Friday, May 13, 2011
Having walked over to the White House pub, not far from me, because it allegedly has poetry readings and live music, neither of which it apparently was offering tonight, I will therefore direct my wine-induced (enhanced, really, because exhaustion does a rather good job on its own) stupor to recording.
: D A left-driving virgin no more! I’m taking great pleasure in the knowledge that untold synapses were activated today. I haven’t been as scared of anything in a long time. Trip to stones and Celtic sites aside, I know that I DID accomplish a trip far—far—outside my comfort zone. Motorway, city, rural roads, country lanes: I’ve done them all. Decades of massive amounts of driving kick in (though it had also been over two years since I’d driven a stickshift at all). But then everything (bear with me if you live in the U.K., Ireland, or Japan) is reversed for a U.S. driver, not just the lanes. The stick itself; the way you go around roundabouts; and there are recurring waves of oh, my god, I’m on the wrong side of the road! Or else that sensation that it must be a multiple-lane highway and I need to be looking over my shoulder. Well, I do, but not that shoulder. Because the left lane is the slow lane (reversed, right?). A certain amount of swearing, shouting, and screaming did occur (some things are best learned alone). I had problems with third; it was rarely where it needed to be (this was a Fiat, mind you). One roundabout (early on, in Limerick) may have been circled twice because of missing the right exit the first time. The N20 became the M20 and appeared to be taking me to Tralee and Killarney (despite my having jettisoned them for lack of time before coming to Ireland), though shortly after I exited to try to correct that “mistake,” there was the turnoff to Croom. And then the country fun began.
I admire all over again the audacity of Gaël Audic’s country driving in 2008; I get as far over on a tiny lane as possible, then freeze in place like a rabbit, letting the oncoming driver figure out the rest (though this evolved slightly during the course of the outing). Without the decades of conditioning in the “other” version of driving, it’s hard to distinguish exactly where the opposite edge of your own vehicle is, especially while moving, especially along a high stone wall.
Lough Gur is gorgeous, in and of itself. The whole surrounding countryside is. The visitor center, for me, sat there uselessly locked up. I walked and walked and walked (yes; I’ve had about enough walking for a while; I’m glad I’ll be taking a train early tomorrow). And climbed. And sort of skidded in mud (because the weather came in full rotation, of course, from brief downpour to warm sun, and always with strong wind—not as cold as yesterday. Except when it was). And stood on a stone wall and seriously contemplated climbing over a barbed-wire fence to see what was up the hill from the locked center (I ultimately didn’t). I asked directions twice before finally finding the stone circle, which I came to last (had come to the eerie wedge tomb first, with no effort at all). I think it was a function of having come the way I had, which was intended to avoid the center of Limerick; the other route down, via N24, would have brought me in from a different direction.
And it was a good, profound conclusion. Dating to ca. 2100 B.C., its stones are not as huge as those of Stonehenge, but many of them larger than those of Avebury. The largest is most definitely cut. Most are not. There are 113 stones in all. There is an avenue of stones leading in. The summer solstice sunrise shines down into the center; two stones on the southwest side and the entrance are aligned with sunset on Samhain. I and a group of three were the only people there.
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