Ireland

Of all the places I saw on my trip, none moved me as much as southern Ireland. Once we were off the ferry and rolling through the hills in the coach, an endless vista of green unfolded, and for whatever reason, it didn't feel like a "foreign land" at all. It felt familiar. I don't know how that's possible.

Everybody commented on this, and on how much it looked like Mississippi. It did and it didn't. I have noticed that no matter where I am, there are always bits that look like home. A wise friend of mine in Japan laughed and told me once, "This is the Earth. It is all the same. Of course it looks like home."

The sheer physical beauty of it was overwhelming. I can see why it's a country of poets and singers. Who wouldn't be inspired just by looking out the front door each morning? I could come up with half a dozen smilies or metaphors about it right now off the top of my head.

Everywhere in Ireland there were roses. They bloomed and flourished in the climate like a garden in a dream. I wish I could get mine to look half so healthy. Walking down the side of any random road, you could smell the fragrance from them. It was divine.

There was also a pervasive sense of history layering over the whole. As we drove along, it was common to see the ruins of a tower or church sitting out in a field. Apparently, they were as unremarkable an occurrence for the locals as a tumbledown barn would have been for us. It never ceases to amaze me how young my own country is, and how little recorded history we have (Native American traditions excluded) when I travel like this. Most of those piles of stone had been ruins longer than we have been a free nation.

It wasn't just the rural parts of Ireland that I loved. I also, surprisingly enough, like Dublin quite a bit, too. I'm not a big city person as a rule, but the feel of the city was comfortable. It didn't feel "too big", and as I was running around either with or without the group, I felt like I could probably have managed it.

All in all, Ireland was the most comfortable place I was during the whole of the trip. As soon as we got on the ferry to leave, I felt a sense of loss. I'm trying hard not to romance it. I don't believe it's any sort of "ancestral connection", but I do know that I wanted to go back almost as soon as I was gone, if for no other reason than to wonder around in all that soft, glowing greenness.