After our hectic, emotional, and eventful last week in Portland, we were grateful to finally be dropped by our cab driver at Denise’s sister Ann and her husband Sean’s home (they are in California visiting family until mid-March) in remote and peaceful Kilmuckridge, Ireland, on the southeast coast in County Wexford. We arrived just as the sun was setting and were met by their neighbor, the very friendly and helpful John O’Brian, who had been keeping an eye on their place. He showed us a few things about the house and let us know we could just knock on his door if we needed anything at all. After 22 hours of traveling, we stood in the backyard and took in just how quiet and still everything was here, with only the sounds of the birds breaking the silence. No traffic, no planes overhead, no noisy neighbors, just quiet.
The next morning, we walked with Coco down to Morriscastle Beach, less than a mile from our house and part of an uninterrupted 15 km of beautiful, sandy shoreline that stretches from Cahore Point to the north down to Curracloe Beach (the stand-in for Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan) to the south. It was a sunny and mild day with no wind and the beach reminded us of the ones we enjoyed on the Oregon Coast, except that there were less than a dozen people on the entire beach. It’s a popular beach in the summer but, in the off-season, it’s basically a giant dog park and Coco was in heaven, frolicking with the other dogs and chasing her ball in the surf.
Later that day, we headed to Gorey, a larger city about 30 minutes from our place, in order to do some errands. However, in order to get there, I had to drive Sean and Ann’s 2006 Renault Scenic, which presented a couple of issues: first of all, it’s a stick shift and I hadn’t driven one in over a decade. More frighteningly, though, the Irish drive on the left side of the road, something I’ve never done before and was dreading from the time we booked our trip. To make matters worse, almost every road in our rural part of County Wexford is the width of about one and a half cars at best, so someone has to pull over onto the shoulder when passing each other. In addition, practically every third vehicle on the road is a farm tractor with eight-foot high wheels and Denise quickly tired of me running her into the hedgerow on the passenger side of the car as I tried to save myself from getting crushed or sideswiped.
We miraculously made it to Gorey in one piece and got our Irish cell phones — we’ve parked our US numbers with Google Voice so you can still text us, but we’re using WhatsApp for video and voice calls — and some groceries at the Lidl market. As a long-time grocery shopper, I was shocked by how much cheaper the food prices were over here. Of course, they don’t have many of the same brands, but packaged sliced cheese (locally made), for instance, was about half what I paid for similar quality and quantity of Tillamook back home. Almost everything we bought was 25-50% cheaper than its US equivalent except for alcohol, which is subject to high taxes to cover its impact on the healthcare system. The country has much stricter rules on food additives and eating local is easy to do with most items. 99% of all the Irish meat sold here comes from family-owned farms and 80% is grass fed on the seemingly endless green pastures that we drove through on our way to town. Here I am navigating the unfamiliar labels of the yogurt section.
On the other hand, petrol and electricity are not cheap here, with gas running about $6.40 a gallon and electricity costing about 40 cents per KwH, about six times what we pay in Oregon. Since we are covering Sean and Ann’s utility bills during our stay, we are being extra careful about our usage, running the dishwasher and laundry during the off-peak hours to save money. Every night, we warm up the living room with a roaring fire in the Stanley Stove, the popular brand of fireplace here and spend the evening in there with the door closed and Coco curled up on her rug in front of the fire.
Last Sunday, we went down to the pub with John and his wife Catha, and enjoyed an authentic Guinness draught or three along with some Craic, (defined as: fun, especially through enjoyable company, a pleasant conversation) The pub is called Hammels, owned by the family that runs most of the businesses in town, from the grocery store to the funeral home. They’re a benign monopoly, but if you’re buying something in Kilmuckridge, you’re probably dealing with one of the 13 Hammel siblings or their numerous offspring.
In general, people are very friendly and outgoing here and we’ve had many long chats at the beach or on the path with fellow dog-owners or neighbors. There’s plenty of folks that just grunt a greeting and move on but when people hear our accent, they generally want to find out why we’re here.
We’ve been here nearly two weeks now and we’ve settled into a routine of coffee, dog walk, physical therapy, lunch, nap, dog walk, more physical therapy, dinner by the fire, and then lights out. It sounds a little boring as I type that but we are fine with that right now as we recover from our surgeries and the stress of preparing for the move. It’s nice to not have many responsibilities for a change! Pretty soon, we hope to make some overnight trips to West Ireland to take in some natural beauty before the tourists arrive. Of course, we’ll stop in at the Slattery dairy farm in Tipperary where Denise’s grandfather was born and where her distant cousins still live and work.
We’ll be here in Kilmuckridge for another month or so, enjoying the peaceful village life, and Sean and Ann will return from their trip in mid-March. We’ll celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and Sean’s birthday together before heading up to Dublin for a week. After that, it’s off to Paris and the rest of the continent (see map) and things will get a little more exciting, we imagine. Watch this space!
Thoughts and observations from Denise:
Removing ourselves from Portland was a tough job, mentally and physically. Those last weeks were brutal. Somehow I just kept pushing on – despite the fact I got Covid and a broken wrist just a few weeks apart. Anyway – we made it.
It’s true that when you make the kind of mental / geographical crossing like this really do end up on the ‘other’ side. It took me a few days to shake the jet lag – but once I did I have to say I started to feel …well, something different. Today I put my finger on it. Just. Less. Stress. And I don’t mean the kind of pack-up-and store-shit stress, I mean like, no-crime stress, no-gun stress, no threat of stupidness stress, no crazy over-priced trips to the grocery store stress. Not that I want to paint Portland (or life in the U.S. for that matter) as a hotbed of horror, I just think it was more the daily news cycle I was digesting in pretty large doses that was dragging me down, along with my local NextDoor App. Life is not so bad when you slow down and do a lot of nothing. (Did you ever think you would hear that coming from me???)
The landscape here in Kilmuckridge is very, very beautiful. I know we won’t always have such fantastic proximity to an absolutely pristine coastline and seclusion once we start moving around Europe so I’m really soaking it up. I love the empty beach almost as much as Coco does. Everyday the sky and the sand are different so it’s always offering up something new. Oh, and Coco has started to make her dog friends here. She gets out to the sand at the same time as her buddies and has good runs. It’s not exactly the dog-park scene she is used to back in PDX as there are not very many dogs but she really comes alive at the beach.
We are so lucky to have her with us. I know it’s hard to understand if you are not a dog owner; it was pretty expensive to include her and we had to jump through all kinds of hoops and bureaucratic paperwork to get her into the country but it’s done and I’m so grateful for it. She is excellent company and we seem to make friends and have nice conversations wherever we go.
We’re only a couple of weeks into this new adventure but I can say in all honesty that this feels very different from what it might be like to be on a vacation. We spend time relaxing and being curious about where we are, wanting to see things etc., but it’s not a vacation: I mean, I live here! Not Ireland per se, but I feel more here than there. It’s hard to describe but I’ll keep thinking about it and fill in more as we go along.….
Until then..D
Calculating Route... 