Another visit to Ireland

A coastal trail near Ardmore.

We’re going to Ireland in a few days. It’ll be our third time there. Mostly we’re going because a few months ago we got a killer deal on round-trip tickets between Seattle and Dublin. How cheap? You don't want to know.

Ever been? It’s a pretty easy place to be a tourist. Sunshine is rare, but the people are generally friendly and that accent makes them seem even more so. They don’t yet hate Americans. Few places in Ireland are very crowded. That has become my primary condition for traveling anywhere these days.

I always feel a bit uneasy before a trip abroad. I like being in a new place, but I loathe the process of getting there when air travel is involved. 

There’s a poem by Derek Walcott that I always think of the night before traveling. “Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” I’ll post it here from memory; my apologies if the wording and punctuation is not precise:

I remember the cities I have never seen, exactly.

Silver-veined Venice. Leningrad, with its toffee-twisted minarets.

Paris: Soon the impressionists will be making sunshine out of shade.

Oh, and the uncoiling cobra alleys of Hyderabad.

To have loved one horizon is insularity

It blindfolds vision, it narrows experience.

The spirit is willing but the mind is dirty,

The flesh wastes itself under crumb-sprinkled linens,

widening the Weltanschauung with magazines.

A world’s outside the door, but how upsetting

to stand by your bags on a cold step 

as dawn roses the brickwork

and before you start regretting,

a taxi’s coming with one beep of its horn,

sidling to the curb like a hearse — so you get in.