Our days in Ireland were always numbered, and we’ve just about run out of them. Our whirlwind tour of Ireland is coming to an end here in Galway; tomorrow we leave for Dublin and the airport and go our separate ways, in my case, flying to Japan for a six-week stay. The road trip continues!
I must sound like a broken record: I still haven’t uploaded my photos. But by next week, I promise to get started writing about my travels in Scotland and Ireland. I have a category in my blog archive called “On the Road,” which is, as you can imagine, a travelog of where I’ve been. It’s nice to have a blog that serves as a memory holder. I remember my first road trip in On the Road was Bridget’s and my trip to Ireland in 2012, so 2026 is like a continuation of the party, just a different chapter. I look forward to sharing it. But that’s next week.
Oh, and when I say “promise,” I don’t really mean promise, but I do have great intentions.
Meantime, in this brief time before the travelog begins, I wanted to talk about my book in the context of place. Place is very important to the Irish, where you were born, your traditions, your people, your land. Until I started researching and writing my book, I wasn’t much of a place person, but that all changed with the book. My place is Ireland.
My heroine Brigit’s place was Clare(now called Clarecastle) and her closest town was Ennis, both in County Clare in western Ireland. Let me digress here for a moment to describe part of my writing process as it pertains to writing a novel. When I am settling in to write the next scene in the book, I sit in my Adirondack chair, lean back, close my eyes, and go to Caledonia in my mind and imagine the next scene. Some people confuse that process with sleeping, so I always have to tell them that I am writing. Which of course they don’t believe because who writes with their eyes closed?
Nonetheless, with my eyes closed, I transport myself to 1848 Ireland and create the next scene. For all intents and purposes, I live in Ireland like it’s my home as long as I have my eyes closed. And while they are closed, I am the director of my movie; when I open my eyes and start writing down the scene, I am writing the screenplay to my movie.
Back before I digressed … my heroine’s place was Clarecastle. After seven years and nine months of being in Clarecastle every time I closed my eyes in the Adirondack chair, I had a real need to go to my character’s home and let her touch the earth where she lived and breathed.
To turn the need into a reality, we booked in one night in Ennis on our way to Galway, Our one day in Ennis was more like a two-thirds day, to allow us to get back on the bus and get to Galway before dark. To give you a picture of how small Clarecastle is, we caught the bus from Ennis shortly after noon, were sitting at the diner in Clarecastle eating our lunch by 12:30 and were done with our tour of the town and back in Ennis by 3. It was all the time I needed though. Enough time to walk in Brigit’s footsteps and feel her place.
As grand as that tour of Clarecastle was, it only came to be because my real reason for stopping in Ennis was to catch up with Joe Power, whom I thank for giving me the ever-important place of my book, both through his book “A History of Clare Castle and Its Environs” and for taking me under his wing and showing me the places, putting them in my head and heart. Without Joe, I wouldn’t have written the book I wrote. It’s been 10 years since he took me romping through Killone Abbey and for tea at Dromoland. Ten years ago I told Joe that this was the easy part, referring to the research (both reading and romping); that the hard part was yet to come. And now even the hard part is done. If you don’t count the next hard part about getting my book out there. But that’s for another day.
This week, we have Tom Waits …
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