East Across Ireland, East Across Wales

On the Fourth of July I woke up in my hostel bed in Galway and knew it was time. I would try to get to Dublin by nightfall, then scoot across the water to be in Manchester by the 7th, at which time Jane from Glasgow would come down and hang out with me for a few days – everyone should have a pal on their birthday, and ours are three days apart. My friends in Galway were dispersing too – Laina and Avery were packing up to catch a plane to France, and Jordan was heading to Dublin too.

Jordan was intrigued by the hitchhiking thing, or maybe the saving money thing, so we decided to hitch together. Galway to Dublin is almost a three-hour drive, and we didn’t get around to leaving Galway until after lunch, but she had a tent, so there was a backup plan if we didn’t make it in one day. I hadn’t quite completed the loop I’d meant to make of Ireland, instead going something more like a lower case “d,” with this trip to Dublin connecting the final bit. I was fine with that; staying in Galway a few days had been really nice.

Once we were on the right road our first lift came quickly, a young couple who drove us a few miles out to the foot of the highway to Dublin. The girl in the front passenger seat was from Romania, and Jordan was proud to be able to say some words in the girl’s native language – she’d spent some time working with horses in Romania earlier in her adventure.

We hadn’t even walked across the roundabout that spits cars Dublinward when we were offered another lift from a friendly young dude driving home to Birr. I didn’t take good notes that day, so I lost his name, but he was super nice. He’s hitchhiked and picked up hitchhikers many times before, and is involved with his family’s bed-and-breakfast in Birr, so he’s very supportive of travelers. We made room for our bags in his trunk/boot by shifting around his hurling gear, which I had to ask him about, having heard a lot about both hurling and Gaelic football but not seen them played. Both are purely amateur sports centered in Ireland; hurling in particular being a 3,000-year-old tradition. It mixes elements of lacrosse, rugby, and field hockey, and it’s a pretty intense thing – imagine if everyone in baseball had a bat and was trying to wack an airborne ball across a soccer field. The sport is exclusively amateur, but the amateur leagues are a huge deal, nothing to scoff at.

He dropped us off near Ballinasloe, and we got another lift pretty quickly in the car of a middle-aged woman with a peppy border terrier in the passenger seat, who, when he was finished barking at us, stood up to stare through the windshield for the entire trip. This ride was a little shorter, but we were making good time, arriving in Athlone, about halfway to Dublin, in the early afternoon.

The day before, Ben, the Canadian bagpiping busking buddy, and I had discovered that Jordan has a big grudge against English people, and we’d given her all kinds of grief for it, so I had to slip her a wry look when our next driver revealed himself as English. He and his girlfriend (I think), who was Northern Irish, had been in Galway the night before for a wedding, and now they were hurrying back to Dublin to catch a flight home. She was busy at a laptop under heavy headphones most of the time, trying to finish some project. Shortly after we hopped into the rental car, they passed the laptop back and had us watch a little video clip and give our impressions. In the video, the driver and another women were introducing the viewer to a series of self-help lessons, or something. It was all pretty vague. But they appreciated our input, so that was cool.

The English guy was very interesting. He was about 40 but looked 10 years younger, and he spoke very passionately about politics and global issues. He was the first pro-Brexit Englishman I’d spoken to, holding his views not out of nationalism or xenophobia (he was reluctantly grateful that they’d voted alongside him) but out of a belief that the direction the EU was heading on trade and unity was good for corporate interests but bad for everyday people – an angle I’d never heard before. I was amused at how interested he was in how I’d made it into Ireland without going through customs at any point (ferry from Scotland into Northern Ireland, hitchhiking into Ireland), filing that information away in case he ever needed to disappear. I couldn’t tell if he was more of an armchair anarchist or an actual revolutionary in the making, but he was interesting, and even Jordan admitted that he was a pretty nice guy. They dropped us off at Dublin Airport, and we took a bus into town. I helped Jordan get oriented, and we both hopped onto the DART train to get to our respective hosts’ places, bidding farewell at Anne’s stop.

Anne, the college classmate I stayed with in Dublin earlier in June, was as enthusiastic as ever to host me. She’d cooked some hearty dinner for us, and in honor of the 4th, she was casually decked out in red, white and blue down to her fingernails. She was weathering a rare spell of homesickness, and we talked nostalgia and Christianity and America and all kinds of stuff into the wee hours, ending the night with several rounds of goofy table tennis, at which she is easily the better player.

The next day I said goodbye and made my way to the dock area where I’d first been dropped off, weeks before, to catch the ferry. I’d discovered that the ferry directly to Liverpool doesn’t take carless passengers, so I would have to take another one to Holyhead, Wales, and get east from there. The ferry itself was much like the last one, puttering slowly across the water while I half-napped and listened to podcasts and music. It was early evening in Wales when I walked out of the station and onto the road – getting to Liverpool that day wasn’t impossible, but with another two hours of direct driving time ahead of me, my hopes weren’t high. I resigned myself to lodging or camping in Wales.

I waited a good while on the edge of Holyhead, eventually starting to wonder if I’d have to stay in Holyhead for the night, when Patty, an Irishman who’s lived in Wales for a couple decades, picked me up on his way to Bangor. Patty paints houses, but he moved to Wales with his wife because he’s into climbing, and northern Wales has some pretty awesome mountains – as a young man, he knew he wanted to move to either Wales or the Scottish Highlands for that reason. Now he lives near Bangor with his family and loves it.

I made a bit of a mistake. I saw on Google Maps that there were hostels in Bangor, which was a big town but a little ways off from the main road, so I told him I’d be fine finding a place there for the night. But when he dropped me off and I looked closer, I realized that none of those places were the type of hostel I was looking for – they were both halfway-home projects for long-term residents, just having the word “hostel” in their names by coincidence. With two or three hours of long summer daylight still left, I decided to head back to the highway and press on.

It was going to be a long walk back to the main road, but two friendly dudes saw my thumb and helped me out. They had the thickest Welsh accents imaginable, but they were gentle and kind dudes. One was about my age and the other probably twice it, but they somehow looked almost exactly the same in their post-work, dazed scruffiness. As they drove me back to the highway, they munched Burger King burgers and told me how apparently Charles, the Prince of Wales and heir apparent, had dropped by their work the day before, and they’d gotten to meet him. I don’t know anything about this stuff, and their accents were intense, so I’m not sure if I got the details quite right on that, but they were pretty chuffed about it.

Back on the main road, I got one more lift that day. Alan was driving a big ten-passenger van containing himself, his Kyrgyz wife, their children, and his wife’s relative, Mickey, a young Thai dude who was also traveling around Europe, while conveniently attending a school in Switzerland. They were heading home from a big hike up Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales. Alan was extremely hospitable, immediately devoting himself to making sure I had a place to stay for the night. He couldn’t offer me his own, but he took me to a few different hotels and inns to check about vacancies, and didn’t give up when they were full, even though I told him he didn’t have to make such an effort for me.

About once a week, Alan cooks in the kitchen of a Catholic retreat center run by Irish Sisters in Penmaenmawr, a small town on the northern coast. He gave them a call, and they happened to be hosting only one guest that night, so beds were available. The building lies on beautifully maintained grounds with gardens. It’s run by four nuns, and they host all kinds of groups looking for want a little out-of-the way place to hear some silence and feel some solitude. After Alan made me some tea and cheesy toast (he really was profoundly hospitable), he and his family headed home and left me with Patricia, the one sister who was awake and not out in Liverpool for the evening. We talked a bit and she showed me to my room.

The next morning I took it pretty slow, ate some breakfast, paid the sisters their very modest fee, and got back on the road. The views were stunning. The North Wales Expressway runs between the Irish Sea to the north and the mountains of Snowdonia to the south, similar in vibe to the Pacific Coast Highway in California. I wouldn’t have objected to standing there all morning.

I had to laugh when I turned around and saw Mickey, from Alan’s family van, coming towards me from a stopped car up the road. Alan’s wife and daughter were driving him to catch a train or plane in Liverpool, and they’d seen me and decided to pick me up a second time. And so I made it to Liverpool in familiar company, dropped off with a fellow traveler. I would spend a day wandering and busking in the funny little city, exploring tentatively, relaxed with the knowledge that I’d be back there in a couple days with Jane, taking a day in Liverpool after celebrating my birthday in Manchester. I watched the Wales-Portugal Euro game with a burger and pint in a pub, then slept soundly in a hostel, proud and weary after making it across two countries and 250 miles in two days’ time.