Sligo, Ireland

I first became interested in Ireland during my misguided youth, an unfortunately timed combination of reading Gone With the Wind and watching P.S. I Love You. When I went to the country for the first time, it basically equated or surpassed the high expectations that the media had built up in my 12-year-old mind. Now that I’m older and wiser, however, I appreciate Ireland for way more sophisticated reasons, like James Joyce and soda bread and wool cardigans and that layer of foam that comes on top of Guinness.

So Ireland basically had to be a part of this trip or I sensed that I would probably regret it forever. When planning, there are only two travel resources that I trust with my life. The first is Anthony Bourdain who can do no wrong and always points me towards the best food. And the second is Frommers’ which are by far the best-written travel guides. This way, if anything goes wrong on the trip, I can either blame Anthony or Frommers’ for their misinformation.

Naturally, as endorsed by Frommers’, we booked a one-night stay in a farmhouse B&B in Sligo, a very VERY small town in rural RURAL Western Ireland whose claim to fame is inspiring basically every W.B. Yeats poem. (Seriously, they’re very into Yeats. Downtown Sligo is plastered with Yeats poems, and one store had a dozen mannequins in a store window who ALL had Yeats’ face). As an urban studies major, I do not know that much about rural life, except maybe that they’re in charge of producing the food for my city. And I especially don’t know anything about rural Irish life, except that I think Seamus Heaney came from a line of potato farmers. In my limited imagination, I basically just assume that people on farms do a lot of sitting around and singing ballads, like in that one Jennifer Lawrence movie where they make meth in Appalachia.

The Sligo B&B was about a three-hour drive from our airport in Belfast, Northern Ireland (the UK, not the REAL Ireland). We rented a nice little automatic car and a GPS (or “nav set” as the locals call it) for the occasion. There are a couple of things that are problematic for naïve, suburban Americans when driving in Ireland. The first is immediately obvious, that you have to sit on the “wrong” side of the car and drive on the “wrong” side of the road. The second we didn’t discover until much later and far too late, which is that all of the rural roads are treacherous in every way imaginable: narrow, windy, fast, unlit, scary, heavily rained upon, smell like cows, etc, all things that Frommer’s somehow forgot to mention.

After a very frustrating yet scenic drive through bucolic Ireland, we arrived at the B&B in the middle of a deathly quiet farm. We pulled up to the car park and were met by a grandmotherly lady in an apron who had been waiting for us. She ushered us inside and asked us if we wanted some tea (we did) and told us to meet her in the main house after dropping off our luggage.

We were clearly the only people at this B&B, and by this time, it was 9:30 pm, my typically jet lag bedtime, and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone ever again, even if they were the world’s nicest elderly Irish farming couple. But we went onwards to get tea anyways and spent the evening chatting it up with our hostess and her husband. Luckily her husband mainly wanted to tell us about their trip to Turkey in great detail, peppered with the occasional story of someone’s tragic death, so we mostly just had to sit there and listen.

In the morning, our hostess had breakfast waiting for us: fresh bread with jam, yogurt with granola, coffee, juices, eggs on toast, bacon, and grilled tomatoes. It was very kind, but it’s just such an awkward dynamic when you’re the only guests at a B&B and are being waited on. I don’t think I’m a B&Bing person, but it was fun to give it a go, and I learned a lot about Turkey.