Click here for Travelogue Part 3

Take Aer Lingus they said, Ryan Air is the shitty one they said. I walk out onto the tarmac and board an airplane that has a giant goddamned propeller on each wing. Maybe I’m naive or elitist, but this manner of aerodynamic propulsion seems a bit quaint to me; quaintness not being a quality I look for in air travel. In any case, I clamber onto the kind of aircraft I picture transporting Indiana Jones to his next swashbuckling adventure and take off for Dublin.

Its a short flight and then I look out of the window to see the verdant shores of Ireland creeping across the horizon. The sight lives up to the expectations I have built - green, old, etc. I am eager with anticipation as we land, and I rush to the rental car desk. I have constructed this leg of the journey around a romantic notion of driving across the country from Dublin to Galway, which is where our branch of the O’Toole’s come from, though I seem to recall my grandmother saying something to the effect that we are actually from Wicklow, but are supposed to tell people we’re from Galway. In any case, there are some O’Toole’s that have come from Galway, so that’s enough for me.

I have never been to a place where they drive on the left side of the road, and navigating a highway system on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area seems like a great way to give myself a baptism by fire. More disorienting than the right side of the road is the fact that the driver’s side is on the right side of the car, but I was advised to focus on keeping my physical body close to the center of the road on a two way street, and this seems to work. I have a short adjustment period in which I start to vibe with the concept of “kilometers per hour”, miss a turn in a roundabout, correct myself, and then we are cooking.

Truly within 20 minutes I go from a modern expressway to hurtling down a two lane road in the countryside with no shoulder, surrounded on either side by rolling fields dotted with cattle and the occasional farmhouse. It is such a cartoonish exaggeration of what you would expect Ireland to look like that I start laughing with glee. The intoxication of the open road and the excitement for the journey ahead overwhelm me and I crank up the U2 and howl with elation like a maniac.

After a few hours’ drive and plenty of hollering, I arrive in Galway, a terribly cute, windswept town on the coast. There are lots of those little flags on a string going from building to building across the twisty cobblestone streets. I dump my stuff off at the hostel and grab a quick bite at the restaurant attached to the nicer hotel next door.

I can feel the stern, expectant expressions of my Catholic forebears going back generations, so as first order of business I head to Galway Cathedral. To get to the massive church, I have to cross the bridge over the incredibly forceful River Corrib. This thing is flowing hard, like if a giant took a piss. The cathedral is appropriately on Nun’s Island, and it is a stunning sight. There is some sort of service going on in one of the knaves or apses, not a full mass though. My business is to sit and be quiet and take in the scenery. I light candles for my late grandmothers. Both of my grandfathers are deceased as well, and honestly? I should have factored them in to my tribute. Sorry fellas!

At no point on this trip do I find out why it is called the Latin Quarter and that is an oversight on my part. This is a bustling central area of Galway and, I quickly figure out, something of a touristy spot. I walk down the main drag of Market Street and pop in to The King’s Head, as they seem to have some live music. The music is two guys with guitars singing “Rocky Road to Dublin” and that type of shit. They are talented, don’t get me wrong, but I look around and realize I’m one of many American tourists here and this place seems to be geared toward catering to their interests, which isn’t quite the scene I’m looking for. But hey, a pint’s a pint, so down the hatch and off I go.

In the span of two blocks, Market Street turns into Lombard Street, and then into Cross Street Upper, which is where I find Tigh Neachtain and enter for what will be the first of 3 visits over the next 36 hours. Thomas’ English Muffins can pound sand, the gold standard of “nooks and crannies” is Tigh Neachtain. The bar itself wraps around into three separate little rooms, all cozy as hell. Walls are bedecked with posters from old local arts festivals and vintage advertisements. There are a bunch of daugerrotype-adjacent pictures of hard-faced people who look all like they would have a good story about a spirited goat. Its all more my speed, and I let myself actually enjoy the pint here.

My instincts tell me I need to expand the radius of where I’m planning to pub hop, go to the outer edge of that, and work inward. This leads me across the river to Galway’s West End and I get the sense that this is still a popular area but more where the action is than the Latin Quarter. I settle on a place called The Crane and I see a group of people younger and cooler than me having a smoke outside. This could be promising. I go inside and find just what I’m looking for - a mix of a young, hip crowd, tourists who “get it”, and several ruddy old men who look like shit and have been at this bar since 1982. I settle on a stool next to a gray haired fellow in a maroon polo and stained sweatpants who is talking almost nonstop to another man who, without exaggeration, sneezes a dozen times in about 2-3 minutes.

I stroll back toward the river and duck into another pub called Monroe’s. In here are a bunch of folks watching football which I start to understand by osmosis the longer I stay in Europe, same with the metric system and centigrade temperature. There is also a fellow playing music, mostly folk and traditional songs. He sings one about a sad woman who sells shellfish out of a wheelbarrow, and this is the kind of Irish nonsense I am looking for. He then leads us all in a singalong to “Country Roads” and I think about how we should do more singing in bars in America.

Across from Monroe’s is Róisín Dubh, a club-like joint with a performance space in the back. A pretty solid punk act is wrapping up a set when I walk in. The next band, Brooki, is a Dublin group that has just wrapped up a small tour. They are a tight, shoegaze-y unit - really in sync with one another - fronted by a woman with killer pipes. Some of the kids in the crowd are singing along and based on the singer’s facial expressions, this seems to be one of the first times she’s experienced an audience that knows her lyrics, or at least it is early enough in the band’s career that this is still novel to them. Its a special thing to witness, and when the set is over, I strike up conversation with the young people singing along and express this observation to them. They absolutely do not give a shit about the sentimentality of a rando tourist 10 years their senior, and I do not get the lovely moment I had in my head when I approached them. Oh well!