The Tour Bus

The experience of a bus tour in Ireland is not to be missed. The roads you take are just over a foot across, the bus is ten feet wide. While you are squeezing down this road, violating several laws of physics, the bus driver is trying to keep you looking at ancient castles popping up on the right and the left. Now the bus driver is like a combination of a drinking buddy turned Jay Leno pretending to be a university professor who got tired of the classroom and has hit the road. They are all wonderfully different and each has his own endearing quirks. The last one was about 105 years old and said everything twice. "One the right you see the Lonegan Castle. That's the Lonegan Castle on the right." The only problem was that Lonegan Castle was really on the left. By repeating himself he was sometimes wrong twice as much. But that's forgiveable, right? But that's forgiveable, right?

This earthen wall with the soil worn down to the roots is 4,000 years old. It has a small mote around it which has filled in over the centuries so that the water is more like a large puddle. The earthen wall is several feet lower than when it was built. This is, in fact, what used to be an earthen fort. I stood inside its walls and pondered what it must have been like to huddle about with your family while someone outside was trying to get in to kill you. I wondered what it would be like to live in a time when an earthen wall could protect you from you enemy. It is hard to imagine in an age when a backhoe would make short work of your fortress, let alone a nuclear bomb. Almost everything has changed except...we are still afraid.

There are several hundred square miles of Ireland called the Burren. Some call it a moonscape. That's because 15,000 years ago, massive sheets of ice covered this land and in their coming and going scraped away every cubic inch of top soil. The world is still recovering from that ice age and its legacy which didn't end until a short 10,000 years ago. In parts of Canada, the soil is still rebounding an inch a year from the smashing it took from the glaciers which scooped out the Great Lakes and flattened much of Ohio. Here there are deep grooves gouged in the rock, striping the limestone like a piece of grilled meat. Massive boulders litter the exposed bedrock, carried from miles distant and dropped in their eerie repose.

Not far away, the Cliffs of Moher drop 700 feet straight to the sea. Sea gulls, snatching insects out of the air, circle a giant tower rising up out of the sea turning the the birds into specks of white. Yes, those are birds. The wind blows here almost all the time. Our bus driver warns us to keep our distance from the edge. He advises women not to turn down the offer to a proposing lover while standing too close to the edge for fear that he might jump on impulse. Move back twenty feet and then tell him what you wouldn't do if he were the last man on earth.

And then, there is the rainbow. We've seen a couple here already, probably because the odds of seeing a rainbow go up markedly when it rains every day. It is not quite that bad, but there is nearly a 100% chance that the weatherman will be wrong 50% of the time. No one needs the luck of the Irish more than the weatherman.

No one needs the luck of the Irish more than the weatherman. On the left.