Back to Nature: Rugged, Western Ireland

Thanks to everyone who voted in the audience participation poll. Overwhelmingly, readers were interested in rural Ireland. Please enjoy this virtual vacation from me to you.

I love to travel.  I don’t love the airports and the packing and the cramped flights but I love the experiences that travel affords me. Several years ago, I chose Ireland and Scotland for a birthday trip.  I really wasn’t sure how I pictured turning 40 when I didn’t feel 40.  Since we would be in Ireland on my big day, I decided I wanted to do something dramatic. I chose a bus tour through the Irish countryside to the top of the famous Cliffs of Moher.  We are not usually tour people.  We prefer to explore on our own.  However, we did not have a rental car, so this was the most efficient way to experience the sea coast and have a relaxing day at the same time. For 27 euros each ($29/each), my husband and I bought tickets at little office in the center of Ennis, a Medieval village where we were staying for a couple of days.

We waited for our motor coach early one morning and chatted with another American couple who were waiting too.  The seven-hour tour promised us a professional & knowledgeable tour guide, a stop on the Burren, lunch at a seaside restaurant and time to explore the Cliffs of Moher.  The tour did not disappoint.  We had an Irish bus driver who told over-rehearsed jokes that made us laugh in spite of ourselves.  We were happy to sit back, hear the history and let him perform the bulk of the work.

When I was a young girl, I went camping mostly because my parents and the Girl Scouts said I had to.  But now, I am more of a B&B with ensuite bath kinda girl.   But on my birthday, I discovered that if there is anything that can make this woman who prefers a hot cuppa (UK nickname for hot tea) and a down comforter learn to appreciate the beauty of nature, it is rural Ireland. The coast of western Ireland is a raw and rugged place. Scientists should stop wasting their hours trying to invent a time machine that can carry them centuries backward and simply book a flight to Shannon airport and buy a 27-euro bus ticket. 

A wild plain of volcanic rock that time has forgotten, the Burren stretched out in front of us for miles.  It is barren and desolate.  At first, it appears lifeless.  Yet grass in rich greens that only the Emerald Isle can produce cropped up between the rock formations as if to say that spring comes regularly here too.  It was a dichotomy that I noticed instantly.  Somewhere in the landscape there was a 40^th birthday life lesson waiting to be learned.  But I could not hear it over the sound of the unfettered wind barreling across the open plain.

We hopped from gray rock to gray rock posing for photos and offering to take pictures of our tour mates for their albums.  This city girl breathed deeply and smelled. . .nothing. It was May and, while chilly, not cold enough to smell snow coming.  But, this uninhabited place also offered no scent of pollution, restaurant cooking smells, or in fact, human presence of any kind.  Yes, tour buses came and went regularly but the strong wind scrubbed the volcanic plain clean just as soon as each tour bus disappeared.  It was a strange and harmonious blend of the rural and the urban.

After the next leg of our bus ride, we arrived at the Cliffs of Moher.  A place that seemed holy to painters, musicians and Victorian novelists.  The one downside to arriving there courtesy of an organized tour is that we were told we would have one hour to explore and then we needed to be back on the bus to begin the return trip to Ennis.  Had we ventured out to the coast on our own, then of course, my husband I and would have spent more time there.  But, as it was, we had constraints and so we wasted no time in hurrying off the bus and up the sloping walk that lead to the summit of the cliffs.

Some people will say that the experience now isn’t the same as it was 15 years ago when the edges of the cliffs were unrestricted.  Several years ago, due to a number of suicides and accidental falls off the precipice, Irish officials had rectangular stone slabs turned up on their ends and inserted into the ground to create a natural stone barrier.   I never saw the cliffs before these barriers were erected, but I did not feel that my experience suffered for their existence.  I know exactly what storm chasers mean when they warn that humans should always be respectful of Mother Nature and her awesome power. 

I stood staring out across the North Atlantic with the most powerful wind I’ve ever felt whipping at me, threatening to topple me over, and I started to cry.  The landscape was part technicolor production and part black and white talkie.  Irish grasses lying flat in the wind. Craggy gray rock and the not-so-very angry blue-gray sea surrounded me at every turn.  This Florida girl allowed herself to revel in the deafening howl of the wind and to drink in the emerald green grass, the gray of the water, and the pure white of the caps on the ocean. I surrendered.  I allowed myself to be awed by Mother Nature.

I looked at my husband as tiny tears trickled from my eyes and down my cheeks.  I turned my red nose toward him and he said, “I know.”  And he did know.   He just stood there silently next to me, like he so often does.  No photo will ever do it justice.  I stood there, feeling like a character in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  Knowing I had only one hour to imprint this place on my mind forever. My husband tried to make a silly video of me talking about my 40^th birthday.  But the unrelenting wind drowned out my voice in the microphone.  As if in a silent film, I am seen leaning forward, head down, pushing my shoulder into an invisible stone wall, trying to forge ahead into the wind.  I manage three steps, four steps, and then Mother Nature shoves me sideways.  We bicker with Mother Nature on and off for an hour, mostly losing to her, and then stumble wind-worn and exhausted down the sloping path and onto our bus.

I cannot say that my day yielded an earth-shattering revelation about the meaning of life.  I don’t know that such a revelation is necessary when one turns 40.  I do know that I thought about the world and my place in it.  My heart was touched by the beauty of places left natural and wished for more places like them.  I learned that lying in a sleeping bag on uneven ground isn’t the only way to connect with nature.  Standing on the desolate Burren or the wild Cliffs of Moher, I, like an empty teacup, was filled to the brim with reverence for something greater than myself.  Call it nature or call it God.  You are welcome to call it whatever you’d like.  Just, please, call me to join you on the next tour.

Are there places you’ve traveled where you have connected with nature in an unexpected way? Would you like more virtual mini-vacations published here?