Once Upon a Time in Ireland

A world filled with wonder

My sisters and I took a little ramble through the west of Ireland last week. We’ve never traveled together, and none of us are getting any younger. We chose Ireland since we have heavy Irish roots, and deliberately chose a basic Intro to Ireland tour, both to limit the challenges for one of us, and to dip our toes into the history. It turned out to be just right—our very experienced Irish guide¹ was a font of history and stories, and we stayed a couple of nights in a few places, giving us a chance to explore each area a little more.

What I found myself thinking about was a trip I took there in 1999, with my mother and my young teenage sons. It was the first time I’d ever been abroad, but I was desperate to visit the UK and Ireland. When I won a substantial cash prize for one of my books,² I knew exactly what I’d do with it.

Travel was not something people did much when I was a child, not in my working class world. The only person I knew who went abroad was my uncle, a brilliant youth and adult, who spent a year in Madrid as a student. Even at the age of seven, I could see that it transformed him. This same uncle and his wife then spent two years traveling in Europe and into India in a converted VW bus and mailed home letters of their adventures.

My heart soared with the possibilities, and I wrote in my journal when I was fifteen that I would “write books, see the world, and BE HAPPY.” (Women writers always seemed to be killing themselves.)

It wasn’t easy to travel then, and I never had any money, but that $10,000 prize reignited the fires of longing. Despite the fact that my neighbors and many others in my world were agast at my temerity, I used the nascent internet to arrange a two-week tour of southern England and a bit of western Ireland. I booked hotels and designed an itinerary that took in my most longed for sights—to see Ightham Mote, the place where Anya Seton got the idea for her novel Green Darkness; Blarney Castle; the Tower of London, and Bath, where so many Regency romances were set. I wanted to take the ferry from Wales to Ireland (a trip that revealed to me that I get very, very, very seasick).

All of it. I arranged every bit of it, researched the tube and trains and ferry and a bus up the coast of Ireland to Dingle. We met Fungi, the famous dolphin. We ate cream teas and climbed castle stairs, and yes, Ightham Mote was everything I had imagined and more. I wrote a blog about it that led to writing a forward for a new release of the book several years later—one of the great thrills of my life.

Amazingly, it all went just fine. We saw the sights. We made connections. We wandered the streets in far away places. My sons fingered the divots on the walls of the V&A museum left by bombs in WWII and knew more about the Blitz than any book could tell them.

We came home changed, all of us, a little bit.

While I was on the trip, I was thinking about my then-marriage, which was in trouble, though I didn’t realize how much. He had discovered he had hep C, and this was before the treatments that are so effective. I worried that he might die, and I didn’t know what I’d do if that happened. Sitting in a high bus passing through a small Irish village, I had a view of other lives through the windows of the home along the road, and I thought maybe travel could help. I would just go on the road, like my uncle, and find my new life.

My husband didn’t die, but we did get divorced a couple of years later. And…I started traveling. Anywhere, everywhere. I accepted invitations to teach at conferences, in towns across the US, and in Auckland and Australia and southern Italy. I hiked in France and Spain, traveled dozens of times to visit my new partner’s family in England. When my beloved uncle died rather suddenly, I went to India on my own (to join a tour—I’m not that brave) and wished I’d gone sooner so we could have talked about it.

As my sisters and I made our way down the west of Ireland last week, listening to the (often sad) history of that beautiful place, I absorbed the differences in what I saw and the things that have stayed the same. Fungi the dolphin lived a very, very long life, but disappeared during Covid. We all have cell phones now, and the internet has smoothed out many of our differences, but I still felt the thrill of exploration. I still thrilled to the wonders of new sights one night on the seawall in Lahinch, eating ice cream with my sisters as the sun set over the Atlantic.

Here we are, in the world, a world so full of wonders it’s almost impossible to imagine them all. What grace to be able to know that! And I am very, very glad to have been able to give the gift of world travel to my 15-year-old self.

Have you given your teenage self a gift? Have you been to Ireland? Or some other magical place? Have you ever traveled with family?

1. We chose Irish Experience tours, and our guide was Sean Power.

2. It was the short-lived Janet Daily Award for best romance highlighting a social issue. The book was The Last Chance Ranch, which explored domestic violence. The prize was a staggering $10,000, which was a gigantic sum of money to me then.