves of the animals click-clacking up the stone streets in the pre-dawn hours, hear their bleating as they cried out and saw streams of blood running down the drain outside after they were killed. It was the first time I grasped that there were real animals hiding in my food . . . not that I ate lamb anyway. Not even mint can help that flavor.

I now yearn to go back and revisit that trip from 1974. Right now. Travel all over with my family and see the sights -- most for the first time. I wonder if, in today's age of Playstation 2 and Nintendo DS, my kids would be even more jaded than we were. Would I be driving around Ireland looking for water slides and hotels with X-box? I hope not. But I'd like to find out.