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Other People’s Houses

Other People’s Houses

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You can call it a bed and breakfast, an Airbnb or a VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner), but when you come right down to it, you’re staying in someone else’s house. Someone you didn’t know before and will probably never see again.

But while you’re there (here), you become intimately acquainted with the play of morning light on window blinds, the amount of pressure required to turn the faucet, the location of the bathroom light switch so you can flick it on in the dark.

I’m a private person, one who doesn’t take naturally to early morning conversation with strangers while making a cup of tea … but somehow, this works for me.

It’s calming to stay in a house rather than a hotel. It feels as if I’m part of a community and not just visiting. And indeed I am — just one member of a band of travelers who want to see a place from the inside out.

Peak Experience

Peak Experience

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The Chief Sealth Trail winds its way through southeastern Seattle for almost five miles. Though I’d read about it in my Airbnb welcome note and tried to find it on a map, it was proving elusive to pinpoint — at least in cyberspace.

In the long run I literally ran into it. Walking down 32nd Street, I saw a rise, an opening, a grassy meadow, a break in the cityscape. It was the trail!

I turned left, and the sight almost took my breath away. There was Mount Rainier looming large in the sunset sky.  I couldn’t find an angle that didn’t involve power lines, but there it was, Seattle’s iconic mountain.

When I reached my place, I told Cris, Airbnb host, how excited I was to spot the peak. Oh yes, she said. But you can see it from our house, too. She led me to the dining room window, pointed off in the distance. And there it was again, only slightly less imposing.

Sometimes, peak experiences are closer than you think.

A Walker in Seattle

A Walker in Seattle

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We’ve been walking up hills and down, from Pioneer Square to the International District, then hopping a bus to Ballard where we walked some more.  We chugged up hills as steep as San Francisco’s, and stopped at a local watering hole for sustenance.

I’ve already walked one route twice, from my Airbnb to Celia’s place. And last night I finally found the Chief Sealth Trail (more about that later).

For now, I’ll just say that Seattle has rolled out its grandest strolling weather for this walker in the suburbs. … walker in Seattle, I should say.

Coast to Coast

Coast to Coast

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Speaking of “above it all,” … I’m about to take off for Seattle, a flight from Washington, D.C., to Washington State. In fact, I’m writing this at Dulles Airport while a history program on the popes of Avignon — “the papacy was more or less captured by the king of France” — drones on the television.

From one extreme  — an expanse of sky; the miracle of flight; a miracle, period — to the other, the absurdity of the particular.

Modern travelers are strung between these two. The wonder of the firmament outside, cramped seats and coffee inside.

Here’s hoping that the miraculous part of this flight holds up its end of the bargain.

Green and Gray

Green and Gray

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Ireland seems like another world already. It is another world, of course, or at least another country. But it’s one I’m going to imagine now, because the fields are so green and the stones are so gray and the two go so well together.

There was a feeling there that everything will be all right in the end. A strange feeling, when you think about the history of the place. But a cozy, warm feeling.

Maybe it’s the gallows humor there or the expectations, which aren’t as high as those on this side of the Atlantic. But whatever it is, I’m going to be drawing on it today.

Above-It-All-Ness

Above-It-All-Ness

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Jet lag has finally had its way with me, waking me at 4:30 and sending me spinning out into the day. Luckily, it’s Friday and the office is still empty, the only sounds are of blowing air and my fingers tapping the keys.

This weekend I’m hoping to let all of this sink in: the green hills and friendly people, the toe-tapping music (which I’m reliving in my car thanks to a CD by the sons of a man who ran the B&B on Inishmore). All of that mixed with what awaited me on return: lots of work and crazy national news to catch up on.

I’m trying to keep the “above-it-all-ness” of travel, the feeling of joyful skimming it can give you. The cessation of normal routine; the quick, bright glimpse of a world you thought you knew but can still surprise you — your own.

Cottage Dreams

Cottage Dreams

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I noticed the difference the minute we left the plane. The lilting voices were gone. I clung to the last few of them, people standing around the luggage carousel waiting for their bags. Maybe I’ll have to hang out in Irish bars, though there’s no guarantee you’ll hear a brogue.

It’s not just the Irish accent that I love, it’s also the expressions they use. “Sure and you wouldn’t be” or “just a wee bit of that now.” That Ireland produces more than its fair share of writers is no surprise given the number of talkers Ireland produces. Our cabdriver to Dublin Airport yesterday was one Rodney Robinson. Told us most of us life story in 30 minutes.

Today as I make my way to work on Metro, I’ll think of Rodney already driving. He lives in a little village in County Kildare. At 5 a.m. it only takes him 40 minutes to reach center-city Dublin. Seven hours of driving his cab (which he owns) and he’s back for a late lunch in the village, picks his kids up from school (two daughters and a son), and has the rest of the day with them. Four days a week like this and the other three his wife works in the village pharmacy and he stays home.

It’s a good life, a simple life, and it’s one of the Irish lives I’m thinking about today, on New World shores. Wouldn’t I love to find a cottage and try living in the Old World some day? Probably won’t happen, but it never hurts to dream.

Feasts and Famine

Feasts and Famine

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It’s our last full day in Ireland, and there was much left to see: the Cong Cross and the bog people at the Archaeology Museum, reading from The Dubliners at Sweney’s Pharmacy, St. Patrick’s Cathedral … and … the famine museum.

The Jeanie Johnston is a replica of a ship by the same name, a ship that carried more than 2,000 Irish emigrants to the New World, 200 at a time, people who might otherwise have perished during the Great Hunger.

The people who traveled in the Jeanie Johnston were some of the lucky ones. More than a third of those who left their homeland in so-called “coffin ships” died at sea.  But the Jeanie Johnston has a staff doctor and required passengers to spend 30 minutes on deck a day (rather than 20 minutes every two weeks). None of its passengers died at sea.

Still, the voyage was no picnic. People crammed five to a bed, ate hardtack and tried to avoid dysentery and cholera. This after a year or two of existing on a starvation diet when a blight killed the potato crop.

It was a sobering reminder of the agonies they and so many (including my relatives) endured to reach the United States. And it made me appreciate all the more the lovely feasts we’ve had on this vacation.

Ancient Manuscripts

Ancient Manuscripts

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Dublin has treated us well so far. Apart from a few showers last night (conveniently timed for our walk home from the pub), we’ve had blue skies and reasonable temps for our first day in Ireland’s capital.

It’s a compact place, with history everywhere, even when you don’t expect it. We were having a bite to eat before visiting the Book of Kells, the ninth-century illuminated manuscript of the Gospels. Turns out, the bite to eat was at the Chester Beatty Library, which I read about as I ate a yummy salad plate of carrots, hummus, grape leaves, tomatoes and cucumbers.

Chester Beatty was an American collector and expat who donated his remarkable library to Ireland. It contains treasures that rival if not exceed the Book of Kells, including fragments of papyrus on which is written some of the earliest known copies of the Epistles of St. Paul.

To see the Book of Kells requires standing in several queues and jostling with others to even catch a quick glimpse of the manuscript. But at the Chester Beatty collection I stood alone, almost in tears, in front of the Letters of St. Paul to the Corinthians.

Had I been able to decipher the Greek, this is what I would have read:

“Love is patient,
love is kind,
it does not envy,
it does not boast…
Love does not delight
in evil but rejoices in the truth.
It always protects,
always hopes, and
always perseveres.”

(Top photo, a map of the world from the first modern atlas, 1570, from the Chester Beatty collection. Above, books in the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin.)

Rock of Cashel

Rock of Cashel

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Home to the ancient kings of Ireland and reputedly the place where Saint Patrick baptized one of them, the Rock of Cashel looms above the fertile green fields of Tipperary. Though it  has been an important site since at least the fifth century, the buildings that remain are “only” from around 1101.

Ten days in Ireland has made me less likely to use quotation marks around that “only.” The old ring forts of Dingle are 2,000 years old, for example. But I don’t want to become an antiquity snob.

So I stood today in the ruined cathedral and looked up at Saint Patrick’s cross, the round tower and and the blue sky through what’s left of the cathedral windows. I let my mind run free, back to a dimmer, grimmer time, one of stone and chisel, blood and smoke.