This is Part Two of a 3-part story, in which the traveler’s best-laid plans go astray to make room for the sanctity of adventure. You don’t have to read Part I to make sense of it, but it’ll help.1
1
Before I continue, I must confess: I kissed the Blarney Stone yesterday, which means, according to legend, that I’ve been rewarded with the gift of the gab eloquence.
An Irish chieftain named Cormac MacCarthy built Blarney Castle in 1446, and I’d be remiss not to refer you back to our favorite theoretical physicists, Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, for is it mere a coincidence that my favorite contemporary novelist has the same name (barring a vowel, of course) as an Irish chieftain who built a castle that houses Ireland’s most magical literary stone?
I think not.
It is April 17, 2023, and Cormac McCarthy is still alive, and I’m cruising along the Emerald Isle in an Irish bus towards Bantry Bay, one of the deepest bays in the world, at least according to Gene, a kind Irishman who we’ll soon meet in the village of Glengarrif.
2
Zach and I have adopted a folkloric tune for our travels. The lyrics are simple:
Oh, blarney, blarney, blarney stone
Oh, blarney, blarney, blarney way.
The first hiccup in our plan had an easy enough fix: the bus that was supposed to take us directly from Cork City to Castletownbere doesn’t run on Tuesdays, which means we had to take this bus to the next nearest town, Glengarriff, a thirty-minute drive from our final destination.
The bus drops us off in a sleepy coastal village that isn’t yet prepared for the tourist season. After all, it’s only April. The frigid winds still blow off the Celtic Sea, and I wonder which travelers first looked out at the whitecaps in the bay and thought to themselves: now that looks like an adventure. In the summer months, Glengarriff’s main street will attract hikers, tourists, and travelers alike, but these three words are not synonyms, and I’d like to think Zach and I are part of the latter.
3
The tourist is decidedly uninterested in adventure because the tourist believes adventure can be purchased or planned. The tourist’s primary purpose is consumption, whether experiential or material, a chance to cross things off a list (usually restaurants, monuments, museums) so that they might return home to their workaday lives with photographic proof that they have, in fact, lived. The tourist, however, has little concept of adventure. Rather, the tourist patronizes businesses that represent a simulacrum of the foreign culture, which only exist to cater to the tourist’s obsession with comfort and ease.
On the other hand, the hiker explicitly rejects this idea by venturing into nature in search of physical proof that they exist. The hiker pursues natural beauty and
physical discomfort, both admirable pursuits; however, the hiker still misses the genuine call to adventure because true adventures cannot be planned. Having calculated how heavy a day-pack should be and how many miles must be walked daily to reach their preconceived destination, the hiker still resorts to lists, figures, and in hopes of quantifying the adventure.
The traveler, however, knows that adventure can neither be quantified nor qualified, and the joy of traversing a land like Ireland is in eschewing the hiker’s tendency towards over-preparedness and the tourist’s total lack of imagination when it comes to answering the question, what’s next?
The consummate description of the traveler’s adventure is you had to be there. If a seasoned traveler even owns a guidebook, they put it away upon arrival and turn off their phone (the battery will soon be dead, anyway, and when it comes to a proper journey, life back home has to wait). The traveler places utmost trust in their intuition and the kindness of strangers, not throwing caution to the wind so much as opening their hands and letting it float away. When done correctly, traveling is a reminder to possess ourselves as we are because when done correctly, we’re only ever precisely where we’re meant to be.
4
As Zach and I descend from the bus in Glengarriff, we see two female travelers further down the road holding up a hand-written cardboard that reads, "To Castletownbere.”
Zach and I agree, however, that we shouldn’t impose upon their adventure. Instead, we decide to look for an alternative, and if, in an hour from now, they’re still waiting by the side of the road, we’ll offer to combine hitch-hiking forces and embark upon a new adventure.
In the meantime, I stroll down the street in search of someone who might be able to help, peering into closed shop windows along the main street of Glengarriff. I reach the end of the road and find a hotel with open doors, which a man is painting egg-shell white.
“Good morning, sir,” I introduce myself. “My friend and I are traveling to Castletownbere. Do you know how we might get there?”
“Good morning! I guess you already know the bus doesn’t run on Tuesdays. Gene could probably fetch you. He has a car service.”
“Fantastic. Do you have his number?”
A straight answer would’ve been too easy.
“I’m sorry, friend,” the hotel owner wipes paint off his hands with a rag before reaching out to shake mine. “I don’t have my phone on me, but if you walk down to the corner store—just down the way there, right across from the Blue Loo—surely someone can help.”
The hotel owner is right. At the convenience store down the way, the grandmotherly cashier hands me a purple Post-it note with an Irish phone number.
Gene doesn’t pick up, but I leave a message anyway.
My phone rings a few minutes later.
“Hello, Gene?”
“Yes! Hello! Is this Sam?” a jovial Irishman speaks to me from somewhere beyond. “Apologies for missing your call. The missus needed some help in the yard. I could be in Glengarriff in, say, an hour. Is that alright? Just tell me where you’ll be. It’s about thirty minutes to Castletownbere. Sorry to make you wait.”
“No problem at all, Gene. Thanks so much. We’ll find some breakfast.”
“Ah, good choice. Head to the Perrin Inn for a good crack.”
Zach and I follow Gene’s advice and sit on a sun-drenched terrace, the only open restaurant in town. While we wait for our food, we chat with an Irish elder who tells us a story about his travels in America. As our meal arrives, the elder rises from his table with the help of his wooden cane and wishes us a pleasant meal: a clay pot of warm cream, a steaming pot of coffee, and two delectable Irish Breakfasts, complete with a fried egg, three sausage links, bacon, beans, two slices of black pudding, two tomatoes, a hash brown, and a small wicker basket full of Irish soda bread.
It's a feast.
With bellies full and minds awake, Zach and I lean back in our chairs to relish in the sunshine and the coastal breeze until a silver mini-van pulls up next to the terrace, gives us a honk, and rolls down the window.
“Is that you, Sam?” a middle-aged man with kind eyes smiles through the window.
“Yes! Hello, Gene.”
Gene comes around to shake our hands. “‘You lads picked a wonderful day for a drive down to Castletownbere.”
And so begins the next chapter of our Emerald Isle adventure.
I hear tell that locals pee on the Blarney Stone per my son who visited there once🤔
Love it! Can so easily picture you both! I miss those "traveller' days; never been much of a tourist!
xxx