There was no way I’d ever do it. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero.
I would never drive a car in Ireland because years earlier my favorite writer had done so, crashed on the impossibly narrow Irish country roads, suffered debilitating head injuries, and eventually took his own life once back at home in New York. This was a family travel nonstarter.
I vowed to never get into a vehicle as driver or passenger on the Emerald Isle immediately after Spalding Gray was discovered to have jumped to his death of the Staten Island Ferry into the East River as a result, in part, of his ill-fated Irish crash.
But here’s the rub, my wife is a redheaded Irish girl who’d long dreamed of visiting her people’s homeland. This was a problem. See above. For years I said no. Actually, I said hell no. No, no, no, no. No way. Instead of a trip to Ireland, I constantly pushed us to other destinations on the world map; Barcelona, San Francisco, Montreal, all the while citing Spalding Gray’s suicide. This summer however, with a U.K. trip on the docket because I was already over there hiking Hadrian’s Wall with the Dads4Kesem crew, I caved.
I was a tightly wound ball of nervous energy before and during the Ireland travel portion of our vacation but I attempted to not showcase any of my fears because the visit meant so much to my redheaded Irish lass. This was mistake number one. Being someone unaccustomed to asphyxiating his thoughts and enduring debilitating emotions, I wound up a monster in a box of a white Vauxhall for 5 days in Ireland and as such I managed to suck the air out of my family’s holiday balloon.
The best worst aspect of our week in Ireland was the remarkable stone home we rented in County Clare, set on six acres in the middle of a wild green nowhere. The house had two lovable dogs, tree swings, grass thicker than a malt and the color of a fresh lime. It was vacation rental home perfection but everything my wife wanted to do and see was a drive away, a gut-wrenchingly long drive away from our perfect Ireland rental home on countless country roads skinnier than a meal-deprived runway model.
With each passing car, a minor heart-attack rattled my fragile cage as I frantically moved our car as far to the left as physically possible, kissing hedges and nearly scraping ancient stone walls in the process. After a pleasant day one spent mostly in and around the house and down the way just 30 minutes in Killaloe for their weekly farmer’s market to buy Irish cheeses and soda bread, I became a hideous amalgamation of anger, frustration, fear and resentment who snapped over the tiniest of things said or done or not done by my wife and kids.
The tragedy isn’t that we crashed, we didn’t thankfully, but that this story was so goddamn close to being radically different. Our Ireland travel horror story could have been the exact opposite because upon pulling into the driveway of the stone house, we four looked at each other and knew immediately that our highly structured plans for our 5 days in Ireland had to change. We’d just come from a hectic and blisteringly hot week in London and we craved downtime, which is exactly what the Meelick House offered. To our credit, we did manage to pivot on the fly, cutting nearly two days of drives out of the itinerary in order to gain not an insignificant amount of idyllic time in and around the house, but in the end it wouldn’t be enough to prevent me from turning my wife’s bucket list trip to Ireland into a green, orange and white hot mess.
There was a lot of emergency work done to repair the family vacation in the days that followed the stressful Ireland travel portion of the trip, and even more service needed to patch up the marriage in the weeks that have passed since. And we’re still in the weeds of that. In the end, a lack of communication doomed us and that, not coincidentally at all, is what has been plaguing us as a couple for far too long. If anything positive is to come from the experience we had on and off the slim country roads in Ireland, it is likely that the two of us will resolve to get better at expressing ourselves honestly before situations become to dire to salvage. That AND a resolve to someday soon have an Irish holiday do-over.
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