Travel Writing

by Peter Ferry

  But it will be Doolin, okay, although when we’ll get up close we’ll find some more of it hidden beneath the lip of the hill. Still, it won’t be much: one pub and a handful of shops at one end of the road, two more and a few houses half a mile away at the other, a few B&Bs and a small hotel or two in between, a tiny yellow church just recently built on a bare hilltop, looking as if it belongs in Montana.

  We’ll walk the road for an hour and then pass campgrounds on our way down to the water’s edge. We’ll have a pint and some okay fish chowder in one of the pubs and listen to some music that won’t be as good as the townie band we’ll have heard in Clifton the night before. We’ll give up and go home to bed.

  The morning forecast will be for brighter weather, but it will still be wet and cool when we get up. Fourth of July mass and we’ll stand at the back with several ruddy-faced, fidgety men looking the worse for last night’s wear. The priest’s homily will be about being nice to Americans; “Hardly a soul in Doolin doesn’t have someone in the States, I should think.”

  Outside a car will stop and an Italian man will ask directions in broken English, and I will start to say I don’t know, but then I’ll realize that I do. He’ll have asked about the one place whose location I’ll happen to know. Left at the corner, two kilometers, left at the police station, straight on.

  We’ll sack two tiny grocery stores in nearby Lisdoonvarna for picnic stuff and makings for a dinner Carolyn will want to cook, and by noon there will be a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table, fresh-cut flowers on the mantel, and tunes in the air.

  I will find a mackintosh hanging in the hallway and some wellies and set about cleaning and moving some lawn furniture I’ll find down behind the barn to an open space where our glasses will be able to sit on the stone wall, our feet to rest on the pasture gate, and we to look over the backs of the cows through the fog to where the sea and Aran Isles will be alleged to be. Coming back around I will be surprised to see a tour bus stopped in the road and lots of Japanese faces behind Japanese cameras taking lots of pictures. Most of the cameras will be aimed at Rose Cottage, but as the bus will slowly move away, a couple will swivel to snap me. I’ll tip my cap and try to think of something Pat O’Brien–ish to say. One day we’ll be strangers in a strange land; the next we’ll damn near be natives.

  By noon we’ll be off on the five-mile hike to the dramatic Cliffs of Moher that fall away a thousand feet into the sea. We’ll have lunch in our backpack and hope in our hearts that the drizzle will be just a heavy mist. At first we’ll walk farmers’ lanes for some time just one step ahead of a herd of cows being moved from pasture to pasture by some farm boys, but halfway there we’ll find ourselves back on the main road alongside fast cars and fumey tour buses.

  Then it will rain. We’ll seek shelter in an animal pen beside the road and as we’ll wait out the shower, we’ll watch a couple coming down through the fields from what will look like the cliffs. When they reach us, we’ll ask if we’ll be able to get to the visitor center that way.

  “Yes, but don’t go. There are fifty thousand people there. Just climb up the path a bit for the best view of the cliffs.” Half an hour later, we’ll be having Stilton cheese, crusty bread, ham, apples, and wine, practically dangling our feet over the cliff. The sun will be out and strong and we’ll be down to our T-shirts.

  Will there ever be a lovelier place or moment in the world? We’ll laugh aloud. We’ll sing John Prine’s lyric: “Half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown, that’s the way that the world goes round.”

  We’ll watch a lone hiker coming up the cliff path from Doolin and offer him a glass of wine when he gets to us. Yes, you can come all the way, he’ll assure us, so we’ll go all the way back to town climbing over stone walls and holding barbed wire apart for each other, turning often for head-shaking views of the cliffs. In five miles we’ll meet just six people.

  Then I’ll be back at Rose Cottage sitting with my feet on the gate, and the Aran Islands will have magically appeared one after another in the bright blue world beyond me. I’ll be able to hear Carolyn’s clatter and music in the kitchen, and soon she’ll join me for a pint of Guinness and the sunset. Afterward we’ll build a peat fire and eat Carolyn’s wonderful chicken, ham, and leek pie in front of it. Very Irish. It is always nice to make a small home in a far place.

  Ten days later, we’ll take the hour-long ferry ride to Inishmore, the largest and most distant of the Aran Islands, last refuge of Celtic culture and the very edge of Europe, next stop Boston. We’ll spend the day riding bikes through the endless labyrinth of stone-walled farm lanes, chatting with students at an archeological dig, crawling on our bellies to the edge of a three hundred-foot drop at the fortress called Dun Aengus, which dates to 2000 B.C., overhearing schoolboys in uniform arguing in Gaelic.

  Then we’ll be having pints and sandwiches at a picnic table in a sunny beer garden at the top of the village when Jon and Cynthia Lynch will come along. “Mind?”

  “Not at all.” They will have just arrived and be poring over their guidebooks.

  “Do you know if you can rent bikes in Doolin?” they’ll ask.

  “Yes,” we’ll say, “there are two places right in the main road.”

  “And where do you ride?”

  We’ll tell them about the coastal road that we’ll have ridden to a manor house cum hotel called Aran View House, and the good dinner we’ll have eaten there. We’ll tell them about riding back away from the sea into the rocky landscape called the Burren, about the fifteenth-century, five-story-tall shell of a castle called Lemeneagh that we’ll have trespassed on a working farm to tour because there’ll be no one around to guide us or even charge us a fee, and about the ruined village that surrounds it outlined in tumbled-down stone walls; we’ll tell them about Carron Church, another fifteenth-century ruin, very quiet and just sitting in someone’s field. And Portal Dolmen, a tiny stone shelter 3,500 years old, the oldest constructed habitation known on earth, where a farmer sitting in his car will have taken a donation in a plastic bucket and then disappeared, we’ll imagine, to the nearest pub.

  “Is the hotel the best restaurant?”

  We’ll say that we liked Branoch na n Aille, an old stone house right in the village, with plank floors, plain furniture, and wonderful food.

  “How about the pubs?”

  “McGann’s has a good feel and good food,” Carolyn will say, “but the music seemed a bit more casual. We heard the best musicians at McDermotts, but we ate wonderful mussels outside at a picnic table at McGann’s.”

  Back on the mainland we’ll read books on the grassy banks above the little harbor, then walk the two miles back to Rose Cottage for the last time, drink a Guinnesss with the last sunset, our feet on the pasture gate, cook a last meal of Guinness stew full of meat, carrots, and prunes, warm ourselves at our last peat fire.

  In the morning we’ll be packed and ready when Tom and Breda Logan will bound into our living room like vaude-villians onto a stage. They’ll clap and laugh and bluster. “And it’s been a fine holiday now, has it?” she’ll say.

  “I should say. Been going by on me tractor, and those bedroom curtains are always drawn.”

  “So it’s your honeymoon, then, is it?” she’ll say.

  “And not his first from the look of him, I shouldn’t think,” he’ll say.

  I’ll laugh.

  “Only married four years meself. Bachelor all me days till the age of forty, then I met Breda here and—”

  “Wham!” she’ll say. “Nothing but bliss since.” They’ll eye each other, laugh in unison, and slap their thighs.

  “Grew up in this house, lived here, and farmed the land till Breda says, ‘Let’s build the new one cross the way and let this one to holidayers.’”

  “But you still farm the land?” Carolyn will ask.

  “I do, and in the fields sixteen hours a day this time of year.”

  “And what do you do in the States?” Breda will ask.


  “I’m an attorney,” Carolyn will say.

  “I’m a teacher,” I’ll say, “and a writer. I write travel stories.”

  “Oh, really? For newspapers, then? And what do you write about?”

  “Oh, just the places we go, the people we meet.”

  “Local color and all of that?” he’ll say. “So are you going to write about Doolin?”

  “I think I might,” I’ll say.

  “Now, don’t be putting us in there as your local color,” she’ll say.

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “Or if you do,” he’ll say, “don’t be telling the truth.”

  About the Author

  PETER FERRY is a teacher, writer, and editor. He has written textbooks for Rand McNally and travel pieces for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. His short stories have appared in StoryQuarterly, Overtures, the New Review of Literature, and McSweeney’s. He has won the Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for Short Fiction. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Follow us for book news, reviews, author updates, exclusive content, giveaways, and more.