Manchester, Liverpool, Jane

On the morning of my 28th birthday, a steady rain dampened Liverpool, not thick or heavy but enough to get you wet. I ate a cheap English breakfast and took a bus to an out-of-service bus stop with a wide area for cars to pull over on their way out of town. Jane‘s train would be arriving in Manchester at 12:30 (they would call that “half twelve” over here, which I think sounds nice). I started thumbing at 10:30, figuring I could take a train at 11:30 if no lift came. Hitching out of cities is never easy, but Liverpool isn’t so big, and rain can heighten a driver#s sympathy, so I was feeling good.

Within ten minutes I had turn down a lift from a guy heading to Leeds (not via Manchester). An hour later I was wishing I hadn’t. If I wanted to meet Jane at the station, I was running out of time. There was a train station down the street, where the guy at the booth informed me that I’d missed the train by four minutes and the next wouldn’t come for an hour. I resigned myself to some more soggy thumb-holding.

Finally a young dude in a nice car pulled over. He was heading to Wigan, which is more or less a suburb of Manchester. From there I’d be able to get a much cheaper train into the city. I wasn’t going to arrive ahead of Jane, but it would be closer. My driver was curious about my travels, having rolled straight into a stable job after school and never really taken time off. He works in medical labs testing blood, and he’s pretty happy with that for now. He had the day off from work, and he was going to Wigan to buy fish for his fishtank. When you have time to do that on your day off, something’s going right with your life.

He had the time and decided to be generous and take me all the way into the city, so I was dropped off at drizzly Picadilly Station only slightly Jane arrived, and we reunited happily. She knows Manchester pretty well and loves it, so for the rest of the day she showed me her favorite places in the city.

Manchester is pretty cool. It fits nicely in the category of “generally working-class cities that are steadily becoming cooler without becoming stupid,” also including Pittsburgh and Glasgow and, arguably, Chicago. These are my favorite kinds of cities. The Northern Quarter is full of interesting little restaurants and quirky stores, the kind of area where it’s easy to find unique nerdy paraphernalia and everywhere you look you see someone who looks extremely cool. From there it’s a quick walk to the ritzier part of town, or the more historic, grandiose areas. I always appreciate a city with an interesting music scene, and Manchester’s is pretty robust, having made substantial contributions to indie rock as well as global pop and cool electronica. Lots of Stone Roses shirts, lots of Oasis requests.

Jane’s a great birthday buddy. After an afternoon of elaborate milkshakes, exploring, and some sushi, we went to see Band of Horses at The Albert Hall, a beautiful old former church, all ornate stonework and stained glass, now a concert venue. It was my second time seeing them, and Jane’s first, and it was comforting to see a familiar band play familiar music (indie rock with a heavy dose of alt-country) for a super appreciative crowd of Brits. Afterward we went to a late-night bowling place because Jane’s really good at planning a birthday. Jane bowled the best game of her life and won by a tiny margin, but I got a couple of nice strikes, and the dude in the lane beside ours asked me for bowling advice, which has never happened before and probably never will again.

The next day we headed back to Liverpool, another city Jane knows and loves, to do some proper Beatles tourism. Liverpool has thoroughly embraced that part of its heritage; you can see likenesses of the four lovable lads everywhere, in statues, cartoons in storefront windows, vintage photos in cafes, murals in alleyways. The official Beatles museum has tons of memorabilia and goofy exhibits, and it’s designed around an audio tour (they give you the headphones and media player) that makes the whole thing into a structured narrative. Liverpool is bustling and fun, with an active city center and dock area, and one street just packed with places I want to come back and eat at. Jane and I agreed, though, that Liverpool felt like a city of missed opportunity – how hard could it be to pivot from music-history museum city into a city with a good active music scene? Liverpool has a rich past, sure, but it doesn’t seem so interested in bridging that with the present.

We finished the evening by attacking all the snacks and drinks on Bold Street, and the next day we took the train back to Manchester, where we parted ways – Jane to visit another friend (her own birthday would come at midnight) and me to continue exploring on my own. In the evening, I was busking in the Northern Quarter and making some decent money when Jane and I figured out via text that my busking spot was just next door from where she and her friend were sharing a jug of sangria. What a happy coincidence, right? It was so pleasing to be able to busk a bit, join Jane and Jo for a while, and then busk some more when their night took them places where my grungy travel attire would never fly.

The next day we decided to see each other yet again, so I met Jane and Jo and Jo’s boyfriend for a little Jane’s-birthday brunch, where I had a proper Sunday roast and we all had dessert. Then Jane and I wandered around just a bit longer until it was time for her evening train back to Glasgow.

Regular readers of my blog must feel quite familiar with Jane at this point. It was never my intention on this trip to meet a girl that I like this much, but the plan was always to stay open to the surprises and possibilities of an open-minded, loosely planned journey. Either way, I’ve gone and done it, and she likes me a lot too. There was no moment where we decided to get into daily texting conversations, but here we are happily doing it. Every few days we get on the phone and talk about my travels, the upcoming America trip she may have to postpone, and the absurdity of caring about each other when our homes are so far apart. But each time we see each other, it seems more and more like something with fighting for. There’s always a warm, inviting silence between when we say goodbye and when someone hangs up the phone. 

From the beginning this blog has been more than just an account of my travels. In exhuming my inner life and sharing it, I’ve been able to keep my inner life close to the surface, where it can stay sensitive and alert. In imposing this kind of narrative, I give my heart a path to follow, forcing it to take this trip with me and not stay buried at home. I’m forcing myself to feel everything I can, and to be as aware of it as possible. Now that my heart is waking up and getting more interested, it’s starting to share the lead in where this journey goes.

 

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.

 

 

 

Neat Cliffs; Long Days in Galway

Google Maps says it takes three and a half hours to get from Dingle to Galway by car, going east up the spine of the Dingle Peninsula to the mainland, bending northward at Limerick for the second half of the journey. But even on a great day of hitchhiking, between waiting for cars, walking to new hitching spots, changing spots, and the usual eating and exploring, three and a half hours can turn into six or seven. And that’s if things go well. So I got to an early start.

Dingle is a very small town, so it was just a couple blocks from my hostel to Hitchwiki’s favorite spot on the road east, a little stretch of open pavement just beyond the gas station at the edge of town. There wasn’t a lot of room to pull over, but a car quickly did, and moments later Dingle was disappearing around the bend behind me.

Jack lives in Dingle with his wife and two young kids. A mixed Irish-Canadian couple, they lived in Vancouver for years but always with the intent of moving to Ireland, and Dingle in particular. Jack works in hospitality. I don’t remember exactly what he does, but I remembered the important thing – shortly before I was there, Star Wars Episode VIII was being filmed further out on the Dingle Peninsula, and Jack’s hotel housed all the construction crew for the sets. I guess in order to do more extensive filming of Luke Skywalker’s little hermitage in The Force Awakens, they recreated the area in a less historically significant locale with comparable scenery. Jack said they’d only just finished set breakdown the week before I arrived, although he wished they’d have left it up. I am living evidence that it would be a great tourist attraction.

They were driving to Tralee to buy a bike for the mom’s birthday. It was a surprise. We talked about Vancouver and Canada, comparing road trip stories and discussing the differences between setting such a trip in Canada vs America. When my travel blog came up, Jack caught the attention of his daughter in the backseat. Turns out she runs a little blog herself. She’s the youngest blogger I’ve met, and maybe the most enthusiastic. We swapped blog info, and as of this post, we’ve both covered the event in our own writings.

From the highway bypass around Tralee, I got a very quick lift with some utterly unintelligible dudes to Castleisland, then looked for a ride north, which I got fairly quickly in Billy, from Dublin, who was going up with his two little kids to Bunratty to see their grandmother. Bunratty is a little castle-tourism town just past Limerick. He’s a schoolteacher, so we talked about that, as well as my plans for the next couple weeks. He’s a big fan of Liverpool, both as a sports entity and as a place – turns out there’s a big Catholic connection between the Irish and Liverpool. Sports allegiances are complicated over here.

I had a gas station croissant in Bunratty, took a little peek at the castle, and checked the time to see that it was only about noon, and I was only about 80 minutes from Galway. I was absolutely flying. I decided to add an hour to the predicted drive time and go west to see the Cliffs of Moher on my way up. The weather couldn’t make up its mind between pounding rain and warm, clear sunlight, so I had to duck for cover every few minutes, but I got a short lift to Ennis and another one to a more useful route out of Ennis, and then a third lift with Justin and Naoimi, a college-age couple en route to a weekend holiday in Lahinch, the last major town before the cliffs. When the sun came back out they put on the Beach Boys and we talked about fish and chips and Trump. From Lahinch, I took one more lift from an old, heavily bearded, Santa-type guy, and then I was at the Cliffs of Moher Visitors Center.

The Cliffs of Moher are a five-mile stretch of epic cliffs over the Atlantic Ocean, with heights ranging from 390 to 700 feet. Those numbers don’t do much for me either. You should probably just go see them. (You already have if you’ve seen The Princess Bride.) Once you leave the little area by the visitors center, you can walk right on the edge if you want. But I wouldn’t recommend it on a day like mine, where sudden gusts of wind were knocking people all around, the kind of wind you can lean comfortably into without falling. The wind only added to the surreal aura of the place. The central part was crowded with tourists, but there was none of the jadedness or entitlement or contagious stress that can give tourists a bad name. The people milling around and taking pictures atop the Cliffs of Moher that day were all awestruck, stopping every few steps to just marvel and take it all in, sometimes giggling to themselves at the absurdity of it all. People were talking, laughing, shouting, but no one was gabbing about how late they were or how underwhelming lunch was or anything dumb like that. People were happy up there.

I could see the rain coming in from miles away, but it was so fun to watch that I didn’t head back down until it was almost upon me. The temperature dropped hard, and when the rain wasn’t falling in cold, slapping drops, it blew down in icy needles that stung the skin. I tried to get a lift unsuccessfully until my hands were too cold, then warmed up in the shelter of some boxy storage thing in the parking lot – this was the kind of rain you got shelter from by standing beside cover, not under it. When the rain eased I walked onto the road again and finally found a ride in a tiny white rental car driven by an elderly German couple who adorably warned me that they’d be stopping regularly to take photos and asked if I was okay with that. Their English was pretty basic, and I had to keep slowing my speech down, but I gleaned that they’re from around Cologne and have a married daughter in a small town in east Michigan whom they visit every year.

We drove through beautiful countryside, stopping to take pictures of the farms and mountains and ocean as we saw fit. On the way down one hill they pointed at the switchbacks in the road and laughed about how it was like a tiny version of the Alps. Whenever we stopped, we had to take care not to open all the doors at once or the wind would blow their maps right out of the car.

They cheerfully deposited me in Kinvarra, where they were spending the night, which was not far from Galway at all. It was getting close to dinnertime, so I was ready to be there. On the edge of town I got another quick lift, this time from Celia, a friendly local mom who was headed up to Kilcolgan to meet a friend. I pointed out to her that she was my ninth lift that day, tying my record from last year. One more and I’d hit ten! At some point in that chat I must have passed a trust test, because she offered to take me all the way to Galway if I was okay with waiting a few minutes for her friend to arrive – they were going to a mutual friend’s funeral there. They didn’t seem too broken up about it. I decided to forego the record-setting and accept the offer. Before 7:00 I had arrived in Galway.

 

Everywhere I’ve gone, people have told me to visit Galway. It’s not a huge city, but the city center is abuzz at all hours with visitors and performers and good food and music. There’s an intangible energy about the place that makes it exciting just to be there. What differentiates it from Dublin is that, although it’s certainly a tourist destination, it’s the one that Irish people visit for vacations, not just international visitors, so it feels a little more real, more concretely Irish. I made some chat with a busker playing Radiohead songs, and I joined him for a couple trad songs before grabbing some dinner and checking into a hostel, where I quickly befriended a couple of 30-something Americans from Arizona who looked and acted like a couple but apparently weren’t. Then I went out to busk.

I was lucky to find a busking spot among all the competition. Usually lots of buskers means not a lot of tips, but tonight this was not the case. I followed my usual MO of playing obscure songs that I like, and the outcome was just what I always hope it will be – making buddies through unexpected music-taste connections. One tipper early on thanked me for playing Sufjan Stevens, and later an American girl on her honeymoon tipped me extra to keep playing M. Ward songs (she’d just seen him in the States a week ago), and I talked to another American couple who knew the difference between bluegrass and old-time music and were big fans of both. Additionally, I made some serious money by having a nice non-Wonderwall Oasis tune on hand for requests. People really like Oasis over here.

At 2:00 I was counting money in the hostel common room and getting ready to go to bed when people started pouring in from the closing bars and clubs – a South African-via-Australia, a group of Irish women who wanted to hear some banjo, the Arizonan from earlier, a gaggle of drunken 20-year-olds. Someday I will learn to say no when people want to hear banjo, but on that night I did not learn that lesson. I did not get a whole lot of sleep.

The next day I fumbled my way into a Saturday farmers market and busked some more, the highlight of which was a woman giving me a perplexed look as I played Neutral Milk Hotel, eventually coming over and asking me what the name of the song was. When I told her, something clicked and she thanked me profusely, saying she hadn’t heard that band in ten years and was so happy to have rediscovered them. I done a good thing. I spent my money on delicious farmers market sushi and falafel. It was a really cool farmers market.

My first hostel was booked for the night, so I had to switch to another one, where I met Laina and Avery, two young Americans traveling low-budget across Europe in their own way. Avery told me my last name when I told her my first; they’d been around when I was checking in downstairs. I somehow decided I would join them for the first half of the hostel’s official pub crawl before going off to busk later, and I did just that, meeting a couple more Americans from Philly and some goofy Irish dudes along the way. In a good hostel everyone’s pretty social, excited to meet people from other places and times, and on this night it felt like all of Galway operated that way. I think that’s part of the thrill I felt in that town.

When I woke up on Sunday morning I decided that I didn’t really feel like traveling north in the rain, especially since Galway’s allure hadn’t worn off yet. But I was feeling pretty spent, so I didn’t want to do much. Laina and Avery were down to hang out later, going on a bus tour of the surrounding area in the meantime. I did some writing in the hostel and took my time getting put together, and somehow I bumbled into Jordan, a girl from Vancouver Island, Canada, who quickly introduced me to Ben, from Prince Edward Island, Canada, even wearing a Canada shirt. They were each traveling solo and had just met, and I invited them to go wandering with me to the aquatic-sea-something festival that was going on at the docks, where I wanted to buy some seafood and put it in my mouth.

They were a really fun bunch to talk to, and I’ll enjoy keeping in touch with them. Jordan’s incorrigibly flirty, and also married to a dude in Manchester – their relationship works in such a way that she travels a lot and he stays home, and they seem pretty happy with the arrangement. If you’re around Jordan enough you’ll notice that among her tattoos is an area on the back of her hand where the skin is raised in the shape of a pentagram. She had an insert inserted so it would do that. But if her bold attitude and aggressive look don’t put you off, you’ll find that she’s a warm, funny person who’s very loyal to the people she trusts.

Jordan’s been traveling for a long time, and so has Ben. Ben’s a quiet guy with a burly beard who plays the Irish bagpipes. I love meeting a fellow busker and talking shop, and he was a pleasure to do that with as we roamed the sunny Galway streets. He’s played in a handful of cities around the world, and although the strategy for bagpipes is a little different from banjo/voice busking, his general experience and lifestyle are pretty similar to mine. He’s worked out a system where he travels to places where he knows he’ll do well busking, then brings that money back home with him to offset his expenses in leaner times.

I feel like I should mention that by this point I’d made almost 200 Euro in Galway, a pretty crazy amount. It was the first place since Reykjavik where I’d really devoted myself to nightlife busking, and it really paid off. I’m not sure how much of that was Galway and how much was just Europe treating its buskers well, but it felt really nice to have a surplus of travel funds for a while. I’ve still got a big pile of Euros in my backpack for when I’m back in a country that uses them.

Later that night Ben would Facebook message me, saying that without my extroverted presence to tie everything together, he and Jordan kept having awkward lapses in their conversation, and they missed me. That was equally touching and hilarious, but by that point I had reunited with Avery and Laina, and we were patrolling around for some affordable food that wasn’t also boring. I was rolling in Euros, and after seeing how much plain bread and almond butter they were eating, I felt like treating them to something.

Laina and Avery are from Whidbey Island, which Hope College people may recognize as the homeland of campus chaplain Trygve Johnson, and the namesake of his goofy Gordon Setter. The two are definitely Northwest people. Avery’s got a degree in something like wildlife ecology, and between her former-dancer habits and Laina being a Yoga instructor, the two of them were constantly stretching and contorting themselves to ease their travel soreness. They fit the Washington mold in that they don’t eat meat and they exude a scrappy Earth-mother vibe, but they give that mold a good name by being warm, adventurous people, friendly to strangers, curious and spontaneous.

We eventually ended up in an American-themed late-night bar with a tasteful acoustic ’80s cover band (who didn’t play Avery’s Neutral Milk Hotel request) and the young American dudes from Philly from the night before. The night had been fun; having met them all already, it felt almost like a normal night out with friends, something very familiar and settling. But there was something a little grim about being in an American-themed bar surrounded in Americans too – maybe that’s why Avery tipsily befriended the super-drunk older Irishman who had been doing the worm on (humping) the floor earlier, to everyone’s amusement. You can see here how Laina and Avery make great travel buddies. Laina’s a little more reserved (without being lame), keeping them on track just enough, while Avery’s the super-outgoing one (also major flirt) who gets them into situations that up the trip’s ante a little bit. They balance each other nicely.

Laina wasn’t as enthused as Avery, but there we went – from the American bar, the three of us ended up in the company of these two old Irish dudes in a 24-hour fast-food place, eating fries and listening to them joke about whether one of them was a murderous inmate under the other’s watch or not. They were delightful dudes, full of laughter and drunken advice and more laughter. They’re the kind of dudes young women traveling abroad probably shouldn’t get too cozy with, but this time the (possibly) calculated risk paid off. They were good people.

Maybe I just got lucky. I can imagine someone going to Galway and just seeing an unflattering mix of frat party and tourist trap, but it didn’t feel that way to me. Everyone I met there was happy to meet me and happy to be there, and that’s how I’ll remember it. If it’s really like that all the time, than Galway really is a special place. I’ll miss it.

They Named A Town Dingle

Ireland feels like the Pacific Northwest – it rains a lot, but rarely very heavily or for too long. Most days bring a cool, gentle misting that doesn’t do wonders for your mood but doesn’t really get you wet either. You get used to it. The sky was thick with foggy rain when I walked north out of Killarney’s city center to Hitchwiki’s recommended northbound hitch spot, a bus-stop pulloff in front of a small hotel. As I was waiting in the rain, two Irish hitchhikers in raincoats and neon-orange backpacks stopped to say hello, politely walking ahead so as not to crowd my spot and lower my chances at a lift. It was just a minute later that I got picked up by Larry, an older guy in a work van who was going a few minutes out of town. He dropped me off by a pub at the base of the road to Dingle, where I had a great sandwich and dried off.

Despite its ludicrous name, I’d been told to check out Dingle a few times. Clayton, the busking American hitchhiker I befriended in Reykjavik, had recommended the small coastal town when I asked him where I should go in Ireland; he and his friends hitchhiked all around it a few weeks before me.

Now I had a problem. The road to Dingle was neither big nor busy. From the intersection with the pub, it sloped narrowly uphill, and cars would gun their engines to get up to speed. There was room for a car to pull off, but no place for me to stand where I would be visible from afar, especially in the gloomy daylight. I waited there close to two hours, walking up and down the road and trying different spots, until the perfect driver picked me up.

Trevor is a middle-aged family man whose current job has him driving all across southwest Ireland replacing big signs in supermarket windows. He spends a lot of time on the road, bored, and he was going all the way to Dingle. Trevor is a big fan of the place, and as we drove he pointed out pubs owned by interesting people, the long, beautiful beach on Dingle Peninsula’s southern coast, and the vantages from which, had it been a clearer day, I would have seen Skellig Michael, the main Star Wars pilgrimage site. We also talked about global politics and my travels, usual topics. I asked him if the Troubles had affected this region much, being about as far away from Northern Ireland as possible. Turns out people in Cork and Kerry County were passionately and directly involved, even though they didn’t see violence. For decades it was through these regions that guns and bombs were produced and smuggled to spill blood in the north.

Arriving in mid-afternoon, I wandered awhile in Dingle, did some writing in the library, ate some good kebabs, had a nice busk, and eventually checked into a hostel, where I left my stuff before heading back out to find some live music. Dingle is something of a mecca for good, authentic Irish trad music, as they call it. Somehow, dozens of pubs are packed into this tiny town, all drawing thick crowds to quality musicians. You can’t walk ten feet in downtown Dingle without passing a sign saying “trad session every night at 9:30.” I’ve written before about pub sessions, these little communal folk music gatherings that are often open to any willing musician. In Edinburgh I wasn’t feeling up to playing along, but tonight I was ready. I took my banjo into O’Flaherty’s at 9:30 and ordered a pint. Despite the sign outside saying 9:30, the bartender told me the music would happen whenever the musicians got around to it. Irish timekeeping reminds me of how I’ve heard people describe African time. Drinking my pint, I made conversation with a guy named Hank from the States. Hank is a charismatic guy with a booming voice and wry demeanor. I didn’t get a lot of his story, but it seems like he’s travelling at the wish of his late wife, who died before they could take a trip like this together. He’d brought his bodhrán, an Irish drum that can be played in booming thumps or rattling, snare-like rolls, with fingers or a stick. The weight of his wife’s passing was palpable around him, permeating his warm, friendly nature, creating an oddly intimate, bittersweet effect that surely contributed to the weirdly dreamlike, emotionally tender mood I felt for the rest of the evening.

It should please you to no end to know that O’Flaherty’s is run by a guy named Fergus Ó Flaithbheartaigh. Fergus started unpacking instruments while Hank and I were talking – a guitar, a tenor banjo, an accordion, a bouzouki, a bodhrán, a tin whistle. The guy plays a lot of instruments. When he was finally good and ready, a concertina player and another bodhrán player pulled up chairs, and Fergus invited Hank and me to pull out our instruments. He had no prerequisites, no tests. Just invitation.

For the next couple of hours, Fergus blasted through song after song, sometimes taking requests from the growing audience. When he would lead a song with a stringed instrument, I would follow along with my five-string banjo, at best finding a comfortable nook in the music for my instrument, at worst plucking inoffensive notes in the proper key. When he would lead on accordion or bodhrán, the songs were harder for me to follow, spryly melodic and rushing with momentum, so I would lay my banjo down and watch, or take video with my phone. Sometimes he would nod expectantly at one of the other musicians, and they would take the lead on a song. Hank knew a lot of Irish tunes, and he bellowed some out a capella, shyly at first but soon adopting the gravitas of a natural performer. When Fergus nodded at me, I sheepishly insisted on passing my turn – I’m totally new to Irish music, and I couldn’t think of any songs in my repertoire that would have felt right. I get the sense Fergus wouldn’t have minded that at all, but I would have. Then Fergus would switch instruments and spring into another tune, his face contorting with focus as his booming voice sang of the Troubles or ancient battles, odes to Cork or Dublin or Derry, even little Dingle.

Eventually the musicians took a break and I slunk out of the pub, tired from the day of travel and feeling a bit introverted. Back in my hostel room, as I was getting ready to settle in for the night, chatting lightly with the French dude staying in the bed across from mine, a group of three Irish girls popped in with their bags, and minutes later, at their request, I was surprising the late-arriving fourth one with a banjo rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Energized by their energy, I went back out with them for a bit to catch some music, which is always more fun when you have buddies. Some of them were schoolteachers, so we had a lot of common ground to talk about. Another is a highly qualified brewer at Guinness, and they were joking throughout the night about her recent foray into stardom – she’s this person.

They stayed out late, but I didn’t. I wanted to get to Galway the next day to busk for the Friday and Saturday nightlife, so I had a long day of travel ahead of me. It didn’t make sense to stay longer (this time), but I’m glad I came to Dingle – it has a unique magic. Though its pubs seem to serve many more visitors than residents, the tourism there is tinged with a refreshing reverence that you don’t feel in the live music of Dublin. Dingle isn’t just a destination for Irish music, it’s a monument to it.

The Gift of the Gab

I didn’t know anything about Cork when I set out west from New Ross. I just knew it was a place that people talked about. I got a couple quick lifts and was on my way. Ash was the first, a young woman from New Ross who works with troubled kids in Waterford, the next town over. She dropped me off in Waterford, and soon I was on the road again with Finn, Connor, and Ben, three recent college grads driving to Dungarvan. They’re the same age as some of the students I was teaching this year. They were really curious about the trip, and they taught me my first rude Irish phrase, póg mo thóin, which I will probably never use.

My next driver was going all the way to Cork. I’ve lost track of his name, but he was pretty great craic. In his 40s, married without kids, he’s preparing to leave his successful career in pharmaceutical engineering to pursue painting. Not houses, art. He’s going to go back to school to further his craft, and he’s looking at a place in Sweden, although when I mentioned Glasgow he told me that he’d really been tempted to go there, but his wife wouldn’t let him. The Scottish girls are too crazy for Irish accents, he says.

He dropped me off in front of a hostel that I promptly checked into. Bru Bar & Hostel was supposed to have a “play for your pint” open mic that night, which really would have been a blast, the Australian woman behind the reception desk told me that the event was cancelled since their speaker system had died.

I busked a little and wandered a little more, then slept and stayed around Cork for another day and night. I never met any actual Cork locals, but I really enjoyed my company in the hostel. In my room there was Jehan, a young French guy who was moving to Cork to work for Apple. Charismatic and attractive, Jehan stayed out until dawn partying on my first night, but later revealed that he’s had a successful career in competitive video gaming, a fact that I’m sure he withholds from girls in nightclubs. The two of us joined Ayon for some consolatory drinks after Ayon failed part of the physical exam to join the Irish military, which was the whole reason he was in Cork. Ayon seemed to rebound a little, but he was clearly pretty disappointed. The fourth bed in our room was occupied by a Croatian (I think) man whose nickname was something like Kiko. He works at the fried-chicken place just down the street, and that evening, when I was playing banjo in front of the bar/hostel, Kiko shared with us a whole big box of delicious extra fried chicken. We all got along really easily, even being all from different countries. Those three did share one characteristic, though, an inclination to murmer “fuck” to themselves under their breath at the slightest provocation – bumping one’s arm against something, having to reach for one’s phone. They say it’s not a swear word here, guys. Then again, I’m not sure if anything else is either.

I had been bouncing around on the /r/vagabond subreddit and noticed a thread asking travelers where they were from and where they were going, and a guy had replied that he was from Illinois and was heading south from Galway. I’d told him our paths were about to cross, and we’d decided to track each other down. But our introduction happened early – while Jehan and Ayon and I were hanging out in the hostel’s common room, Julian from southern Illinois overhead me and introduced himself. He was in the same room at the same hostel by sheer coincidence. Julian’s taking a break from studying audio engineering to travel the world. He’s got dual citizenship in the UK, so he’s got a good amount of flexibility with visas and things, which is cool. We didn’t hang out for long, but his company was enthusiastic and kind.

I’d talked to an American student in the hostel who’d recommended Blarney Castle, conveniently located between Cork and Killarney, my next destination. Vincent, my lift to Blarney materialized swiftly when I got to the edge of town. He was a farmer, driving one of those mini-trucks that farmers use because he’s a farmer, though a semiretired one, only doing the jobs he feels like doing. He’s been to the states to see the John Deere factory in the midwest. He likes farming.

Blarney Castle isn’t quite flooded with tourists, though they pump them through at a pretty steady pace. The castle is picturesque and well-preserved, classically castly in all the ways you’d want it to be. Near the top, a random chunk of outer wall is known as the Blarney Stone, and legend has it that if you plant a nice kiss on it, you will forever be blessed with the GIFT OF THE GAB. Depending on whom you talk to, that either means you become more eloquent or specifically better at schmoozing. I’m never one to pass up on a permanent character buff, so I joined the lengthy line to the top of the castle, inching up narrow stone spiral stairways with a rope for a railing and out onto the sunlit roof of the castle, overlooking rolling green hills of shaggy cattle and camera-wielding tourists. As I’m sure you can tell from the sudden increase in the quality of this blog’s writing a couple posts ago, I now bear the gift of the gab, and I’ll surely never be the same.

I got out of Blarney with a series of short lifts. First was a doddering old taxi driver whose accent was way too thick for me. I wasn’t quite sure that he was actually offering me a free lift until a few minutes into the trip, but he was going north to the main road anyway, and he was genuinely generous. Next was Amy, a black French woman with toddler seats and a big Hello Kitty window cling in the back and only a rudimentary grasp of the English language.We didn’t talk much, and I had to repeat a few things before she realized I was hitchhiking all around Europe and didn’t live in Mallow, the town to which she recently moved to look for work. Her car’s speakers played a chanted narration of the Quran softly and continuously. She was quick to smile.

After Amy was Oliver. A week later, I remember really enjoying his company and conversation, but only two details have stuck with me. One was that he used to hitchhike around Ireland when he was young, and even thirty years ago hitchhikers were still an everyday sight. The other thing I remember is that Tom Waits’ Mule Variations was in his CD collection. Oliver dropped me off where the road forks to go to Killarney.

Jerry was the last driver. A bearded, confident man in his 30s, when I mentioned Chicago, he was quick to tell me that he’d lived in Chicago for a couple years and loved it. Afterwards he’d spent another year in San Francisco painting houses – well, the first thing he had to say about that was that he did a lot of cocaine that year. After that he’d lived in New Zealand for a few years, and that was his favorite place to date. Jerry was talkative and friendly, but the only reason he was on that road at that time was that his girlfriend of a year had just broken up with him in a text message, and he’d decided to head home from work early. He divulged a little information about that, but I didn’t want to pry. He must have been sad, but he masked it well.

At Killarney I did some writing in the public library while poking around on the internet to find a host in town. Martha volunteered her spare bedroom quickly, which left me with two hours to kill before she finished her shift at work. I talked to an overwhelmingly Irish guitar busker named Jimmy about good spots, then headed to his recommended square of street and played for the locals and tourists to great financial success. With the last 20 minutes of my free time I joined Jimmy and played along to some of his Irish tunes.

I met Martha at her flat in the early evening. She’s about my age, having done some college and bounced through a couple jobs and cities (Waterford, Dublin, more) before ending up managing an organic restaurant in Killarney. I knew I was in good hands when her apartment walls featured posters of The Smiths and The White Stripes and also a framed sketch of Auron from Final Fantasy X. Martha is a natural host whose enthusiasm for both life and Killarney flow easily into others. We walked into Killarney National Park, lush and pristine and right next to the town, and talked about music and adulthood until we arrived at Ross Castle. Martha majored in medieval studies, so she capably handled all of my Irish history questions as we puttered around the old (but not that old) castle grounds. Back in town, she reminded me of a certain Scotswoman who’s hosted me, making sure we got dessert (snacks) and drinks (beer and whiskey) but overlooking actual dinner food. But she works in an organic restaurant; she whipped something up back in the flat while we continued to nerd out about music and our similarly idealistic, creative, emotional personalities.
In the morning, I woke up from a firm, healthy sleep in the guest bedroom to the sound of Martha heading outside into the beating rain to go to work. The rain decided what I would do with my next day – The Ring of Kerry, a beautiful drive around a coastal peninsula, wouldn’t afford me the view of Skellig Michael that I wanted, let alone any other views, in the misty weather, so rather than make the loop and spend another night in Killarney, I would send a nice goodbye text to Martha and hitch north to Dingle.

Real Ireland

I left Dublin at a leisurely pace, taking a late-morning train to Greystones, a seaside town at the far end of the DART line, and hitchhiking from there. My goal for the day was Wexford, a cool town in the southeast corner of the country. But my goal for the present moment was to watch the Ireland-France Euro game in a proper Irish pub. I had time to get maybe one lift south before the game.

It was a bit of a walk from the train station to the main highway, but once I was there I got a lift in no time from David, a young dude heading to Newcastle, a few towns south. He talked about how if Ireland were to beat France (unlikely, but Ireland wasn’t supposed to beat Italy either) then he was going to sell his car and use the money to travel out to support the team. He could always get another car, he said.

David dropped me off at a classy little pub that was almost full, brimming with Irishpeople of every generation – unlike bars in America, pubs can be a wholesome little community gathering place. We don’t really have anything like that – a shared living room for the town. I ate a fancy little lunch and watched Ireland score a triumphant goal in the first two minutes, elevating the hopeful tension in the room until the second half, when France finally got aggressive and won decisively, knocking Ireland out of the tournament. People were disappointed but hardly surprised. Ireland was never supposed to do this well, so their grief was tempered by pride that the game had happened at all.

I walked south from Newcastle after the game, hoping to get another lift quickly, but the road wasn’t the main thoroughfare in the area. It got narrow and rural, and soon I was walking on the gently curving pavement, changing lanes to avoid cars when I heard them coming. It was a bad road for me, with no sidewalk and no shoulder for cars to pull onto, and cars came one per minute, if that. But eventually a blue sedan stopped for me. The driver’s name was Karen, and she was actually driving home from the pub I’d just been at. She was a cook there – when I told her what I’d ordered, she confirmed that she had indeed prepared it. She went a bit out of her way to drop me off by the highway on-ramp by Rathnew.

This road was also pretty quiet on a late Sunday afternoon, so I hiked up to the highway and put my thumb out there. I don’t prefer doing it that way, as cars are going way faster and it’s more likely to be illegal, but there are always shoulders to pull onto, and steady traffic beats no traffic. John from Romania (Transylvania specifically) was my next driver. He works for a private security firm, and he took me to the far side of Arklow, right on the edge of Wexford County. He wanted to hear me play banjo, so I sang him a song on the side of the road before he headed back into town. It was evening now, but I was getting close.

Until this moment I’d never been picked up by a bus before, but that’s what happened. But this was no public-transit bus. The driver welcomed me in and I stepped into a laughing, shouting bunch of young Irish folks all wearing matching red shirts from the adventure run they’d completed that day. The thing is called Hell and Back, and these people were all coworkers in New Ross, a town none of them seemed proud to call home. They were all drinking and being adventurous goofs, picking up a hitchhiker was a natural extension of their day. They asked to hear some songs, so I played a bunch of songs, to which they were a fantastic audience. I liked them. They confirmed that if I stuck around with them for the night someone would make sure I had a place to stay, so I decided to do that.

The first bar we went to in this dumpy little working town was very divey, with a profoundly local crowd. The town is small enough that most people know each other. because this is Ireland, there was live music, but of a distinctly New Ross variety – one older dude with a guitar singing over backing tracks of popular songs. I don’t know how many people realized that the guitar he was halfheartedly strumming wasn’t even plugged in – it certainly wasn’t stopping the room full of tipsy middle-agers from dancing. It was a nice prop, at least. After a couple hours of Guinness and generally good craic, the group thinned and a few of us moved on to a pub with a younger clientele. It was close to closing time, but when people noticed my banjo, they wouldn’t let me go without a song, so we figured out songs they could sing to and I put on a little show. More on this later, but the Irish love to sing in their pubs – after I put the banjo away, the revelers continued on persistently with proud, shambling rounds of the Irish soccer team’s fight song, interspersed with bits of other folk songs that everyone knew. It felt like Ireland.

Disco Dave was what the bus crew jokingly called the guy who had offered to take me in for the night, but his friend at the last pub of the night called him Cha. Some people just attract nicknames. The place was closed, but after persistent texting and banging on the door, we were allowed into the lock-in, which is a thing they do over there where the pub technically closes its doors but everyone already inside canstay and drink into the wee hours. The place was busy on a late Sunday night, bustling with locals over the age of 50. People were immediately into my banjo, so at their request I pulled it out again and played some songs. They were interested in the kind of old-time Americana that I like to play, so I did some of that in addition to the Johnny Cash songs that are brilliant crowd pleasers in those parts. Where the younger crowd sang raucously with the music as an accessory, this audience listened attentively, and when I was finished a couple of them quietly slipped me cash with their encouraging words.

A burly guy with a thick grey beard a bare dome was chatting with us, and he pointed out a guy further down the bar, a slim older man with a tidy brown suit and matching hat, as the best tin whistle player in southeast Ireland. Of course Terry had a tin whistle on him and wanted to play with me. It was quickly understood that we didn’t have a lot of common ground in our repertoires, but he was happy to figure it out on the fly, so we did. He would play an Irish folk melody, all chipper and whimsical, and I would fumble around until I had some working chords to throw down. Then I would play some American folk and he would jam over it. After a few songs he was laughing and shaking my hand with thanks. Even with all its variations and dialects, music really is a universal tongue.

Dave and his friend were pretty insistent that I drink hard with them, and at first I was keeping pace just fine – they were paying, after all, and I was still present enough to play banjo, which is a pretty good measure of whether you’re okay. Dave’s friend was espousing the most typical of small-town bar stories – “I could have been a soccer star, but instead I chose drinking. Ha ha! Great choice.” On the topic of Wexford town, my abandoned goal for the day’s travels, Dave said it was nice but a little stuffy – in his exact drunken words, “a cesspit of arrogance and delusion.” (Immediately after he said that a big smile appeared on his face. He was so proud of that line.) But eventually it was 3:30 and we and the bartender were the only ones left. I put my foot down on more drinks, but I didn’t want to push too hard about going to sleep. I was a guest, after all. But I was getting cranky, trying to at least mix it with good humor before manifesting it.

But we made it at last to what they called The Shed, a little second-floor flat above the garage at Dave’s friend’s house. Picture a dirty room covered in junk and knickknacks, existing only to be a drinking venue or a crash zone, littered with evidence of good times and abandoned dignity. The two guys shared a bed in the house and I slept peacefully in the early daylight before heading back into town to eat a delicious egg-and-bacony breakfast and begin the westward leg of my hitch journey, towards Cork.

Belfast and a Lot of Dublin

After such a nice time in Glasgow, I felt a bit of a funk as I rode the bus to Ayr, walked 40 minutes to the main road south, and began to hitch. It was another (supposedly) rare sunny day in Scotland, and my drivers were in good moods – a family eventually picked me up and took me to Maybole, and then a truck driver who worked for Stena Line ferries picked me up and took me to my exact destination, the Stena Line ferry station. Both of my drivers that day jokingly mentioned “The Hitcher,” an American slasher film that I wished hadn’t made it over to Europe.

Having missed the 3:30 ferry, I had a couple hours to kill before the 7:30 would depart. The employees were super friendly. One, a well-spoken older gentleman dressed in a sharp suit that was definitely beyond the requirements of his security job, made dry jokes with me and asked lots of questions about my trip. Both he and the truck driver earlier had caught recent Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young shows in the area, and both were very proud to tell me so.

The ferry itself was pretty huge. It dragged itself over the water for a full two hours while I sat in the cushy dining area and listened to podcasts and charged my chargables and the sky turned dark and gray. I had found a Couchsurfing host for the night in Lidia, a Polish woman who’s actually lived in Belfast for the last ten years. She volunteered to pick me up from the ferry, saving me from a stupidly long walk. She had said that she would be desperately working on some late homework for a course and wouldn’t have time to show me around, but she was definitely looking procrastinate by giving me that lift and having nice conversations afterward. I was happy to help. As a former Ben and Jerry’s employee, she loved hearing about the B&J’s quality assurance guy I met in Iceland – truly a valuable connection to have.

My day in Belfast was cold and persistently rainy. Best was the Ulster Museum’s section on the Troubles, where loads of text and pictures and videos cover the walls in a solemn memorial to Northern Ireland’s complex and tragic recent history. Even Northern Irish people my age remember constant fear of car bombs and terrorist shootings. Walking back to Lidia’s place in east Belfast, I passed several huge militaristic propaganda murals. There may be stability now, but it doesn’t feel certain.

The next day I hitchhiked to Dublin, where I would stay with Anne, a girl I’d known vaguely at Hope College, whose hospitality had been recommended to me by Marcus and Jen in Michigan – the last time I’d seen Anne was at their wedding, a union of some of our best buds.Getting to Dublin was very easy. My first driver’s accent was so extreme that I had to have him repeat everything twice, but he took me to Lisburn, the first major town south of Belfast, and minutes later I got a second lift all the way to the city. This was my second time hitchhiking with a truck driver. I don’t remember this guy’s name, but he was super nice. He worked for Coca Cola for most of his adult life before being laid off, and now he drives trucks that serve some purpose in the drilling of oil? I don’t remember, really. He’s still the only person I’ve spoken to who’s in favor of Brexit, the referendum  having been a few days in the future at the time. What sold him was a fear that Turkey would join the EU and flood England with workers who would take all the low-income jobs. Sound familiar? He acknowledged that the effects of the UK leaving the EU were hard to predict and would probably be difficult to bear, but the course he believed the UK was on scared him more than the unknown.

He dropped me off by the docks, in an industrial area of Dublin where huge cranes lift boxes of goods onto trucks and ships. I was happy to find sidewalks there; surely I was the only one using them. But an hour later I was in Sandymount, the relatively posh area where Anne and her friend Aoife live (two syllables, and you can really ignore the “Ao”). Soon Anne was pulling up on her bike to show me how to shimmy down the alley and past a fence to find their house. We spent her lengthy lunch break checking out the downtown, getting me accustomed to Dublin’s public transit and busking spots, and getting an Irish SIM card for my phone.

I was in Dublin for a week. The first few days were mostly spent exploring, punctuated by little bits of busking. I saw the castle and the National Museum, where the bog bodies are on display – extremely well preserved Irish bodies, thousands of years old, their brown skin crackled and dry and their faces contorted in very human grimaces. Some have clearly visible stab wounds; others are just beheaded, limbless torsos. They believe most were human sacrifices related to ancient Irish traditions of kingship. It was riveting, though I felt really weird about it. I was looking at actual dead people from a time long erased from history, people who felt all the same emotions as me, people with names and families and dreams. And there were their mangled, dried remains in glass cases. As little kids scampered around, oohing and aahing at the bodies, I wandered through the rest of the museum in a daze.

I busked at Temple Bar on my sunny first afternoon in Dublin. Temple Bar is not a bar but a neighborhood snuggled up against the city center, where bars throbbing with live music cram together along narrow pedestrian streets. I was lucky to find the busking spot I did, as full amped bands would occupy it every other time I passed through. I did a little busking every day in Dublin, but mostly spent my time just wandering around until I was hungry, eating, then wandering around some more. 

On Friday night I went out for drinks with Orlagh, (pronounced like you probably guessed, if you ignored the “gh”) a peppy local girl whose father plays Irish banjo and who aspires to make a career in the music business. She was the first Dubliner I really talked to. Until then I hadn’t really gotten a feel for what it’s like to live there – so many tourists downtown, a little bit of the Edinburgh syndrome. Orlagh believes that only visiting Dublin isn’t really a proper Irish experience, and she recommended me some destinations in the country (when we weren’t talking about music and traveling, which we did a lot). She was great company and a bit too good of a host, insisting on paying for drinks and ordering at a pretty Irish pace. Rather than get up early to travel the next day, I spent a lot of time napping.
When I wasn’t bumbling around the streets of Dublin, it was nice having a home to go back to. Anne and Aoife are basically missionaries, Aoife in a more church-related capacity and Anne doing some general outreach and community building in conjunction with the YWCA. They both make their own schedules and work from home a lot of the time, so we had time to talk over morning tea or evening tea or nighttime tea, covering topics like mutual Hope College friends, travel, living in Dublin, and the finer points of open-minded Christian adulthood. I even got to do some songwriting on Aoife’s guitar. So homey. On one weekday Anne and I met at a pub to watch the Ireland Euro Cup game against Italy with her friend Bernard (pronounced like murmur), a kind, soft-spoken academic type who was cursing and shouting with the best of them as Ireland struggled aggressively against the traditionaly superior Italian team. When Ireland scored a game-winning goal in the last few minutes, the bar exploded like nothing I’ve ever seen, and the explosion continued as jolly, singing green-clad locals filled the streets, overwhelming the tourists in a hilarious display of patriotism.

I’m writing this from the southwest corner of Ireland – obviously I’m a couple posts behind – and now that I have something to compare it to, I will say that Dublin itself, though very fun and bursting with energy, felt very globalized, a bit watered down in its Irishness, despite the Lucky Charms face it presents to the tourist. Aoife, from the north, tells me that she’s never heard an actual Irish person say “Top of the mornin’ to ya.” But Dublin will say it to you because it knows that’s what you want.

 

 

Glasgow Redux and The State That I Am In

Edinburgh to Glasgow would be my third day of hitchhiking in Scotland. Getting out of cities is always tough, but the total drive was less than an hour, so I was in no rush to get going. I walked from Malika’s place up to the city center and busked a bit before stopping into a pub for – wait for it – a haggis burger. Now, I haven’t had a burger that really impressed me in quite some time, especially not in Europe. They’ve all been decent. This burger was no exception. The haggis formed a second patty of roughly equal volume to the beef, and its squishy, kind of grainy savoriness was the dominant note in the sandwich, adding interest without quite elevating the burger to greatness. But now I’ve had a burger with haggis on it.

I took a bus to a bus station on the western outskirts of town, a short walk from Hitchwiki’s preferred spot. To follow their directions, one crosses a busy roundabout and shimmies along a roadside barrier to get to where the on-ramp going to Glasgow stretches far and straight, with ample room to pull over. I stood pretty far up the ramp and was picked up in 10 minutes.

Martin drove a white work van. I have no recollection of what he does – maintenance of some sort, construction – but he was driving to Bellshill, a southeastern suburb of Glasgow, which was good enough for a start. The service station he dropped me off at before turning off the main road was a pretty low-traffic affair, but even there I got a lift offer quickly, this time from Brian, a freelance taxi driver who works all around Scotland, driving a 10-passenger van between city and airport, working on his own schedule but being on call most all the time. Brian has a little Shrek figure on his dashboard. He respects Glasgow but feels loyal to Edinburgh, largely because of football (between my best efforts to understand his accent and my subsequent Googling, I think I’ve determed that he said he was a Hearts fan). He also thinks Uber is dumb for cutting corners with things like insuring their drivers. I’d never been picked up by an off-duty taxi driver before; at first I was afraid he’d change his mind and try to charge me. But Brian works for himself, and he was feeling generous. He was booked for a trip out of Glasgow later in the day, so his plan was just to drive up there and relax for a couple hours anyway. He took me right to where I was going. Brian is a really nice guy.

You may remember Jane. She had offered to host me on my way back through Glasgow, but that night wasn’t great for her, so I deferred to a Couchsurfing host who had been willing but unable to host me last time I went through town. I liked Glasgow; spending a couple more nights there was a nice prospect. So I had my driver drop me off near the University, where Elena, a 20-year-old German university student (I know) lives with two roommates, an English dude of Venezuelan descent and an Italian girl. Elena and I had connected over music on the CS site; she’s into different kinds of post-punk and other weird stuff, and she thought it was cool that I’m busking as I travel. It wasn’t an ideal night for her to host me either, as she’d forgotten that she was already hosting two Spanish girls that night, and she was working from 5 to 10 in the evening. But she made it work, and I’m grateful for that. She would sleep in her roommate’s room for the night while the other Couchsurfers slept in her bed and I on the couch. I would occupy myself while she was working, and the Spaniards would show up at some point. We would figure it out.

In the early evening I walked to the West End and busked a bit. Then Jane, who had been socially booked, realized she was available to hang out, so I took the subway into the city center to meet her for a drink. This time we went to a labyrinthine pub called Waxy O’Connor’s, where multiple floors of bars and tables wind and twist around a cavernous space like an Escher painting. Up until this point, Jane had had a clear upper hand at playfully taking the piss out of me (this is a thing they say in the UK, turns out), but on this night my wit reached a new level of snark, and I let her have it in equal measure. It was very generous of Jane to allow this.

Elena works in a restaurant, and she worked later than she expected to. It was past midnight when I met her and one of her coworkers on the street and we started back to her flat, picking up the Spanish Couchsurfers on the way. I was never quite sure about their names through their accents, and their English was pretty basic, but they were nice. Both were exchange students in England, taking a few days to see Glasgow, Inverness, and Edinburgh, and it was their first time Couchsurfing. Elena knew they were students in Spain, but we were surprised to find that they were actually from Brazil and Argentina. We talked late into the night over tea, Elena and I getting into many long tangents about indie music or politics that the Spanish girls weren’t really equipped to follow us on.

In the morning, those two headed out to go do tourist things while I popped into a library to write. I was taking the day off from tourism. For lunch the Spanish girls cooked us tortilla, which is a  hefty Spanish omelette with potatoes that just happens to share a name with the things we use to wrap burritos. After the girls left for Inverness, Elena and I just bummed around the flat and listened to music.

I had hardly seen the sun since St. Andrews. When I packed my bag and left Elena’s flat, rain was coming down steadily. Jane would be back from her Edinburgh commute in half an hour, so I set up under the overhanging facade of an Urban Outfitters and made zero dollars, as everyone was just trying to get out of the rain and didn’t really care about some schlub playing banjo. I was feeling lonely in a strangely peaceful way when I put the banjo away and walked to meet Jane at the pub where we’d met the night before. This time we headed a bit south of the city center, eating Russian food and rosemary chips (Jane, bless her sweet heart, called them fries for me) and having mixed drinks made with Irn-Bru, Scotland’s homegrown, ubiquitous, awesome/terrible soft drink, whose marketing campaigns have given them an Old-Spice-like notoriety for authentic goofiness. On our way back to her neighborhood, we stopped by the big old cathedral, an old haunted hospital, and the Barrowland, a historic Glasgow music venue that’s being slowly edged out by more modern arenas. At a nearby park, names and dates of bands that have played there are painted in a long row of colorful bars, reading like a comprehensive history of indie music, peppered with uniquely UK quirks – the Stone Roses are painted on there more times than they probably ever played in America.

The next couple days are a bit of a blur. I knew I wanted to see my Aunt Laura in Dublin while she was there on vacation, but I also knew I’d see her again eventually, so I talked myself into sticking around in Glasgow one more night, and then a late morning, to spend more time with Jane. We ate good food, drank good drink, shared and sang songs, walked around the neighborhood, visited a cool old-money family estate with its own private collection of world artifacts on display, drank tea, listened to more songs. It was time well spent, and made this lonely solo traveler feel a lot more human.

Jane thinks very similarly to me, but she comes from a very different background and has lived a very different life. So she’s the rare type of person who understands and affirms the weird decisions I make, but also understands the human behind the traveling hitchhiking busker thing. Every time we talk we discover another common interest or taste, and every time our talks go deeper, she meets me with a very warm, creative intelligence. And we laugh constantly. So now, days later in Dublin, I’m in the unenviable position of trying to unpack and put words to something that I’ll need a lot more time to properly process. Since my marriage dissolved in 2014, a lot of parts of me have felt numb, and I’ve been watching them operate in some locked-down survival mode. I’ve been talking and writing about them mechanically, from a stoic distance. I expected bits to thaw eventually because I’m just a big softie at heart – I even expected traveling to help with that. Now it’s starting to happen, to my surprise and relief. There’s something very inconvenient about it happening with a new foreign friend in the middle of a long trip, but I’ve got time to sort it all out, and I’m up to the task.

On Saturday morning I finally grabbed a bus to Ayr, on the coast, and hitchhiked down to Cairnryan, where the ferry leaves several times a day for Belfast. I realized very quickly that trying to meet my aunt in Dublin at this point would be a mad and futile dash, and I decided to find peace in the path I’d taken. Some healthy cognitive dissonance had kept me in a place that was very good for my soul, and the same cognitive dissonance finally pushed me onwards with the journey. After this trip, I’ll go on to live the rest of my life. First embrace the journey.

 

 

Edinburgh

The week of summer sun that carried me to Glasgow and St. Andrews finally gave way to the UK’s trademark drear. On the morning I would leave, David was beginning to feel symptoms of the cold that Anna and the wee baby Samuel had been powering through. There was no way I could avoid it, having lived a week in a room whose every surface is probably covered in a thin microscopic layer of Samuel’s mouth bacteria. But I would worry about that later; it was time to move.

Inverness, the biggest town up in the highlands, lies 150 miles to the north of where I was staying and seemed like a good goal for a day of travel. If I could get a ride in the morning, I would hitch up through the Cairngorms, spend a night in Inverness, and then head south to Edinburgh. But after an hour of no rides and the rain wearing down on me, a full day of travel began to lose its appeal. I rejoined the Westfalls for lunch, warmed my fingers, and changed my plans. Although trying to hitch on the other two major roads out of town yielded no results, I eventually found a ride west from the same roundabout I’d tried in the morning.

I understood about 50% of the words coming out of my drivers’ mouths. They were two young dudes driving a work van with room in the front for three, equipment and my pack in the back. They offered to drive me to the far end of Dundee, where a lot more north/south traffic passes through. I answered their questions about my traveling and the busking life while the radio played unfamiliar old pop songs that sounded startlingly dated. Hearing one of the guys sing softly along to this song made me feel as far from America as almost anything so far.

I was dropped off by a roundabout along a busy, high-speed road. The cars would gun their engines as soon as they were around the loop, and there wasn’t much room to pull off. But a short walk away was a gas station, and even though no more than one car passed through the exit any minute, I got a ride within five. Kids scooted over in the backseat to make room for me as The Smiths played and Tim and his Australian wife whose name I don’t remember welcomed me into their car. Their initial offer was to take me to Perth, which lies directly north of the bridge I would have to take to Edinburgh, but as they got to know me, they revised their offer to take me all the way to Dunfermline, the major town just north of the Queensferry Bridge over the Firth of Forth. Their son taunted their daughter with half-offered candy (he shared readily with me) while the parents asked questions about my life, occasionally interjecting the necessary parental lines to the kids: “Don’t you ever do this!”

My last hitchhiking site of the day was at a roundabout located directly above M90, shooting cars down onto the on-ramps and out to Dunfermline on the sides. I wasn’t picked up immediately, but the ride was a good one. Mike is a teacher, an older guy with the most professorly way about him – soft-spoken, glasses, sweater. Most of his clothes and accessories were maroon. Like many California drivers I’ve ridden with, he was quick to tell me that he’s hitchhiked before, making him eternally sympathetic to the hitchhiker. Mike did it decades ago, in hitching’s heyday, in Corsica while he was a university student in France, riding with his friends in the open back of a truck along the countryside. He went out of his way to take me to the city center, and as we passed through his home neighbourhood and eventual destination, he pointed out his wife chatting with a friend on a busy sidewalk. He rolled down the window and called to her. She didn’t hear him. “Ignoring me as usual,” he said.

J.K. Rowling is from the area, and Mike told me that her big gated mansion stands down the street from his house. I didn’t care quite enough to want to see it, but it’s fun to know that I’m now separated from the author by only two degrees at most. Before dropping me off near the castle, Mike gave me the names of some good live music pubs and pointed me towards the good areas of downtown. At the same time I was texting with Jane, the best girl in Glasgow, who also happens to work in Edinburgh, making her the best girl in both cities and a tour guide of vast worth. Having not found a Couchsurfing host, and beginning to feel the effects of the cold virus that had been spreading through my system all week, I was ready to have an easy night, and after telling me which areas I should check out and which streets might be good for busking, Jane dropped the bomb that there was a free outdoor showing of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, a cool movie that I saw part of on an IcelandAir plane once. I explored for a while to kill time, climbing up the steep, winding roads to the Old Town, where everything looks like Hogwarts, later joining a young busker for some instrumental folk jamming. And then Star Wars, which I’ve now seen five and a half times, which I am not ashamed of. Especially fun this time was the audience, who murmured giddily when the blatantly Scottish Guavian Death Gang spokesman and minor X-wing pilot had their lines, and cheered every time an old character first appeared or Rey did something really awesome. As my body shuddered with mildly-sick-chills (don’t tell Anna; she will feel terrible), the warmth of Scottish Star Wars fans kept me going.

Up until this point I had never stayed in a hostel – they’re barely a thing in America, and Couchsurfing had served me well so far. But how could I resist Haggis Hostels, just across the street from the park where Star Wars had just finished, whose mascot is a little wad of haggis with a hat on? I checked in and checked out, sleeping to the best of my ability in a mostly empty 12-bed room. I woke up feeling a little better, but not much. The weather was misty and cool. I putzed around in the National Museum of Scotland in the morning, taking little sitting breaks in between exhibits, and even a little podcast-fueled power nap in the cafe. Afterwards I dragged myself to a restaurant that served soup, which I’d been craving since the day before when I’d heard Anna Westfall was making some. I sipped my soup and tea over the course of a couple hours, endlessly amusing the waitress with my sleepy goofiness.

There’s a thing in the UK that we don’t have in the States called pub sessions. Pubs, already being a little homier than our bars, host pickup groups of local musicians on a regular basis to sit in a circle and play the folk music of the region. Sometimes these are closed and scheduled, but at Sandy Bell’s, the pub my driver Mike had recommended to me, right across the street from my soup restaurant and the hostel I’d decided I would stay at, has open sessions every night. After dropping off my stuff and laying down awhile at the hostel, I found my way into Sandy Bell’s. The musicians set up while I munched on a black-pudding-and-steak pie and discovered a Scottish beer that I really like, which is pretty rare for me. Although a friendly old musician (they were all over 50) invited me to join them, I decided to just sit back and watch. Scottish folk banjo doesn’t play chords as much as dances around the fiddle melody, kind of like a nice bouncy bass might. They sounded perfect.

My last full day in Edinburgh was easily the best one, Star Wars notwithstanding. I felt a lot better, my body still feeling the effects but my head finally clear and steady. I took my time in the hostel, befriending a Swiss traveler from the mountains who would be down to host me if I ever pass through. Then I mustered my strength and hiked up Arthur’s seat, a hefty hill in Holyrood Park, just a few blocks away from the Old Town. On a clear day, you the peak provides a beautiful view of the city and beyond. This was not a clear day – clouds hung low and swathed the city’s pointed roofs and spires in grey fog. I knew before I started the ascent that all I was going to see was the inside of a cloud, but I did it anyway, recognizing a distinctly British poor-me humor in the arguably wasted effort.

Eventually I climbed down, traversed the city center, and busked on Rose Street. It was a great spot – a busy but not overly wide pedestrian street called Rose Street, under a little overhang, with great acoustics – but it was a short busk, as I had plans to take the bus up to Leith, where Jane works, to grab some lunch. In downtown Edinburgh, tourists are everywhere, snapping pictures and buying retail products and worrying about buses. It seems like the only locals are the tour guides and restaurant employees. Leith must be where all the locals have fled to, a business area north of the city, up by the Firth. Nothing much to see except Jane, which was more than enough for me. She took a leisurely lunch break and sipped a pea soup while I puzzled at what the cafe employee had called a burrito (David had warned me about this). The filling was roughly correct, if not extremely Mexican in character, but the tortilla had apparently been run through a toaster oven, and it was served bare on a plate. When held erect, the burrito’s end promptly dissolved and spilled its contents onto the plate, giving Jane something to laugh about while I tried to salvage the meal.

Jane isn’t a fan of Edinburgh, and if you’re getting Glasgow and Edinburgh confused, she’ll send you this Buzzfeed list to illuminate the difference. While Edinburgh has some pretty cool spots and a lot of obvious historical beauty, to Jane it feels heartless, covered in facade, while Glasgow’s heartbeat is raucous and strong. And I’ll admit that Edinburgh didn’t tug at me in the same way. I felt very much like the visitor I was, and everyone around me looked like one too. You should all still go there, but one time may be enough.

After Jane went back to work and I puttered around the docks for a bit, I took the bus downtown and busked for another hour, filling the misted air of the narrow street with my strained voice. I was pretty satisfied with the sightseeing I’d accomplished; I was ready to just busk and enjoy some good company. I’d finally found a Couchsurfing host for the night, but I had a few hours to kill before she would be ready to meet me. Luckily for me, Jane comes through the city center before catching the train back to Glasgow, so we met for a drink at Dirty Dick’s, a pub with a very Harry Potter vibe, all darkly glimmering with clutter. I was having too much fun and left a good hour after I meant to, but it was fine. Did you know you can fit the word “wee” into literally any sentence? Just a wee fact.

My Couchsurfing profile is slowly developing a problem. Maybe you’ve already pieced it together. When I send requests to potential hosts (and in Edinburgh I had to send a good sixty of them before one worked out), I don’t really discriminate by age or sex. I just submit requests to people I don’t expect to clash with, so most people. The problem is that lately most of the people who accept my requests are 20-year-old girls. I don’t want my profile to be full of references from 20-year-old girls. It might give the wrong impression.

That being said, Malika is a 21-year-old French student doing a summer research program in Edinburgh. She’s hosting Couchsurfers in a shared, graffiti-covered kitchen/lounge in a sparsely populated student housing building she’s sublet for the summer. She shared a stir-fry with me and we talked about travel and life and music. She’s a veteran hitchhiker, an experienced traveler, and plays guitar – she’ll be quick to inform you that she doesn’t just strum chords, but plays pretty fluently in a lot of genres. She’s not pretentious about it, she just feels she deserves a little credit for playing classical and jazz guitar, which she does. She was interested in my banjo, and I insisted that she try it out, and she insisted that I play a little (I played the cover of Bowie’s “Heroes” that I’ve been working on translating into banjo. I slept well, and in the morning I would roll out of bed and figure out how to get back to Glasgow.

 

*The most European thing was happening next to me at the public library as I wrote the first half of this. Two Nigerian university students were sharing a computer. I glanced over and saw them chuckling over a Buzzfeed list counting consequences of dating Bulgarian women.  Then one of the librarians sat beside them to make conversation. She started in French because she misheard their accents, and they politely corrected her. She’s not French either, just Irish. Meanwhile, for many of us in America, meeting a Mexican is enough to startle us into silence.

A Course on Selflessness at St Andrews

David is one of my oldest and bestest friends. In our junior high days, when we were both unbearable doofuses, we belonged to the same Boy Scout Troop, he rising to their structured challenges and goals while I made regrettable jokes and was as unmotivated as a boy could ever be. Later, when we found ourselves classmates in high school, friendship came quickly and naturally. We experienced our life changes in parallel up through college, when we attended rival, neighboring, nearly identical schools. After undergrad, he got a big-boy degree at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and now he’s getting an even bigger degree at St Andrews University in Scotland. Before they left the States, I participated in his wedding to Anna, a fantastic girl whose curious mind and sharp wit and rugged compassion complement David’s ideally.

St Andrews is a historic town on the North Sea that happens to be the birthplace of golf, which I guess is like disc golf except you throw little balls instead of discs? It’s about 75 miles from Glasgow. I got a late start leaving; it was 3:00 p.m. when I arrived at Hitchwiki’s recommended spot to get a ride eastward. Hitchhiking out of a city is never easy. The Hitchwiki community’s consensus regarding Glasgow was that taking a bus to the edge of town wasn’t really worth it. So I took the subway to an on-ramp where a long merging lane strewn with debris tags alongside the main lane as it ascends to meet M8 – a perfect place for a car to pull over.

It wasn’t like Iceland, where a fifteen-minutes was abnormally long. This one took a patient hour and a half. Twice, young dudes offered to take me one or two exits down the road, but since I didn’t know if those places would be any better to hitch from, I turned them down. But I think I made the right call, because the ride I eventually did get was perfect. An American named Paul picked me up, driving back home with his wife, Heini, from Finland. They’re pastors at a church in Glasgow, living in a little village to the east called Gartcosh. When I told them what I was doing, they were super interested, especially when I let on that I’m a Christian. They took me to their home in Gartcosh, which was mostly packed up for their impending move to Redding, California, the site of their next ministry post. Though their kitchen was packed up, they had a bunch of premade sandwiches and other snacky bits that they imparted on me for the road. Back in the car, Paul offered to drive me a few exits further on my way, to a popular shopping area where he thought I’d be most likely to nab a ride. He listened to the short version of my story, and we talked about leaps of faith in life, the overratedness of stability. When he dropped me off, he gave me a few pounds and prayed for me on the side of the road, that I would have safe and expedient travels, and that in my travels I would find myself closer to God. I like this Paul.

His instincts were right about that spot. The highway on-ramp was a long, wide curve, and as soon as I set down my bag where the road straightens and put out my thumb, a car stopped for me in seconds. This time my ride was Raymond, a man from Hong Kong who lives in Manchester and works for BP near Falkirk. Raymond was so enthusiastic about what I was doing. Before getting the car moving again, he took a long, thoughtful look at his map to decide how far out of his way he wanted to go  on my behalf. He decided on North Queensferry, the town on the north end of a long, scenic bridge that crosses the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh. Raymond was down for a bit of adventure – he was going to spend the weekend in Scotland taking pictures and enjoying the early summer, so he was in no hurry to get anyplace in particular, listening to Adele softly (his music collection was playing in alphabetical order by artist, I noticed). We stopped on the south end of the bridge to take pictures, and if I hadn’t just been fed by Paul and Heini, he would have insisted on treating me to fish and chips in Queensferry. Raymond had the coolest British-Chinese accent, and his demeanor was contagiously buoyant as he told me about his travel experiences and how much he wanted to explore America one day. He ended up taking me even farther north than North Queensferry, and insisted that I send him a message on WhatsApp when I got to St Andrews. I hope that guy has a family someday, because he seems like he’d make a really fun dad.

He dropped me off about 30 miles from St Andrews, a very surmountable distance that I would eventually cover in four brief rides. The first was a couple young dudes from Jordan who took me to the far edge of Kirkcaldy, followed by Mike, looking like a severely Scottish Hank Schrader driving a huge black truck. Mike is a small-town, blue-collar guy who places a lot of value on his individual freedom (that thing we invented in America) and also happens to have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro (guided by a more outdoorsy friend), and hopes to pass the outdoorsmanship ambition onto his kids – they’re going on a local family climb this weekend. Then I rode in a tightly packed backseat to Upper Largo with two guys who spoke in the thickest, most unintelligible accents I’ve heard yet. They were super nice, but also seemed like the type who would beat you up over a football dispute. I’d love to say more about them, but I really understood only about one in ten of the undoubtedly kind words coming out of their mouths. Nice guys?

Upper Largo is not a big place. It sends a road directly to St Andrews, less than 10 miles away now. But it was about 8:00, and while my spot alongside the low-speed road was very visible, as I stood and fidgeted in the oncoming dusk it dawned on me that this was not a particularly well-traveled route. Having no particular reason to stay in Upper Largo, I began to walk – being a little closer wouldn’t hurt, although the idea of walking the rest of the way felt pretty grim. But the views were beautiful, and the low sun cast a gorgeously melancholy light on the sloping fields and wildflowers of the countryside.

I forgot to copy down the name of my last driver of the day, an Irishman who works on the famous golf courses at St Andrews, who slowed down for me on a whim. He told me he’d never picked up a hitchhiker before, but he’d always wanted to, and now he could cross it off his to-do list. We hardly had time to talk before he was guiding his car through the medieval city gates of St Andrews and asking if I knew my friends’ address.

The week since has been refreshingly slow. Samuel Westfall turns eight months old today, and while he’s no longer a newborn, he still demands a lot of attention. David and Anna have found reprieve in consistency. On a typical day, they will take turns caring for Samuel’s needs and their own: David making the grown-ups breakfast or lunch while Anna feeds the boy, David working on his research while Anna watches the boy and takes care of home life and I read or write or explore the town, David bouncing the boy while Anna makes dinner and I amuse myself idly. They insist upon me not helping too much. They’ve adapted well to this kind of schedule; as long as I hang around, spare time materializes for us to have rich conversations and get out into town together. This rhythm has felt stabilizing in my time of constant upheaval. Even now, I’m making dough for a deep-dish pizza while Anna catches up on domestic odds and ends, Samuel burbling and vocalizing and puttering around in his crib, David rewarding himself for a productive week of reading and writing by going to a coffeeshop to read and write some more.

I have a few married friends who are getting pretty stable, but Anna and David are only the second couple close to me to have a kid. While I don’t know if I’ll ever commit to another marriage or pursue parenthood, my own despair hasn’t shaken my faith in the worth of those institutions; spending time with this family would put anyone’s doubts to rest. Anna and David have undertaken an arduous, irrevocable course in selflessness, forsaking leisure and flexibility for something almost countercultural in its impracticality. And for all the adventure and millennial freedoms they’re postponing until their empty-nest period, the joy I see in their faces when little Samuel mirrors their smiles defies any cynical interpretation. They’re living in accordance with a deeply rooted purpose, and their spirits are drinking from an abundant well.

The weights of time and convention feel heavier here in St Andrews than anywhere I’ve lived. The place has been settled for over a thousand years, being a center of Scottish education for at least 800 of those, having played host to influential people and ideas for vastly longer than the USA has even existed. As fun and important as it is to be innovative and progressive, a place like St Andrews is a testament to permanence, legacy, conservation – progress that takes the past with it instead of cutting it off. I don’t know what to do with these ideas except to feel them. I suspect I’ll feel this way a lot as I travel across Europe. Do the locals feel the weight this way? I’ll have to find out.

I’m blasting out Couchsurfing requests like an Exeggutor using bullet seed, procrastinating on choosing between Inverness and Edinburgh as my next stop before heading back through Glasgow and onwards to Ireland, where between a Hope friend and a traveling aunt, I’ve got some other folks’ schedules to plan around. Things are gonna get pretty unpredictable for me after that. But for all the adventure that will bring, leaving one of my closest friends and his family in Scotland is going to be hard, and I’m going to do whatever I can to bring something of their family’s love with me on the road.