Doolin

The sun's about to go down. I just arrived in the pastoral village of Doolin, which is on the West Coast and just north of the Cliffs of Moher, where I go tomorrow. Bits of a stone castle stand in the backyard of my B&B. Cows are munching on the edge of the narrow road that's Doolin's main street.

How do you cry on a blog? My day went like this: Up at 6:00 am, catch a bus to the airport, rent a miniature car, find miniature car in the car park, dare to get into the driver's seat which is on the right side, drive on the left side of the M3 freeway to Newgrange, maybe a half hour north of Dublin. (Newgrange might just make the whole Ireland trip worth it. I'm ready to come home.) After Newgrange, get lost looking for the Hill of Tara. Find Tara after stopping to ask for directions; stopping is excruciatingly difficult when country roads have sometimes not even inches of shoulder. As I start up the Hill of Tara, it starts to rain, not the soft kind. After the Hill of Tara, I head east for my next destination, Doolin, and enter into a spiral of lostness. If you add up the hours, I am lost for a large part of the entire day. Once, I even knock on the door of a house alongside the road. Huge trucks, lots of huge trucks, with extra-wide tires terrorize me and miss the miniature car by a hair, over and over, not on the highway, but on the roads with no shoulders. [Interruption: Just now it started to rain, so loud it announced itself, so fierce it's falling in sheets. Maybe it will stop before I have to walk back across the road to my B&B. Maybe not.] The car, minus a hubcap, and I hobble into Doolin. Now I'm going to eat one of the chocolate bars I bought in Geneva.

Special note to Colleen: getting lost meant I got to see the barren Burren.