Seanie smoked a pipe. That’s what I remember most about him — not his face, not his voice, but the particular smell of him, warm and woody, the tobacco announcing his presence. He was my godfather, and he was fun in the unhurried way that certain adults are fun to children. Then he died, and someone brought me to see his body, and I stood at the casket and looked at him.

He was cold and blue.

I remember the observation more than the grief. The way the colour had gone out of him, the stillness that was nothing like sleep. I was sad, I knew I was sad, but I stood there and I looked, and I filed it away. I was about 14 years old, and I was doing something I would spend the rest of my life doing without knowing it had a name.

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In Irish, you don’t say I am sad.

You say Tá brón orm. Sadness is upon me. The emotion arrives from outside, settles on you like weather, like a hand on your shoulder. You are not sad. Sadness has come to where you are. You keep a gap between the self and the feeling, preserve the self as separate, as the location of the emotion rather than the emotion itself.

The same pattern runs through the whole emotional register of this beautiful language. Tá fearg orm — anger is on me. Tá áthas orm — happiness is on me. The feelings visit. They do not define.

I don’t know if there’s a proven link between grammar and psychology. But I do believe that language affects thought, nudges it, reinforces orientations that were already there. That grammar and culture co-evolve, each shaping the other across centuries.

What I can say for sure is, standing at Seanie’s casket in the Mortuary Chapel in Naas Hospital, I was doing something the language had a structure for. I was letting the sadness be upon me without letting it be me. I was 14 years old and I was, without knowing it, thinking in Irish.

My parents had brought me to see Seanie. I was the oldest so they probably thought I was ready. I remember watching them, they knew what to do. Where to stand. What to say.

I don’t remember them crying. I had never, in my child life, seen either of my parents cry. Crying did happen in our house, we kids cried for all kinds of reasons, but Mam and Dad were always stoic.

Funerals came and went. Neighbours died. Relatives died. The adults gathered in kitchens and groups outside the door of the church. Cups of tea appeared, sandwiches were made, arrangements handled. My mother is the one I have always turned to. She is the one who knows what to do. She showed me that being practical was a useful way to deal with grief. That this was, in fact, what was required of you.

A few months ago, I was at the Giants Causeway hiking back up from the stones. I had been delaying but finally called a friend I had meant to call earlier. My breath was a little labored as the incline increased, my attention split between the physical effort of the hill and the emotional weight of the conversation. We work together, know each other well, the kind of friendship built on years on the road. His wife has cancer. Things don’t look good.

He told me about her treatment in the particular way that people tell you about terrible things when they are trying to manage the telling. Leading with the positive, the pain management going well, some semblance of normal life maintained, the doctors cautiously this or cautiously that. She had moved downstairs into the new extension he had finished recently. He was holding it at arm’s length. I recognised it immediately. I have done it myself.

And I said …. I don’t remember exactly what I said.

Something.

Something that acknowledged what he was going through, that expressed care, that tried to land in the right place.

But I felt, as I said it, the inadequacy of the words. The way they sat on the surface of what was actually happening.

His wife is dying. He knows it. I know it. And I was on the phone, reaching for something, and coming up with phrases. Warm but insufficient. Present but not quite there.

I felt, when I hung up, embarrassed. Not by anything I’d said. By the distance I couldn’t close.

Tá brón orm. Sadness is on me.

Keeping emotion at arm’s length is a way of surviving grief, of remaining functional, of standing at a casket when you are 14 years old and not being destroyed by what you’re looking at. It works.

I have moved through difficult things in my life with a steadiness I am genuinely grateful for.

We all develop a method to get through life. The question I find myself asking now is whether the same method that protects us can also keep something out.

I feel inadequate in moments of grief. Give me a problem and I will look for the solution. Give me a crisis and I will find the next thing that needs doing. But place me beside someone whose pain cannot be fixed, and I sometimes don’t know where to put my hands.

My parents modelled a coping mechanism that served me from childhood to adulthood. When someone I care about is drowning in their brón, I am not fluent in that language. I, who normally have an easy line of small talk, am struck dumb.

Seanie is cold and blue in my memory, and the tobacco smell is gone. My friend’s wife is dying, and I didn’t know what to say. My parents endured their sorrows privately, and I watched, and here I am.

Tá brón orm. The sadness is on me. It visits, and I observe it, and I remain standing. I am not sure, anymore, whether this is inheritance or identity. Whether it could have been otherwise. Whether I would want it to be.

I think now of my mother, dry-eyed at every graveside I can remember. I used to think that meant grief did not reach her. Now I wonder if she simply carries it differently.

And I wonder what it costs her. I have never asked.

Alex Jabolowski asked me the question over dinner at Lyrath Estate in Kilkenny. We were on the last night of the tour, the farewell dinner, that particular mix of relief and mild melancholy that settles over a group when they realise they’ve run out of days. Alex was an engineer from the midwest, newly retired, a genuinely likeable man who had spent the two weeks in a state of quiet amazement. This was his first trip outside the United States. He had looked at the castle ruins and the country roads with the attention of someone who was making up for lost time. His eyes lit up when he saw the pints of Guinness settling on the bar and engaged in conversation with anyone nearby.

He leaned across the table and asked, “Do you ever get homesick?”

He meant Seattle. He meant Liz, and our house, and the life he imagined I was missing while I shepherded twenty-six Americans around the country of my birth. It was a kind question, the kind that comes from genuine curiosity rather than small talk. Alex had spent two weeks watching me work and had concluded, not unreasonably, that I led a remarkable life. He was not wrong. But it is not that simple.

I told him I missed my own bed. That part was true.

What I didn’t tell him, what I was still working out as I said it, was that the question had me a bit shook. Standing in Kilkenny, in the country where I grew up, I was being asked if I missed home. And the honest answer was more complicated than either of us had time for over the remains of a farewell dinner.

When I am in Ireland leading a tour, I miss Liz. I miss the life she is living without me in Seattle, the dinners with friends, the easy weekends, the rhythm of a life that carries on perfectly well in my absence, which is both reassuring and, if I’m honest it makes me a little sad. I miss the sun, which is funny to Americans who have not experienced the character-building properties of Atlantic weather. I miss my life. I miss sitting on the couch watching Jeopardy with Liz, each of us shouting out answers to questions and making arbitrary judgements about the contestants.

When I am in Seattle, I miss my family. I miss the particular ease of Irish conversation, the way strangers will talk to you in a shop as if they’ve known you for years. I miss the weight of history that sits in every field, every ruined abbey and every corner in every town. I miss the banter. It looks like argument. It sounds like insult. It is, in fact, a form of love.

So, there it is. I am always missing something. The question is just which half.

There is a version of my life that looks, from the outside, like freedom. No fixed office, no commute, constantly moving through remarkable places with interesting people. Alex had been looking at this version for the last fortnight. I could see it in the way he framed his question, the assumption that the only thing I might be homesick for was wherever I wasn’t.

What he couldn’t see, because I hadn’t shown him, was the other version. The one where home has become more complicated. Not in a romantic way, but in a practical, slightly disorienting way. I have moved on. My life is in Seattle now, with Liz, and that is not a consolation prize, it is my actual life, the one I chose, the one I want. But Ireland was where everything happened first.

When I drive down the coast from the Cliffs of Moher, I can’t help thinking of eating Tayto in the back of the car on family holidays while my father muttered as we got stuck in traffic in Ennistymon. Sitting in Kilkenny, I could feel the weight of memory. The ache wasn’t for a place so much as for a version of myself that belonged somewhere without having to think about it.

Alex couldn’t have known any of this. Guests rarely do. They see the performance, the knowledgeable guide, the polished anecdote, the appearance of a man entirely at ease in the landscape he is describing. The performance is real, by the way. I’m not pretending to love this country or this work. But it is still a performance, and what it necessarily leaves out is the interior monologue running alongside it. On the coach I’m answering questions about Vikings while mentally calculating when the electricity bill is due.

The interior monologue that night, in Kilkenny, went something like: You are standing in the country where you grew up, being asked if you miss home, and you cannot give a straight answer because you have two of them and neither is complete.

Alex finished his wine and said he thought I had the best job in the world. I thanked him and meant it. It is a privilege, and I know that. As the gathering broke up, I said my goodbyes to everyone. I went to my room and even though it was nearly 10pm the June light came in through the window.

He was a newly retired man on his first trip abroad, seeing a world that had always been there, wondering what it would feel like to move through it with the ease I appeared to have. What he was really asking, I think, was: Is this as good as it looks?

The answer, like most honest answers, is yes and no.

Yes, because I get to do work I believe in, in places that still astonish me, with people who are genuinely trying to experience something beyond their ordinary lives. Alex himself was evidence of that, a man in his sixties, who was out of his comfort zone.

No, because home is not a place you can carry with you, no matter what anyone tells you. It’s a feeling of not needing to explain yourself, to the landscape, to the people in it, and most importantly to yourself. And when you have two homes, you are always, on some level, a guest in both of them.

When I am in Seattle people say I have such an Irish accent. When I am in Ireland people tell me I sound American.

I am Irish in Seattle and I am an emigrant in Ireland.

I am at home in both places and fully settled in neither.

Inside, the evening was already well advanced. He could tell from the looseness in the voices that the drinking had been going on for a while. He was brought to the fire, his cloak taken, a glass pressed into his hand before he had fully settled.

The family spoke Irish to the servants and English to each other, the way people did in houses like this, navigating between two worlds in the same evening. They asked about the roads, about who he had visited, what news he carried from the east. A harper arriving was a kind of newspaper. He told them what he had heard: a fever in two townlands south of Strokestown, a land dispute near Boyle going badly for the Catholic side, a wedding in Sligo where the dancing went on until the candles burned to nothing.

Then someone asked him to play.

He settled the harp against his shoulder, the wire strings cold under his fingers for a moment before the room’s warmth reached them. He played a slow air first, the way you might ease into a conversation. Then a planxty he had composed for the Joneses of Meath, Protestant merchants who had fed him well two winters past. The music owed something to the Italian style he had been hearing in the drawing rooms of the big Anglo-Irish houses, the harmonies that had come in from the continent along with the new furniture and the wine. As the night became old and the fire was low, he could feel the room settling into something older. He played a modal air in the Gaelic manner, the kind of thing his teacher’s teacher might have played before the Flight of the Earls had emptied the Ulster courts.

Nobody in the room commented on the distance between the two kinds of music.

They didn’t need to. They lived with these two worlds every day.

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Turlough O’Carolan was born in 1670 near Nobber in County Meath, the son of a small tenant farmer, part of the Catholic Gaelic population living under increasingly difficult conditions. When he was still a boy, the family moved west to Ballyfarnon in County Roscommon, where his father found work with the MacDermott Roe family. They were a branch of the old Gaelic aristocracy who had managed to hold onto some of their land through the upheavals of the previous decades.

At eighteen he contracted smallpox. He survived but lost his sight. This would mean he could not work on the farm and might be confined to a life of dependence.

Through the MacDermott Roes he received training on the harp and, when he reached his early twenties, was given a horse, a guide, and he set out on the road that would occupy the rest of his life.

To understand what O’Carolan was travelling through, it helps to understand what Ireland had recently been.

The Gaelic world that had sustained the harpers for centuries operated on a principle that seems almost impossible to modern ears: that poetry and music were not entertainment but an essential structure of society. The hereditary filid, the learned poet class, held legal status equivalent to bishops. They preserved genealogy, recorded history, celebrated military victories, and destroyed reputations through satire with a precision that could take generations to repair. The harper accompanied the recitation of formal verse at court. Between them, the poet, the reciter, and the harper constituted a kind of cultural memory system for the Gaelic aristocracy. This was how families were remembered, legitimized, and sustained across time.

The bardic schools that trained the poets had been operating in Ireland since at least the 12th century. Their curriculum was punishing by any standard. It took twelve years minimum to attain the highest rank, and mastery of hundreds of metres. Students were given a subject at nightfall, then spent the following day in a darkened room composing entirely from memory. Only when evening came and the candles were lit did they write anything down.

The system produced something remarkable, a literate oral tradition, equally at home in manuscript and memory, that had survived Norman invasion, plague, and repeated political disruption for four centuries.

What it could not survive was the 17th century.

The defeat of the Ulster chieftains at Kinsale in 1601 broke the political independence of the last significant Gaelic lordships. The Flight of the Earls in 1607 removed the remaining great patrons from Ireland entirely. Ninety-nine Ulster lords and their families boarded ships at Rathmullan for the continent. Most of them would never return. The poets who had served them were left behind with their learning intact and nobody left who could pay for it. The Cromwellian conquest of the 1650s finished the job. Catholic landownership was devastated through confiscation and plantation. The remaining Gaelic families who might have sustained what was left of the old cultural system lost their land along with everything else.

By the time O’Carolan was born, Catholic families owned twenty-two percent of Irish land while comprising seventy-five percent of its population. By fifty years after his death, that land ownership would fall to five percent. The old Gaelic aristocracy, who had been patrons of harpers and bardic schools for centuries, were impoverished, scattered, or scrambling to adapt to the new order. The hereditary bardic schools had largely collapsed. The poets who had been trained in them were working as hedge schoolmasters or dying in poverty, writing laments for a tradition they watched dissolving in real time.

Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, probably the last poet trained in a classical bardic school, spent his final years doing agricultural labour. He died in 1698, the year O’Carolan was beginning to establish himself on the road. His poem D’Aithle Na bhFileadh — “The High Poets Are Gone” — had already said everything that needed saying about where things stood.

The Ireland O’Carolan travelled through was a land of tattered remnants and uneasy coexistence.

The great Gaelic houses that welcomed him were living in circumstances considerably diminished from their grandparents’ time. Their military power was gone, their political authority broken, their land confiscated. Irish remained the everyday language of rural Connacht and Ulster, but it was losing ground in the towns and among families who needed to navigate the new order. Songs, stories, and genealogies still passed from person to person around turf fires. Fragments of the old world survived but the formal structures that had sustained and organised that culture were gone.

The houses O’Carolan arrived at were navigating two worlds simultaneously, as the scene in any well-appointed Roscommon drawing room would demonstrate. Conversations moved between Irish and English depending on who sat at the table.

The new furniture from Dublin. The old Gaelic hospitality customs, maintained with a stubbornness that was partly pride and partly the only form of continuity available.

The other Ireland being built alongside this one was prospering considerably. The end of the Williamite war after 1691 had confirmed Protestant political dominance. The Penal Laws that followed restricted Catholic rights to land, education, and public life, with new legislation added throughout the 1690s and into the 18th century.

The major redistribution of land after the seventeenth century created substantial estates ruled by what would be called in Ireland, the Protestant Ascendancy. The small Anglican ruling class consisted of aristocrats, landowners, barristers, politicians, clergymen, military officers, all prominent professions that by practice and law had been closed to Catholics by the penal laws.

Dublin during O’Carolan’s career was transforming from a medieval town into something approaching a European capital, for the Ascendancy at least. Jonathan Swift held the deanship of St. Patrick’s Cathedral from 1713. Handel conducted the world premiere of the Messiah in the city in 1742. The great Georgian terraces were going up. For the members of the Ascendancy at least, Dublin was a city of elegance and wit and genuine cosmopolitan ambition.

O’Carolan moved between these two Irelands because he had no choice. Blindness had already taught him to navigate by what he could hear rather than what he could see. Though Catholic and rooted in Gaelic culture, he was welcomed in Protestant Anglo-Irish houses as readily as in old Gaelic ones. His music flattered and honoured his hosts wherever he found them. He composed tunes called planxties, named for patrons, “Planxty John Irwin,” “Planxty George Brabazon,” “Planxty O’Rourke”. The names alone tell you he was moving across a social landscape that the political situation had theoretically divided into opposing camps.

Over five decades on the road he composed lively tribute pieces for patrons and friends, lyrical airs with Irish-language words he wrote himself, and solemn laments marking deaths in the houses he visited. His work carried forward the older bardic function of elegy even as the institutions that had formalized it were long gone. More than two hundred tunes have been positively identified as his work.

What makes O’Carolan genuinely fascinating, rather than merely historically poignant, is what he did with what he heard.

The Baroque era was transforming European music during his lifetime. Corelli had reorganized how composers thought about harmony and musical structure. Vivaldi, Handel, and their contemporaries were producing work of a kind that had no precedent in earlier centuries. These sounds reached Ireland through the Anglo-Irish estates visited by O’Carolan. The Protestant Ascendancy maintained strong ties to London and the continent, bringing imported sheet music, and visiting musicians.

O’Carolan absorbed them. Pieces like Carolan’s Concerto carry clear Baroque influences, harmonic movement, and structural logic, woven into Irish harp music in a way that sounds entirely natural. The older modal qualities of the Gaelic harp tradition sit beside continental harmonic structures without apparent strain.

He was not a museum piece of vanishing Gaelic culture, and he was not a musician trading his inheritance for fashionable continental styles. He was something more interesting than either. He was a man who had absorbed both traditions so completely that he moved between them without apparent effort.

That is not a small thing. The formal Gaelic poetic tradition of the time had responded to political catastrophe largely by turning inward. The aisling poets of O’Carolan’s generation encoded their Jacobite politics in dream-vision references and yearned for a defeated Catholic Gaelic world. They composed elaborate laments for the lost world in traditional Gaelic forms, even as the audience who could appreciate such work shrank.

O’Carolan’s music crossed the line those poets could not or would not cross. It was heard and valued on both sides of the divide that the 17th century had cut through Irish life. That is partly why he survived as a working musician when so many of his poetic contemporaries died in poverty.

Within a few decades of O’Carolan’s death in 1738, the old harp tradition had contracted so dramatically that people feared it might disappear entirely. That fear produced the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, where the surviving elderly harpers gathered so their music could be written down before it was gone. Edward Bunting sat beside them and notated what he heard. A remarkable portion of what he preserved were O’Carolan’s compositions, still being played by musicians who themselves represented the final generation of a tradition stretching back centuries.

You could spend a long time arguing about exactly what O’Carolan represents. The end of Gaelic Ireland. The survival of it. The point at which Irish culture absorbed a new world rather than being destroyed by it. He was probably all three at once, which is what makes him more interesting than the romantic image of the blind bard on the misty road.

He died at the home of the MacDermott Roe family, where it had all begun. Tradition holds that he asked for one final cup of whiskey before he went, so that two old friends might part in good cheer.

On July 31, 1970, something quietly monumental happened aboard all ships of the Royal Navy scattered around the remnants of the British Empire. At exactly 11:00 a.m. the call rang out:

“Up spirits.”

For a brief moment the ordinary sounds of the ship seemed to pause: engines humming below deck, boots against steel, the hiss of sea wind along the rail.

This call had been heard on ships of the Royal Navy for centuries, but this time, it was the last.

The smell of navy rum drifted across the deck as the cask was opened: molasses, alcohol, and oak, familiar to sailors long before anyone aboard had been born.

One uniformed sailor pumps rum from the cask into a bucket. The bucket of rum is then poured into a barrel of water. Another officer uses a huge dipper with a 5 foot handle to stir up the rum in the barrel.

Then sailors line up with buckets, one for each detachment. The officer fills the buckets with the mixture of rum and water as the line moves through. The buckets are shared among the men with a solemn sense of history.

That final issue of rum marked the end of a tradition that had shaped naval life since 1655. Sailors called it Black Tot Day, and they didn’t let it pass unnoticed.

Water in medieval times was often contaminated and not safe to drink. Low-alcohol “small beer” resisted bacterial growth better than stored water.

Fresh water in barrels deteriorated quickly, especially in warm climates or on long voyages. Beer spoiled too but generally lasted longer and was more palatable.

By the time of the Tudor navy under Henry VIII in the early 1500s, beer was already a standard naval provision. In fact, beer was so central to shipboard life that naval logistics were often planned around it.

The quantities were astonishing by modern standards. Sailors could receive up to ten pints of weak beer per day. This was not modern-strength ale, “small beer” was about 1-2% alcohol.

Beer also served another important purpose: calories.

Life aboard a warship was brutally physical. Sailors climbed rigging slick with rain and tar, hauled wet rope until their hands split open, and cannon crews worked in suffocating heat below deck. Beer functioned partly as liquid food, helping sustain men through exhausting labor and poor diets.

Beer, however, had major logistical disadvantages. Chief among them was the sheer amount of space it required.

Naval provisioning records from the Tudor and Stuart periods show how massive beer consumption really was. A fleet preparing to sail might load thousands of barrels of beer alongside salted beef, biscuit, cheese, and dried peas. Supplying beer was one of the Navy’s largest logistical tasks.

In warm climates the barrels could turn quickly. Beer soured, water grew stagnant, and sailors sometimes drank with one hand covering their nose against the smell. On long voyages, a ration that could survive months at sea without spoiling became more than a convenience, it became a necessity.

As England expanded overseas, especially into the Caribbean, stronger distilled spirits became more practical. This started with gin, but after England captured Jamaica in 1655, rum became abundant and cheap within Britain’s imperial trade network. The daily rum ration, known as the tot, was introduced in 1655.

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Rum eventually replaced beer as the primary spirit ration because it lasted indefinitely, required less storage space and transported efficiently.

When first introduced, sailors received a half-pint of rum per day. This was not refined sipping rum by modern standards. Naval rum was powerful, rough liquor, often around 100 proof. It was seen as essential for morale given the brutal conditions on board.

However, it led to problems. The sailors would drink it quickly and get drunk or hoard it for a few days and drink it all at once. This caused drunkenness, accidents, poor discipline, and operational problems aboard ship.

In 1740 Admiral Edward Vernon introduced reforms to the system. He ordered sailors to dilute the rum with water and mix it with lime or lemon juice and sugar. And most importantly the sailors must consume it under supervision. No more hoarding.

The total alcohol allocation remained but diluting it slowed consumption and reduced immediate drunkenness. It was a practical compromise.

The ration was rarely consumed alone. Messmates gathered around battered tubs and shared the drink together, turning it into a daily act of camaraderie.

Edward Vernon was nicknamed “Old Grog” by sailors because he frequently wore a cloak made from grogram cloth, a coarse silk-and-wool fabric. The nickname was transferred to the diluted rum itself. So, “Old Grog’s drink” became simply grog.

Over time, the ration was reduced. What began as a half-pint became just one-eighth of a pint (about 70 ml) by the mid-19th century.

Yet the tradition endured through the transition from sail to steam, and later into the age of radar, missiles, and nuclear submarines.

By the late 1960s, naval technology had transformed warfare at sea. Modern warships relied on increasingly complex electronic systems and rapid-response operations. Concerns grew that daily alcohol consumption no longer matched the standards required of modern sailors.

In December 1969, the Admiralty Board announced that the rum ration would end.

The decision sparked what became known as “The Great Rum Debate” in the British Parliament. Among those defending the tradition was MP James Wellbeloved, who argued that rum strengthened morale and fighting spirit.

But the decision stood.

The tot would disappear.

When Black Tot Day arrived, sailors understood they were witnessing the end of something larger than a daily drink. The tot had become ceremony.

It marked a pause in the rhythm of naval life. It connected modern sailors to generations who had crossed oceans under sail, fought wars, survived storms, and served aboard ships made of wood rather than steel.

Sailors didn’t treat it like an ordinary day. Across the fleet, they marked the moment with a mix of humor, defiance, and genuine grief. The final tots were issued with unusual ceremony. In some cases, officers even read formal statements.

Some sailors wore black armbands. Others staged mock funerals for the rum ration. At the Royal Naval Electrical College, a full funeral procession was held, complete with a coffin. Sailors marched behind the black cloth draped coffin while others stood silently at attention, half amused and half sincere in their mourning.

The tot was a ritual that cut across all ranks and represented a tangible link to sailors stretching back centuries. The daily pause in the rhythm of naval duty had defined the life of sailors for over 300 years.

Sailors who gave up the tot were compensated financially, in what became known as “grog money.” And rum itself remained tied to naval identity, just no longer part of the daily routine.

Today, Black Tot Day is still remembered by naval historians, enthusiasts, and former sailors. Commemorative bottles of navy rum are produced, and the story continues to fascinate people far beyond maritime circles.

Part of that fascination comes from the sheer improbability of it all: a centuries-old institution issuing daily rum aboard armed warships well into the modern age.

Black Tot Day marked the moment when the modern Navy finally severed one of its oldest living links to the age of sail.

Most grabbed their envelopes with quick thanks. But one older man lingered at the back, hands in his pockets like he was apologizing for taking up space.

When he finally stepped forward, I pulled out his ticket.

“Here you go, Edward.”

He looked up sharply. Not flattered. Surprised, in the way someone reacts when they’re not used to being singled out at all.

“You remembered my name,” he said in a soft-spoken voice, like he was surprised.

He took the envelope carefully, nodded, and walked inside. His shoulders were a little straighter than before.

That’s when I realized: the ticket wasn’t what mattered.
It was the name.

A moment of being seen in a city that forgets people.

People assume I’m good at remembering names. I am, but I have to work at it, and sometimes I mess up.

It happened once in Alaska, at the Glacier Brewhouse in Anchorage. Last night of the tour, everyone was in high spirits. I was going around the table thanking people, offering a few words to each couple.

And then it happened. Blank. Panic.
There was a lady traveling alone, Her face, familiar; her name ? in my mind somewhere but I couldn’t get it out.

It lasted three seconds but felt like an eternity. I tried to cover it with warmth, humor, a gentle “my friend.” She smiled kindly, but I saw it: that flicker of disappointment. Not anger, just a realization that I had forgotten.

I remembered her name at 3 a.m., of course, when memory is cruelly sharp. But the damage was done.

That night I understood something I’d only felt before:

Remembering someone’s name isn’t about professionalism or showing off.
It’s about dignity.

A name says: You matter.

In this hectic world, it’s a connection. We are all human and the name we call ourselves, is a foundation of who we are. Some people prefer a nickname or an entirely different name than the one bureaucracy uses. That is who they are and meeting people where they are is the key to connection.

People think I have a secret. I don’t. There are only systems, repetition, and the determination to make people feel seen.

For me, writing people’s names helps me, typing works too. I handwrite luggage tags for people, I write name tags, and I type name cards for the coach. All these things help me in advance. Then at the welcome event, I meet each person individually. I hand them something with their name on it, a luggage tag, a name tag. I confirm pronunciation.

Then I circle the tables and confirm names and faces. Guests will see me muttering to myself as I float from table to table. Hopefully by the end of the night, I can notice the things which matter.

A few things seem to make a difference. When someone asks to be called by a different name or shortened name, that registers, somehow making it easier. Maybe it’s because it is clearly important to them. Remembering couples is easier if they sit together, visually it seems to help to see them both as you say their names.

People relax when they know they’ve been recognized. It’s an instinctive, primal comfort.

I walk through hotel corridors, mentally quizzing myself. In the morning, before the guests arrive at the coach, I go through my manifest of people and mentally check each face in my head. Often there are one or two that I need to reinforce and that is one of my tasks for the day. I occasionally jot down small notes.

By the end of the first day, I’m already building an invisible map in my head: who sits at the back, who jokes a lot, who’s quiet, who’s diabetic, who gets carsick. It’s not just information; it matters.

I don’t know everyone’s story, but I know who needs coffee first in the morning, who I need to watch for departure times, and a little of each couple’s dynamic.

People think the work is remembering the names
But it’s really about noticing.

Forgetting a name at the wrong moment breaks trust. People remember how you make them feel. When you get their name right, they feel seen. When you don’t, it makes it harder to connect with people.

Two seasons after Alaska, I saw her again. Another tour, another country.

Before she even arrived at the welcome dinner, I recognized her name, and I remembered.

“Good to see you again, Margaret.”

She blinked, startled. Her whole face shifted, warmth, recognition, disbelief.
“You remembered!”

Of course I did. I had been disappointed with myself, and her hurt had been with me all this time. She was the reason I’d listen more attentively, giving more space to people before speaking.

That moment, that tiny spark of joy, was worth every mental gymnastics exercise I’ve ever done.

People think this job is about geography. It isn’t. It’s about humanity, knowing that every traveler carries a story, and mostly, we all want to be recognized.

So how do I remember everyone’s name?

The honest answer: I don’t. Not perfectly. Not always.

But I remember moments.

I remember the woman who laughed when the rain hit her umbrella sideways.
The man who told me his grandfather’s story in tears.
The guest who whispered, “I didn’t think I’d ever come here.”

The names stayed because the people mattered, not the other way around.

Some people light up when you say their name.
Others soften.
And some, like Edward, just stand a little straighter.

By the end of a long season, my memory feels crowded with lives that aren’t mine. I’ll wake up in a hotel halfway across the world thinking of someone I guided months ago, their laugh, their story, the way they looked at the world.

And then a strange sadness:
I may never see them again.

It’s a beautiful thing to remember deeply, then release gracefully.

Remembering isn’t about having a brilliant memory.
It’s about presence. Practice. Patience.

And a desire to make people feel real in the few days I have with them.

Some days I get tired, distracted, overloaded. But then someone smiles when I greet them by name, and I remember why.

In a world of strangers, the name is a bridge.
And if I can build that bridge thirty times a week, maybe that’s enough.

People want to be seen. Saying someone’s name is the simplest way to give them that, a moment of belonging in a world that rushes past them.

Everyone know it’s not easy to remember names, but it is worth the effort.

The morning sun shimmered on the Chesapeake Bay, heat rising from the asphalt as our tires rolled smoothly along the final stretch of the Colonial Parkway. After nearly three months and over three thousand miles, it was hard to believe we were pedaling the last few miles.

“There,” Liz said, pointing ahead.

The sign emerged from a blaze of red maple ahead of us:

Welcome to Historic Yorktown
Site of the British Surrender — 1781

I felt something break open in my chest, pride, relief, and a sudden hush inside me, like church doors swinging open. Yorktown was the eastern terminus of the TransAmerica Bike Trail we’d followed across the country. It felt profound to end our cross-country ride at the place where America had won its independence.

“You know,” Liz said, coasting beside me, “Bryce is going to get such a kick out of this.”

Earlier that summer, Colonel Bryce Hollingworth (retired) had been just another guest on one of Liz’s Alaska tours, a distinguished gentleman in his eighties who covered ground with the steady determination of someone accustomed to completing missions. Over campfires in Talkeetna and Denali, he’d shared stories of designing American embassies around the world during his Air Force career, each one a small fortress of democracy on foreign soil.

“Kabul, Baghdad, Nairobi,” he’d told Liz one evening, watching the rushing waters of the Nenana River. “Every embassy was a statement: America stands here. Sometimes they are in dangerous places. Sometimes it made you a target.” He’d paused, stirring the fire with a stick. “But you build them anyway, because we stand for something.”

When Liz mentioned our cross-country cycling plan, his eyes had lit up. “Well, I’ll be damned. Yorktown’s my backyard these days. You finish that ride, you look me up. Anita and I will throw you a proper welcome.”

Now, three thousand miles later, his business card was tucked in Liz’s handlebar bag, dog-eared from the journey.

The sound of drums echoed ahead of us.

“What’s that?” Liz asked.

We rounded a corner to find Main Street closed, crowds lining the sidewalks, and a parade forming. A teenager in a tricorn hat was adjusting a banner.

“It’s Yorktown Day!” he called to us. “Two hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of the surrender!”

We looked at each other and burst into laughter. We’d planned to arrive around this date, but the exact timing felt like a gift.

I flashed back to Kansas, when prairie winds shoved us sideways all day and we managed only seven miles in three hours. The memory made me shudder. Now, to roll into Yorktown on a day of celebration felt like the wind had changed.

A woman in a reflective vest approached us, clearly a parade organizer. “You two part of the procession?”

“Actually,” Liz grinned, “we just rode here from Oregon.”

The woman blinked. “Wait—bicycled?”

“Coast to coast” I confirmed, still catching my breath.

Her face lit up as if we’d just unearthed a chest of Revolutionary coins. “Well, get in line behind the Fife and Drum Corps. Just don’t pass the horses.”

And so we joined the parade. Our bikes clicked gently over the cobblestones as fifes played ahead of us and drums marked time behind. The crowd didn’t know who we were, but they clapped anyway, perhaps sensing something different about the two dust-covered cyclists with overstuffed panniers and sun-weathered faces.

“Way to go!” someone shouted.

A little girl ran up and handed me a small American flag, then darted back to her parents, giggling.

It was ridiculous and perfect and overwhelming. I found myself crying and laughing simultaneously as we rolled through the heart of this historic town, completing our own version of an American revolution.

After the parade, we went down to the James river and dipped our tires in the water as we had done in Florence Oregon nearly 3 months before,

A woman approached with a camera and reporter’s pad.

“Lorraine McKay, Yorktown Herald,” she introduced herself. “Word is you just finished quite a journey.”

She lined us up with our bikes and took our photo.

“What made you do it?” she finally asked.

I glanced at Liz, then up at the replicas of the boats that had founded Jamestown.

“To see the country the slow way,” I said. “To feel the ground beneath the story.”

Lorraine smiled and closed her notepad. “I’ll send you a clipping.”

We called Bryce from the visitor center, and his voice boomed through the phone speaker. “By God, you actually did it! Anita’s making her famous crab cakes as we speak. Get yourselves over here.”

The Hollingworth house sat on a tree-lined street, brick and shutters speaking of old Virginia money. Inside, everything carried the squared-off neatness of a man who’d lived by military order. Bryce answered the door in khakis and a polo shirt, but his bearing still carried decades of command presence. In his eighties, he was tall and straight-backed, with sharp blue eyes that missed nothing.

“Well, look what the road dragged in,” he grinned, embracing us both. “Anita! The cyclists are here!”

Anita appeared from the kitchen, a woman of equal vintage with silver hair and the kind of warm smile that charmed diplomats and generals. “Welcome, welcome! You must be starved. When did you last sit down to a meal that wasn’t trail mix or gas-station pizza?”

As we showered and changed into our cleanest travel clothes, I could hear them talking in the kitchen, Liz had told they’d met late in life, they were practically newlyweds like ourselves. They had both lived overseas with the military and had a lifetime hosting unexpected guests in foreign countries, making strangers feel at home. Representing their country with elegance and grace.

“You know,” Bryce said over dinner, “there’s a big anniversary celebration tonight. Fireworks, ceremony, the works. Some of my old colleagues are in town. Would you like to join us?”

We arrived at the waterfront as the sun was setting, expecting to find spots in the general crowd. Instead, Bryce led us past security checkpoints with casual nods to uniformed personnel who clearly knew him well.

“Colonel, sir,” a young Marine said, snapping to attention. “Your party’s expected at the VIP area.”

We found ourselves in the front row of a roped-off section filled with military brass and political dignitaries. I felt absurdly underdressed in our zip-off trousers and least-smelly t-shirt a jarring contrast to rows of pressed uniforms and polished medals. Bryce and Anita introduced us around as if we were visiting heads of state.

“These are the cyclists I told you about,” Bryce said to a three-star general. “Just finished riding across the country. Oregon to Virginia.”

“Congratulations,” the general nodded approvingly. “What an amazing trip.”

As the ceremony began, with speeches about sacrifice and freedom, I understood why Bryce had been so moved by our journey. We’d been exploring the country he had dedicated his life to, rediscovering what made it worth defending.

When the fireworks exploded over the York River, painting the water in red, white, and blue, Bryce leaned over. “This is the America worth fighting for,” he said quietly. “Not the one you see on the news, but the one you find when you slow down enough to meet your neighbors.”

The rockets burst overhead, reflecting in the water like fallen stars.

Back home in Washington, autumn arrived with its familiar darkness and rain. Our bikes sat in the garage, still dusty, their odometers frozen at numbers that seemed almost fictional.

Sometimes I’d walk past and run my hand along the handlebars, half-convinced we’d dreamed the whole thing.

Then one gray afternoon, a manila envelope arrived in the mail. Inside was a newspaper clipping from the Yorktown Herald:

“Victory Ride: Cross-Country Cyclists Reach Yorktown on Historic Anniversary”

There we were in grainy black and white—standing with our bikes, grinning like fools, with the ships in the background and October sun in our eyes. We looked exhausted and exhilarated and absolutely certain we’d just done something that mattered.

But tucked behind the newspaper clipping was a handwritten note on newspaper letterhead:

“Thank you for sharing your story. —L.McK.”

I stuck both pieces on the refrigerator, right beside our old paper map where a thin red line still traced its way from sea to shining sea.

I stepped back, arms folded, and whispered to the map: “From sea to shining sea.”

Some journeys change you mile by mile. The best ones, the ones worth taking, show you the country’s heart, in strangers who hand you flags, in new friends who save you a seat beneath the fireworks, in the discovery that America is still worth crossing slowly, one revolution at a time.

The first time I came to Bushmills was on the 12th of July, marching day. Liz and I had arrived after walking the Giant’s Causeway, flushed from the wind and wonder of that otherworldly coastline. The scene that greeted us in town was festive. Roads were closed. Crowds gathered on the pavements. And the air, somehow, felt charged. Waiting for something.

I had no clue what was happening until I heard the huge Lambeg Drum and saw the orange banners. Then it clicked, the Battle of the Boyne, still commemorated here since 1690. I looked down and realized, by chance, I was wearing an orange rain jacket. An accident of fate that now made me uncomfortable. I asked Liz if I could swap for her green one. She laughed, but obliged, and I walked the rest of the day in a too-tight jacket, looking like an Irish Tyrannosaurus. I felt stupid. But it also left a question I couldn’t shake: Why had I felt the need to switch?

That question occurs to me each time I drive the Antrim coast. When I think of the future, where is the Orange order in a united Ireland? Growing up I would never have considered this question as the possibility seemed impossibly remote. Now it seems a united Ireland may happen in my lifetime. Honestly, I don’t think it’s soon. As I drive north, I seek to understand not just the politics of reunification, but what it might actually feel sharing this ground if Ireland were united.

…

We leave Belfast early, the city still drowsy under grey skies. The open water of Belfast Lough opens in front of us. Lough means lake in Irish. This isn’t a lake, it used to be called Carrickfergus Bay which seems like a better name. When we come to Carrickfergus we drive past the waving Ulster banner and Union Flag, we circle the roundabout with signs to the royal family.

We park at Carrickfergus castle, built by John DeCourcy in 1178. The name of the town hints at an older history. Founded by Fergus Mor of Dal Riata, an ancient kingdom that spanned the North Channel between Scotland and Ireland.

This place will always be associated with William of Orange, the Dutch prince who would fight against his father-in-law. William landed here at Carrickfergus castle when he came to march south to meet James II. At the Battle of the Boyne his success brought about the end of the reign of the Stuarts forever in England, Ireland, and Scotland.

This place is still today a bastion of protestant unionism. Standing beneath these walls, I wonder: in a united Ireland, how does that story go?

…

As we come to the small village of Glynn, the Ulster banner is flying and the curbs are painted the blue, red and white of the Union flag. We see the seal of the Orange order painted on the road. I find myself carefully watching where I step, as if the painted ground itself might take offense.

The road here is part of the island that is steeped in the politics of Ireland. Here, the landscape of myth is claimed by both sides and stories unfold regardless of borders. Each painted curb asks a question: In a united Ireland, what happens to these curbs? Why should anything happen to them ?

…

We passed a rugby field. A sign of hope in my mind. Rugby is a sport where Ireland has one team, including the Republic and Northern Ireland. One sport where we play together. One of the questions was addressed. What do you play for the national anthem? You play a new rugby anthem, Ireland’s Call.

Not replacing what was but adding something new. I think this is how unity comes, not through erasure but through addition.

…

In Larne, Loyalist murals leave no doubt where the town stands. Over a century ago, it played a key role in the infamous Larne gunrunning. In April 1914, Unionists smuggled nearly 20,000 German-made Mauser rifles into Ulster, landing them at Larne, Bangor, and Donaghadee. The operation was mounted in defiance of the British government’s plan for Irish Home Rule. Though it occurred decades before the Troubles, the Larne gunrunning marked the beginning of organized paramilitary forces on Irish soil, a shadow that would stretch far into the twentieth century.

The desperation in that act, I understand it differently now. It’s the fear of being erased, of losing your story. Any reunification must reckon with this fear, must promise that their stories too will be Irish stories.

…

The Antrim Coast Road was carved in the 1830s by Scottish engineer William Bald, who defied the land’s resistance by dynamiting a path along the cliffs. Before then, boats connected these isolated communities with Scotland more than Belfast. Bald’s vision was nearly impossible. The cliffs were unforgiving, the sea relentless. Workers hung from ropes to chisel the rock, blasting a path just wide enough for a horse and cart.

Perhaps this road is Ireland’s island boundary, a place where boundary is made tangible and begins to carry new weight. The Glens of Antrim open before us, flowing naturally between communities. The air along the Causeway Coast is salted with stories, each turn carries a memory. Gorse blooms yellow on the hillside. Stone walls wind like veins across the green skin of the hills.

This is one of those places that makes me think about how unique each part of Ireland is. I grew up in Kildare, flat plains, quiet bogs, open vistas. But here, each corner of coastline makes me look inward into a unique world far from what I grew up with.

…

As we approach Carnlough, we see the Irish tricolor flying and the school names in Irish. The tide is out in the very picturesque small harbor. This place was important before the road was built. This harbor traded with Scotland, just a few miles away across the North Channel. We stop for a break and explore the harbor. Imagine the world when this place’s connection to Scotland defined the world these people lived in. The connection between Scotland and Ireland was strong before Fergus Mor invaded Scotland. There is evidence of trade between Ireland and Scotland from neolithic times.

At Glenariff, the Queen of the Glens, archaeologists found Neolithic tools and Bronze Age cairns. Legend has it that one tomb is the resting place of Oisin, the son of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, who aged differently in the faerie world which doomed him when he returned to Ireland. Like many of these places scattered around the country, the stones had been repurposed to build walls and homes over centuries. Now sheep graze in the ruins.

As the town is left behind, the ruins of Red Bay castle comes into view above the harbor on the site of an earlier Dal Riatan outpost. The Bissetts once controlled Rathlin Island from here but their support for Robert the Bruce ruined their fortunes.

Offshore you see a rock, seabirds nest in narrow ledges. Sometimes beside each other, sometimes at a distance. They return to the same rock each year. Not because it’s safe. But because it’s home.

…

Coming down the hill into Ballycastle, Rathlin Island comes into view. I love to stand looking over at the island, just the call of gulls and the heather-scented wind. Rathlin is the only inhabited island off the coast of Northern Ireland and today is a farming community but in the past its strategic location between Ireland and Scotland made it important. In ancient times it was an important Christian center, and it was the first place in Ireland attacked by the Vikings. I feel a little bit like Rathlin island caught between two places, for me it’s Ireland and America.

Robert the Bruce of Scotland, after killing his cousin, sought refuge with his allies the Bissetts in Rathlin and spent the winter there. Legend has it that when Robert’s spirits were broken, he took refuge in a cave. Sitting in the cave, he noticed a small spider attempting to weave a web. The spider tried and failed over and over. Each time the spider fell, it climbed back up to try again. Finally, the spider’s silk took hold, and the spider managed to spin a web.

Perhaps reunification is like that spider, trying, failing, trying again. Not giving up despite the failures.

The island in the 14^th century had a population of about 500 people, but the island has been ravaged by several massacres. In the 15th and again in 17th centuries hundreds of men, women and children were brutally murdered. An Gorta Mór, the Great Famine was to be the end, the island never recovered when hundreds again were forced to leave the island. The population has kept declining and today it is around 125.

Sometimes unity means just surviving together. Sometimes that’s enough.

…

The Causeway isn’t just beautiful, it’s impossible. The shapes are so perfect, it proclaims the wonder of nature. Born of fire and cooled by patience, its pillars stand like a cathedral to ancient motion. You feel small there, but rooted, like you belong to earth. At the Causeway, you kneel and press your hand against the stone. Cool, smooth, unyielding. A hexagon older than every human idea of country.

Waves hurled themselves against the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway, retreated, and returned, never in the same shape. Tourists balanced on hexagons. A father lifted a child for the photo. The sea didn’t stop for any of it. People, all standing on the same ancient stones.

…

We stopped into the Bushmill’s Inn for lunch. I ordered a proper carvery lunch, also Liz’s favorite. Later, we toured the Bushmills Distillery. Bushmills had been my god mother’s favorite whiskey and she had given me a taste for it. I had heard people describe it as a protestant whiskey, but I never cared.

The guide spoke reverently of the whiskey making process and of the magic of time in the barrel. Time seems like a good recipe for many things in life.

When we arrived at the tasting segment, Liz does not drink brown alcohol. So, all the whiskey was for me. There were a couple of ladies from Scotland who didn’t really like the whiskey and they too gave me theirs. I would not be driving home.

This was Liz’s first time driving on the other side of the road, but despite some trepidation it was no trouble at all. As we drove south in the gathering darkness, the painted curbs of the morning seemed to fade.

If a united Ireland comes, it might not arrive in the form of referenda or flags. It may arrive like this coast did, in slow erosion of obstructions, in tidal persistence, in quiet acts of recognition. In the sharing of whiskey, in the playing of rugby, in touching ancient stones and telling each other’s stories. Perhaps one day I’ll return to Bushmills wearing orange, and feel no need to switch.

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The rear derailleur snapped with a sharp crack that echoed off the mountains.

My heart hammered. I felt the bike lurch beneath me. Metal tangled with spokes, the wheel seizing up completely. The bike stayed upright, but the back wheel bucked and started to screech its way along the Colorado highway. I somehow managed to unclip and leap clear before the bike crashed onto its side.

“Holy shit!” Liz pulled up beside me, dust swirling around her tires. “Are you okay?”

I sat up slowly, checking for blood. Nothing broken, but the bike was a twisted mess. We were somewhere outside Fair Play, Colorado, population: 700, according to the last road sign, with the nearest bike shop probably a hundred miles away.

“So much for day forty-three,” I muttered, staring at what remained of our cross-country dream. It didn’t look good.

We were out in the middle of nowhere on a Sunday afternoon, with no help in sight.

We turned my bike upside down, the universal sign of distress, and stuck out our thumbs. Liz added a little leg for luck.

About fifteen minutes later, not one, but THREE trucks stopped to help us.

Eighteen months earlier, it had all started with Liz’s laugh. “I’m serious,” she’d said, sprawled across our floor in Seattle with maps spread around her like fallen leaves. “It’s called the TransAm Bike Trail. Coast to coast. Oregon to Virginia. Just you, me, and whatever we can carry.”

I traced the red line on the bike maps with my finger, Florence to Yorktown, three thousand two hundred miles of possibility and madness.

“Life’s short,” I told her. My stomach was already knotting with doubt, I’d never biked more than fifty miles in a day. “Let’s do it.”

The training was hard. I started by riding to the bus stop, then taking the bus from progressively farther points until I was cycling fifty miles daily, twenty-five in the morning darkness, twenty-five under the evening stars. My legs screamed. My lungs burned. My ass hurt. But gradually, impossibly, I grew stronger. I biked in all kinds of weather, except hot.

By July, after completing the Seattle-to-Portland rally, two hundred miles over two days, I finally believed we might actually pull this off.

“Why Yorktown?” friends kept asking.

“That’s the terminus of the trail created for the bike centennial in 1976, celebrating 200 years of America,” Liz would say. “Over 2,000 people rode across the country that year.”

The first week nearly broke us. Eight flat tires in two days taught me to flip a bike and patch tubes with the desperate efficiency of a battlefield medic. My hands became permanently stained with grease and road grime.

But slowly, we found our rhythm. The rolling hills of Oregon gave way to Montana’s endless sky, and pronghorn antelope running beside us. In Kansas, thunderstorms soaked us to the bone, and we battled headwinds so fierce they seemed personal. But a senior center took our picture and fed us for free when we arrived in town.

“You’re doing what most people only dream about,” a woman in Ordway, Colorado told us, refilling our water bottles. “Don’t you forget that.”

In Wyoming, a pickup truck slowed down beside us and we were invited to camp in their backyard and they fed us a big home-cooked dinner that night in the house. In Montana, a truck driver bought us ice cream when we climbed a brutal hill.

“The country’s not what you see on TV,” Liz said one evening as we watched the sun set over farmland that stretched to infinity. She was right. From the saddle of a bicycle, America revealed itself as something far more complex and beautiful than any headline could capture. A nation of individuals, each with their own story, most of them eager to share it with two crazy cyclists.

But it was the breakdown in Colorado that nearly ended the trip.

That’s when we heard the rumble of Humvees and pickup trucks.

They were a bunch of guys about to go elk hunting who looked like they’d stepped out of a Carhartt catalog, weathered faces, calloused hands, new pickups with all the gizmos.

“Y’all broke down?” the first one asked.

When we explained our situation, their concern deepened. Within minutes, they’d loaded our bikes into truck beds and were racing toward the nearest town like we were family in distress. I was in the red truck, Liz was in the Hummer and the last one had the bikes.

They coordinated on radios, dropped us and a load of fish at Sarah’s house 5 miles down the road. Soon we were bouncing into Guffey, CO where there is a bicyclist’s hostel.

Sarah knows the owners, so she had called ahead and told them they would have customers.

“Guffey’s a nice place but the bar / restaurant just closed about 3 days ago,” Sarah said when we reached Guffey. “But Bill will help. He’s... well, he’s Bill.”

They pulled up to a weathered garage with a hand-painted sign: “Guffey Garage - Bikes, Antiques, and Arguments.” The front yard was a graveyard of antiques, some rusted beyond recognition, others gleaming with fresh paint. Wind chimes made from old bike chains clinked in the breeze.

“Bill!” Sarah hollered. “Got some cyclists need help!”

The man who emerged from the garage had a gray beard that reached his chest and strong arms corded with muscles. He wore a mechanic’s apron over a tie-dyed shirt, the combination somehow making perfect sense.

His sharp blue eyes took us in, despite the beer bottle dangling from his left hand. “Let’s get you settled and fed.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“We have some cabins out the back and I can make you up some sandwiches. I can look at your bike in the morning.”

We settled into an adorable little cabin and we even got a very civilized shower. Perfection.

The next morning we explored the town of Guffey. The museum featured a certificate from the first TransAmerica Bike Tour in 1976. Also, a rocket from an IBEW reunion, topped with a skeleton. Eclectic is the order of the day.

Bill investigated the bike situation. He walked around my mangled bike, running his fingers along the twisted derailleur. “Did quite a number on this.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Won’t know until I look. But I’ve seen worse ride out of here.” He carried the bike toward his workshop with practiced ease.

Bill’s workshop was a converted barn that was part bike shop, part museum. Vintage signs covered one wall. Ancient bikes hung from the rafters like metallic fruit. A work stand occupied the center like an altar. The air smelled of WD-40 and decades of grease.

“Population of three in this town,” he said, selecting tools with practiced deliberation. “Well, was three.”

He began working on the derailleur, his hands steady now, as if the mechanical puzzle had focused him completely.

“Now I’m almost on my own, had to kick out the bartender for sleeping with my wife. Bikes are easier than people.”

For the next two hours, he worked with the focused intensity of a surgeon. Liz sat on a milk crate, asking questions about the vintage bikes, drawing him out. I watched his hands, scarred, steady, certain, coaxing metal back into alignment.

“See this piece?” Bill held up two fragments that had clearly been one part. “Custom derailleur hanger. Giant makes these specific to the frame. Can’t jury-rig it, can’t make one.” He set the pieces down gently, like they were precious. “I can clean it up, but you’ll need a dealer for the real repair. Canon City tomorrow, then probably Colorado Springs.”

“Thank you for doing what you can,” Liz said.

Bill looked up at her, then at me, his expression shifting to something deeper. “Ya know. You get a view of this country most people don’t.”

His words stick with me today.

Bill refused our money but accepted our thanks. He drove us to Canon City in his ancient pickup, the bikes rattling in the bed. The bike shop confirmed what Bill had said, we would need to go to a Giant dealership in Colorado Springs.

“You can rent a car right here,” Bill said, pointing to Buddy Ray’s Towing Service. “Get something big. You’ll make Colorado Springs by noon.”

We shook hands, his grip firm and warm.

“Thank you,” I said, knowing it wasn’t enough.

The drive to Colorado Springs felt strange, covering in an hour what would have taken us all day on bikes. We found a shop that could order the part; it would arrive the following day. We spent the afternoon at Garden of the Gods, where ancient red sandstone formations stood like sentinels, permanent and patient. These spectacular monuments reminded us that some things endure while we waited for our modern mechanical fix.

After a night in a forgettable hotel, we picked up the repaired bike.

The young, efficient mechanic barely looked up from his paperwork. “Where you headed?”

“Yorktown, Virginia,” Liz said. He looked up at her.

He nodded, and a smile flickered across his face. “Good luck.”

We returned the rental car in Pueblo and got back on our bikes. The new derailleur clicked through the gears perfectly, but I found myself thinking about Bill’s words. His intervention had been exactly what we needed, just like every act of kindness we’d encountered on this journey.

Somewhere along the way from coast to coast, something in me shifted.

I’d come for an adventure. But what I found was a country that was full of kindness and ambition.

This country was founded on the idea we can improve.

I realized I didn’t just admire that.

Somewhere out there, between strangers and storms and open sky, I stopped feeling like a visitor. I knew I wanted to be an American.

I wanted to be part of it.

Samhain (pronounced “SOW-in”) marks the end of the harvest season in the ancient Celtic calendar, when the boundary between the living and the dead was believed to grow thin. On this night, October 31st into November 1^st, the portals to the otherworld open and the dead could return to visit their families, who would leave offerings and light candles to guide them home.

When Irish immigrants fled to America during the Great Famine, they carried these traditions with them. What was once a night of spiritual meaning transformed into Halloween, though elements of the old fear and reverence still linger.

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The Samhain Grave

She kept digging the grave as the sun sank behind the hill, the light that strange color and paleness that joined day and night. Her thin arms shook from the effort. Her hands were raw, palms blistered, her husband’s spade growing heavier with every stroke. When she finally stopped, the earth sighed and settled, as if exhaling.

It was Samhain, the night when the dead cross back. But she wasn’t thinking of that. She was thinking of Conor.

She had carried his small weight for days against her chest, his breath so faint she had counted heartbeats instead. When it stopped, she kept walking anyway, the wasted body warm for a little while, then not. She had walked all morning past cottages collapsed into their own smoke, past the black fields of rotting potatoes. The crows had followed her, a slow circling procession.

When the wind shifted, she could still smell the thatch burning on the hillside behind her. That morning, the soldiers had come with boots in the frost and English voices like the strike of steel on flint. The bailiff read her name from a folded paper, the last name left in the parish. She couldn’t understand the words, but she knew what he said. She had begged, but they didn’t look at her. They gestured for her to take what she could carry. She had nothing but Conor wrapped in her shawl as he weakly asked what was happening, and her husband’s spade slung on a string over her back.

When they set fire to the roof, it cackled like a banshee. The thatch twisted and spat and came down in sheets, the smoke rolling thick and bitter, smelling of turf and grief. By noon the whole row was gone, the hillside smouldering like a battlefield.

By evening she was alone with no husband, no neighbours, no priest to bless the ground. Just the sound of her own breathing and the earth waiting as she dug through the dusk. The spade struck roots, then stones, then something softer. When she stopped to rest, the crows went quiet and circled low, as if waiting on a signal. That was when she noticed the air had changed, colder now, and utterly still.

She brushed her hair back from her eyes and looked down at the child one last time. He was so small, his eyes sunken, his distended stomach painful to see. She whispered his name, only once.

The wind whispered it back.

She froze and listened. There it was again, a soft voice carried over the hill, speaking her name this time. At first she thought it was the wind, but then she heard boots on the path.

A figure stood at the edge of the field. Fergus. Her husband.

The breath left her. He’d been dead nearly a year, taken by the fever and buried in the churchyard before the priest himself had succumbed to the hunger. And yet here he was, walking toward her in the eerie light. His coat hung open, his face pale and sunken, his eyes dark as the soil she’d been digging. He didn’t speak. He just reached for the spade.

When he took it from her hands, she felt the chill move through the metal, as if something had passed between them. He began to fill the grave slowly, carefully, covering the body with clods of rotting earth.

When the grave was half full, another figure came from the mist. Her brother Liam. She had found him last winter by the river, face blue, mouth green from eating nettles by the roadside. Now he came walking over the rise, bloated, eyes milky, feet leaving no print in the mud. He took the spade from Fergus and kept filling the grave.

And then the others appeared. Old Máire, who had starved in her chair. Tomás, the boy who’d vanished after the fever took his mother. Even the priest, collar torn, fingers burned black from blessing too many bodies. They moved slowly, reverently, as though answering a call. Their clothes hung in tatters, their faces grey, but their eyes suddenly filled with a blue light.

She tried to speak, but her throat was dry. The wind rose, carrying the smell of peat and rot as smoke from the ruined cottages drifted down the hill, twisting around them. When the last of the soil fell, the wind stopped. The crows went silent. The night arrived all at once.

Fergus turned toward her, his mouth moving in what she thought was prayer until she realized he was saying her name. He held out his hand, fingers cold, cracked, black under the nails.

“Come home,” he said, the voice hollow, echoing from somewhere beneath the ground.

She stepped back. The earth behind her shifted with a soft wet sound as a hand broke through. Small and pale. Conor’s.

She dropped to her knees as the tiny fingers reached, grasping air, then touched her knee. The hand was warm. Her tears came hot and sudden.

“Please,” she whispered.

The others were closing in now, their faces calm, almost kind. Liam smiled the way he had when they played as children. Fergus stood just behind, eyes fixed on her with something like love. They weren’t pulling her. They didn’t have to. She could feel the earth beneath her knees beginning to soften, to give way like water.

She looked past them. The cottages burned still, but the flames were different now, blue and steady, like a beacon.

She understood then. It was Samhain, when the dead return to their hearths. When the veil between the living and the dead was thin.

Conor’s hand tugged again, gently. The soil crumbled at the grave’s edge. For the first time in weeks, she felt warmth, not in his touch, but in the promise of joining him, of ending the hunger, the cold, the terrible weight of surviving when everyone else had not.

She looked at his small fingers as they wrapped around her wrist. Then at Fergus, waiting. At all of them, patient as the earth itself.

She froze. Nothing moved. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

“No,” she said.

The word came out cracked, barely a whisper, but she said it again, stronger. “No.”

She pulled her hand free from Conor’s grasp. The warmth vanished instantly, replaced by a cold so sharp it burned. The child’s fingers reached again, desperate now, and she saw his face rise from the black earth. Mouth open in a silent cry that nearly broke her resolve.

“I carried you,” she told him, though she knew he couldn’t understand. “I carried you when you couldn’t walk. I’ll carry you still. But not like this.”

Fergus stepped forward. “There’s nothing left for you here. Only hunger. Only death.”

“Then I’ll be hungry.” Her voice grew steadier. “I’ll remember you hungry. I’ll speak your names hungry. But I’ll speak them.”

The light in their eyes flickered. Liam reached for her, and she saw confusion in his bloated features. They had never been refused before.

“Someone has to remember,” she said. “Someone has to tell it. The hunger. The burnings. Your names. If I go with you, who will know we were ever here?”

The dead stood perfectly still. Then, slowly, Fergus nodded. He understood. He had always understood her.

One by one, they turned away. Tomás first, then the priest, then old Máire. Liam lingered, his hand half-raised in farewell or beckoning. Fergus was the last to go, walking backward, keeping his dark eyes with the blue light on her until the mist swallowed him.

Conor’s hand withdrew into the earth. She wanted to grab it, to pull him back, to hold him one more time. Instead, she pressed her palms flat against the freshly turned soil and felt the last of his warmth fade into the ground.

She sat there until dawn, praying his name and all the others. When the sun rose, she stood on legs that barely held her. The spade lay where Fergus had dropped it. She picked it up, she would need it for walking, and perhaps for other graves.

The burned cottages still smouldered on the hillside. Somewhere beyond them was a road, and beyond that, perhaps, a place where the living still drew breath. She would find them. She would tell them. She would remember.

She looked back once at the small grave. “I’ll carry you,” she promised.

Then she walked toward the rising sun, the spade over her shoulder, leaving the dead to their rest, and carrying their names like seeds.

When you live as an immigrant, you quickly learn that home isn’t just a place. It’s a taste, a smell, a feeling that can’t be replicated. And sometimes, that feeling is worth smuggling twenty pounds of vacuum-packed meat across an ocean.

For me, its Irish crisps that put American chips to shame, especially the classic cheese and onion, mysteriously absent from U.S. shelves. Irish chocolate is creamier, richer, simply better than the waxy American stuff. But the crown jewels are the meats: rashers and sausages from my hometown butcher, Nolan’s, that make anything labeled “sausage” in America taste like a ground cardboard.

For years, my parents and I had a comfortable arrangement. With each journey across the Atlantic, we’d orchestrate a small-scale import operation—Operation Full Irish.

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They’d visit me and my wife Liz in Seattle every year or two, arriving with pounds of Nolan’s bacon and sausages, while I’d return from Ireland with suitcases stuffed with crisps and chocolate. It was a way to keep home alive, along with the Leinster Leader and stories of relatives, births, and deaths.

The contraband would be hoarded for select mornings, and the sausages rationed. The wonderful smell of frying rashers filling the kitchen was a kind of magic, an act of communion.

It worked flawlessly. Until it didn’t.

I was at baggage claim, watching the crowd thin from my parents’ flight. Thirty minutes passed. Then an hour. I started scanning faces, imagining missed connections or lost passports. By the two-hour mark, my neck ached from looking up at the arrivals board for divine inspiration.

At last, they emerged. My father wore a sheepish grin. My mother’s face was crimson, her eyes brimming with fury. She strode ahead without a glance in his direction.

I gave my father a quizzical look.

“We’ll talk about it in the car,” my father muttered.

In the privacy of the parking garage, the truth spilled out. At customs, an officer had asked if they were carrying any meat.
“No, no meat in the bags,” my father said, with the breezy confidence of a man who had convinced himself he hadn’t packed twenty pounds of vacuum-sealed sausages and rashers the night before.

The officer’s expression didn’t change. “Step over here, sir.”

A conveyor belt. A scanner. A shadowy, suspicious shape on the screen. The officer unzipped the suitcase and peeled back neatly folded clothes to reveal the evidence.

Faced with the contraband, my father turned to my mother and uttered the immortal words:
“Sheila, how did those get in there?”

My mother had endless patience, humor, and forgiveness. But my father throwing her under the bus? That crossed a line. I had never seen her so upset.

Later that evening, she opened up.
“You know they took them home and ate them themselves,” she said, her voice trembling between anger and heartbreak. The pettiness of it all had her near tears.

For the next three days, she gave my father a silence so absolute it made Liz’s Buffalo winters seem tropical. Breakfasts were eaten to the sound of cutlery on plates, my father offering tentative conversation starters that died mid-air.

After that, my parents were on a customs watchlist. They got searched every time they visited. They gave up their bacon-running days, and, though they never said it, I suspect the customs hassle was one reason their visits eventually stopped.

Now I spend months at a time back in Ireland running tours around the country. I eat my yearly quota of rashers and sausages in a few glorious months. But they taste different. Maybe it’s because Nolan’s has gone out of business, or maybe it’s knowing that the last time my parents tried to bring me a taste of home, they were labeled a threat to national security.

When I snatch a visit between tours, my mother opens the fridge and the smell of frying sausages fills the kitchen. It’s the same smell. It smells of love. Home isn’t just a place. It’s that familiar smell rising through the house, as if the past has come back for breakfast.

“Are you having fun?”

The woman asking me this is sitting in the lively bar of a castle in Donegal, wine glass in hand, still glowing from the guided tour of the folk park we had just finished. She means it kindly. Behind her, other guests are comparing photos of the rainbow over the peace bridge in Derry.

I’m calculating whether the bus pickup time in town tomorrow should be 3 or 3:15 to avoid clashing with the service buses that pick up in the same spot. I remember that one of my guests is gluten-free, one vegetarian, and remind myself to reconfirm that the restaurant has the details. I’m mentally reviewing the forecast, rain likely, which means I need to reroute our walking tour in two days.

“Of course!” I say, smiling.

She looks relieved. After all, I have a dream job, travel, beautiful hotels, incredible food, spectacular views.

But here’s what I’m actually thinking: I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in six weeks.

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2 AM in Fairbanks

The shrill ring of the phone in my room wakes me up instantly. I look at the time, 2:17 AM, that’s never good. It’s the front desk. My eighty-nine-year-old guest has fallen. She is a spitfire, had introduced herself as soon as she arrived. She was the leader of a group of fifteen from Texas.

I’m up and out of bed in seconds. Thankfully I had laid out my clothes for the morning, I am knocking on her door in minutes. My mind is already whirring: how bad is the fall? How do I get her to Fairbanks Memorial? Do I have her emergency contact information? What happens to tomorrow’s itinerary if I’m at the ER until dawn?

She opens the door, pale and shaking. “I’m so sorry to wake you. I fell.”

“That’s exactly what I’m here for,” I say, and I mean it.

We sit in her room. I assess. She had gotten up to use the bathroom and fallen in the bath. She had been able to extract herself and thankfully slept in pajamas. She was in obvious pain and couldn’t raise her right arm. I call the front desk and ask them to get the ambulance. I call the guest’s emergency contact. I stay with her until the ambulance arrives, then follow to the hospital.

At 6 AM, I’m back at the hotel. The guest has a broken collar bone but nothing worse. I have two hours before I need to be in the lobby, cheerful and ready to take thirty-six people on a riverboat ride on the Chena.

Am I having fun? No.

But when that guest comes back to the hotel in the evening, embarrassed and grateful, and quietly thanks me, I feel something that goes far deeper than fun.

The Highlands

Last October, I’m standing in the rain in the Scottish Highlands, feeling ridiculous wearing my kilt and holding an umbrella like Paddington Bear.

My guest turned to me and said, “I don’t know how you do this job.”

I almost laughed.

I was on week seven of an eight-week stretch. I was so exhausted that my eyelids were sore and my limbs heavy. My voice was nearly gone from narrating the same journey again and again. I’d eaten hotel food for nearly two months straight. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a conversation that wasn’t about logistics or history or where the nearest bathroom was.

She went very quiet, and I looked up at her.

She was gazing up at the Three Sisters, mist rolling down the glens. Her face had that expression people get. She looked like she might cry.

“This,” I wanted to say. “This is why.”

Instead I just said, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” and watched her nod, speechless.

That night, before dinner, she told me the story of her grandfather who’d emigrated from Scotland. How she’d always wanted to see what he had talked about. Now she understood.

I didn’t plan that moment. I can’t make it happen. But I made it possible, got us there on time, chose the right stop, knew when to talk and when to shut up.

That’s not fun. That’s something better.

What Fun Actually Looks Like

If I wanted to have fun, I’d stay home.

I’d sleep past six. I’d write without interruption. I’d make things with my hands. I’d learn new skills just because they interest me, not because I need to explain them to twenty strangers tomorrow.

I wouldn’t spend my mornings explaining hotel Wi-Fi passwords for the thousandth time. I wouldn’t ration my peopling energy like a scarce resource, protecting my health, snatching sleep, staying perpetually one step ahead of burnout.

But then I’d miss the guest who connected with their distant Irish cousin. The colleague who taught me a better way to explain the Reformation. The spontaneous moment when everyone on the bus started singing, and for thirty seconds, I forgot I was working.

Fun is spontaneous, unstructured, self-directed.

My job is the opposite.

And yet.

Last week, at the end of a tour, a guest said, “You made this look so easy.”

That’s the invisible work. The mental load. The 24/7 vigilance. The crises managed, the plans adjusted, the details looked after so they don’t have to.

When someone says it looked easy, I’ve done my job right.

The Truth About Dream Jobs

So, am I having fun?

Not in the way people mean when they ask. Not the way I’d have fun traveling with Liz.

But I feel purpose. I feel the quiet pride of creating an experience. I love what I do, even when it’s hard.

I’m lucky. Not everyone in my industry gets to work for an organization that provides this level of quality. But privilege and ease aren’t the same thing. You can have a dream job and still come home so tired you can barely speak.

Most guests assume that because they’re having fun, I must be too. It’s an honest mistake. They don’t see the mental checklist. The constant vigilance. The months without a break.

They see the sunsets and champagne. They don’t see me at 2 AM in a Fairbanks hospital.

Both are true.

The question still follows me everywhere: “Are you having fun?”

These days, when I’m honest, I say: “No, but that’s not what I’m here for.”

When the season ends and I’m finally home in my own bed with no alarm set, no guest calls, and I have all the time in the world to have fun, I catch myself thinking about next season.

About mist-covered mountains. About guests seeing something for the first time. About the behind the scenes work that makes it all possible.

I don’t need my work to be fun. I want it to matter.

And most days, it does.
And on the others, that’s all right too.

The horizon was wrong.

A dark, twisting column stretched from cloud to sea, writhing as if it were alive, shredding the surface into white froth. A waterspout. For a moment, Liz and I just stared at each other across the cockpit. No questions, no commentary—just that quiet, shared recognition that everything had changed.

We'd limped into this anchorage twelve hours earlier under sail alone, the engine silent after running out of fuel somewhere in the darkness of Banderas Bay. It was the kind of mistake that made you question everything—how had we not checked the tank before leaving Isla Isolde? But there we were, threading our way past Punta de Mita's rocks by moonlight and radar, ghost-white fishing pangas materializing from the black water like warnings we barely heeded.

The hook had set clean in forty feet off La Cruz, and I'd collapsed into my berth exhausted, satisfied we'd pulled off our first anchoring under sail. But Liz hadn't slept. I found her at dawn in the cockpit, hollow-eyed and rigid, a dry bag clutched in her lap stuffed with passport, credit card, cash—the essentials for abandoning ship.

"I can't do this anymore," she said, her voice steady but brittle. "I've been listening to every sound all night. Every wave, every groan of the rigging. That fishing boat that came so close I could smell their cigarettes. The way the anchor chain keeps scraping against the hull." She gestured toward shore, maybe three hundred yards away. "I'm ready to swim for it if I have to."

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I'd seen this before, the moment when the romance of adventure collides with the reality that the ocean doesn't care about your plans. We had weathered storms and mechanical failures, had anchored in dozens of places more remote than this. But I could see she was zombie tired, pushed past her limits.

"The dinghy's faster than swimming," I said, trying to keep my voice light.

That's when we saw it.

The waterspout was moving fast across the bay, maybe two miles out but closing. Its base whipped the water into white scars that spread like cracks in glass. The air tasted of metal, that electric sharpness that comes before lightning strikes. Above us, the sky had turned an odd, bruised purple, and the wind seemed confused, pulling from two directions at once.

"We need to go. Now." Liz was already moving, her decision made.

Training took over. We had the zodiac over the side in minutes, outboard clamped and primed, painter tossed clear. The waterspout loomed larger, its roar now audible—a low, churning growl like a freight train made of water. Liz leaped into the dinghy, her knuckles white on the safety line as I yanked the starter cord and gunned us toward shore.

Halfway across, I looked back. Our boat sat small and vulnerable at anchor, mast swaying against the unnatural sky. If the spout passed over her, there'd be nothing left but debris and insurance claims. But we had no choice now except to run.

The waterspout began to weaken as we approached the marina dock, thinning from a solid column to wisps of mist. By the time I tied off the dinghy painter, it was gone entirely, leaving only the bruised sky as evidence it had ever existed.

Liz stepped onto the weathered planks and dropped to her knees. She pressed her palms flat against the dock and stayed there for a long moment, shoulders shaking. A group of Mexican fishermen watched from their morning coffee, cigarette smoke curling in the suddenly still air. One of them chuckled and muttered something about "el papa"—she did look a bit like the pope, kissing the ground there on the dock.

But I understood. Sometimes you need to feel something solid beneath you, something that isn't moving with the rhythm of the sea.

We spent the morning in the marina restaurant, drinking coffee that tasted like salvation and listening to other sailors drift in with their own stories from the night before. A catamaran had dragged anchor in the squall. A single-hander had his genoa torn to ribbons. Everyone had a tale, and everyone had survived to tell it.

"I'm not ready to quit," Liz said finally, watching our boat through the restaurant window. She looked steadier now, the hollow-eyed fear replaced by something more familiar, determination mixed with healthy wariness.

I nodded. Fear was just information, a mentor had always said. The trick was learning to read it correctly, to distinguish between rational caution and the panic that could get you killed. Last night had been rational caution wrapped in exhaustion and unfamiliar circumstances. The waterspout had been something else entirely—a reminder that for all our planning and preparation, the sea still held cards we couldn't see coming.

We went back out in the early afternoon, under clearing skies and a steady breeze. The boat was exactly as we'd left her, riding easily on her anchor, waiting. As if nothing had happened at all.

The room captivated me instantly, unlike any space I had ever encountered. My eyes darted everywhere at once, each surface covered in fascinating objects. Some things I recognized, some I had heard of but never seen, and others were completely unfamiliar wonders. When I first stepped into Rembrandt's Wunderkammer in 1983, it became one of the most eye-opening moments of my life.

I had grown up in Ireland, and this was my first trip abroad. Thirty or forty of us schoolboys boarded the bus that drove onto the ferry at Dun Laoghaire and across England in the middle of the night. We had consumed the sandwiches our mothers had packed and depleted our Lucozade supplies before embarking on another ferry to Ostend, Belgium.

This journey exceeded all my previous adventures. Everywhere we went, the landscape of difference unfolded before me. The language, the food, the architecture, it was immediately clear that the rhythms and patterns of life here were entirely unlike home.

Our destination that day was Rembrandt's house on Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam. When I walked through the door into the Wunderkammer, or "Cabinet of Curiosities," my imagination ignited immediately. These collections, which originated in Renaissance Europe during the 16th century, were rooms filled with extraordinary objects showcasing both natural wonders and human ingenuity. As I wandered through Rembrandt's personal museum collection, I felt a deep connection to his curiosity.

The stories these objects told of distant lands and scientific discoveries transformed my perspective on the world. One moment I'd be examining an exotic seashell, the next a scientific instrument whose purpose I couldn't fathom. Each object invited questions, making the room not just a collection of things but a catalyst for wonder.

Rembrandt had lived here for 18 years and had been prosperous enough to accumulate these items as both a stimulus for his creativity and a display of his status. He went bankrupt in 1656, after which the entire contents were inventoried and sold off. This detailed inventory later proved crucial to restoring the Wunderkammer to its former glory.

The town where I grew up has a canal, but it has always been a quiet backwater, still one of my favorite places to walk when I return to Ireland. In Amsterdam, however, the canals weren't decorative afterthoughts but the lifeblood of the city, integral to its commerce and character.

As I learned during our tour, the center of Amsterdam consists of concentric canals, each representing a different era in the city's development. The houses lining them stood tall and narrow with distinctive scalloped rooflines. Crowning each was a hook beam—a crane-like structure still used today to move larger items into and out of the narrow buildings, an ingenious solution to their unique architecture.

Gliding along these waterways on a glass-topped tour boat transformed my understanding of the city. The guide explained how the most significant expansion of Amsterdam's canals occurred during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century, when city planners devised the "Grachtengordel" plan. This created three main canals, Herengracht, Keizersgracht, and Prinsengracht, arranged in concentric arcs around the old city center. These weren't merely picturesque features but sophisticated systems for transportation, defense, and water management.

Seeing Amsterdam from the water changed everything for me. I've since come to appreciate that viewing any place from its waterways provides a completely different perspective. So many cities developed around rivers and harbors not by accident but because these waterways offered advantages that made trade possible and communities flourish.

Amsterdam engages all the senses. Walking through the flower market, where tulips of every imaginable color were displayed in riotous profusion, I was overwhelmed by their collective beauty and fragrance. The aroma of fresh flowers mingled with the scent of waffles and stroopwafels from nearby vendors, creating an unforgettable experience that I can almost conjure even now, decades later.

The Van Gogh Museum presented the artist's story in a way that rendered him the most human of artists to me. His style evolved through joy and struggle. The vibrant colors and bold brushstrokes of his canvases seemed to vibrate with energy in person.

Perhaps most affecting was Anne Frank's House. Walking through those rooms where she and her family hid during the darkest days of World War II, I felt a coldness in the air. The cramped quarters, the blacked-out windows, the bookcase that concealed the entrance—these formed the setting of a young girl's truncated life. I remember standing in silence, imagining the care they took with each footstep, the routine of enforced quiet, the constant fear of discovery.

Amsterdam has remained one of my favorite cities. It can be overrun with tourists at certain times of the year, but it's populated by people who strike me as both practical and open-minded. The city carries layers of history, some of it very grim, but also maintains a forward-thinking attitude that I find refreshing.

My first business trip was to the Netherlands. My contact from the IT department of a bank in Rotterdam invited me to dinner in the World Trade Center, a dramatic glass and steel structure that epitomized the city's sleek, modern high-rises. As the elevator whisked us up, my ears popped, and then the doors opened to reveal a panoramic view that stole my breath: Rotterdam's illuminated harbor stretching below us, container ships moving like glowing toys in the distance, and the iconic Erasmus Bridge being built over the Maas River.

The restaurant itself was floor-to-ceiling windows that made diners feel suspended in the night sky. My host, Jan ordered something I had not heard of —rijsttafel, literally "rice table," a Dutch-Indonesian specialty. Dozens of small dishes arrived in perfectly choreographed succession, each representing different Indonesian flavors and techniques.

I sampled spicy sambals that made my eyes water, tender rendang that melted on my tongue, sweet-sour acar pickles, and fragrant coconut-infused vegetables. With each tiny porcelain bowl came new sensations, crunchy, creamy, fiery, soothing, a harmony of contrasts. The food was mind-blowing, I had not grown up with spicy food. As I looked down on the rebuilt city that had risen from the ashes of World War II, I realized how travel for work could widen my world.

I would travel to Rotterdam again a number of times and become comfortable getting around the Netherlands. The train system is great and easy to navigate. I would tack on a few days after my work in Rotterdam and take the train to Amsterdam.

Years after my schoolboy visit, I returned to Amsterdam as an adult and discovered another facet of its progressive character—the pragmatic approach to cannabis. While other nations debated prohibition, Amsterdam had long since moved toward regulated tolerance through its coffeeshops. These weren't merely places to purchase cannabis, but social spaces with their own distinct atmospheres. I found myself drawn to a place called The Grey Area, with its Roswell-themed décor, run by Americans. These were the first Americans other than my cousins I had ever spoken with—an education in itself. It was a small establishment with worn leather couches and jazz playing softly in the background.

Over subsequent visits, it became a place where I could sit by the window watching bicyclists stream past, nursing a raspberry tea with honey and enjoying a perfectly rolled joint while contemplating plans for life. The coffeeshop's regulars, a mix of locals, expatriates, and travelers, created a community that felt both temporary and timeless. There was something profoundly honest about the laid-back atmosphere, where conversations flowed easily between strangers sharing a joint. A visit to a coffeeshop in the evening became a regular facet of my visits.

Bicycles became my transportation, providing another equally authentic experience in Amsterdam. Renting a bike from a shop near Centraal Station, I joined the river of cyclists flowing through dedicated lanes throughout the city. What impressed me most was how the entire urban environment had been designed with cyclists in mind. The traffic lights for bicyclists, small, eye-level signals featuring illuminated bicycle silhouettes, operated independently from car traffic, giving two-wheeled travelers priority at many intersections.

Pedaling beyond the tourist-heavy center, I found myself in residential neighborhoods. locals carried seemingly impossible loads on their bikes, groceries, children and even furniture. The creative cargo and kid carrying bikes were a fascinating glimpse into a different way of living. Beyond the suburbs the flat landscape made cycling effortless, cycling paths led through farmlands where windmills still swirled in lazy circles.

The Rijksmuseum housed works by Dutch masters. Standing before Rembrandt's "Night Watch," I was captivated by details on faces painted centuries ago yet still so alive. The play of light and the sense of movement remain magnificent beyond words.

The Tropenmuseum opened my eyes to other cultures in unexpected ways. During my first visit, they displayed a Mongolian yurt, set up indoors where visitors could enter and experience it. Touching the felt walls and ornate wooden supports, I realized how differently people lived across the globe. Only years later did I come to understand the complex history of Dutch colonialism that had brought many of these artifacts to Amsterdam, adding another layer to the city's story that I continue to reckon with.

Amsterdam is known for its nightlife. After dark, the streets took on a different character—café windows glowed with warm light, laughter spilled from doorways, and music drifted from venues tucked away on side streets. I remember attending a comedy show where the audience was a mix of tourists and locals, all laughing together despite language differences, a moment of connection.

One evening, curiosity led me through the Red Light District—De Wallen—an area as much a part of Amsterdam's identity as its canals and museums. The famous red-lit windows lined narrow medieval streets, where women in lingerie stood or sat behind glass, looking bored or tired. They barely glanced up as equally bored-looking men shuffled past, hands in pockets, neither party seeming to find what they were seeking. It felt mechanical and jarring to see historic 14th-century architecture housing the world's oldest profession, now sanitized and regulated.

Walking out of the district, past the same old church that had witnessed centuries of this commerce, I found myself contemplating how cities contain humanity intensified.

My father never quite understood my fascination with Amsterdam. When I announced my second solo trip there in a year, he cornered me in the kitchen, teacup in hand. "What's the real reason you keep going back to that place?" he demanded, his accent thickening as it always did when he was working himself up.

Before I could answer, he leaned in conspiratorially. "Is it the prostitutes?" The question shocked me as my mother's head whipped around from the sink. I nearly choked on my toast. "Dad! No! It's not the prostitutes!"

He waved his hand dismissively. "Well, just because it's legal doesn't mean it's OK. You could catch something you know."

I tried explaining about the rijsttafel, the bicycle culture, the art scene, but he remained unconvinced. "Just remember you could catch something," he continued, warming to his theme as my mother rolled her eyes behind him.

He sipped his tea with the satisfaction of a case well made. I didn't have the courage to tell him about the coffeeshops. Somethings are best left unsaid.

Each visit to Amsterdam has expanded my horizons. The city's blend of old and new, tradition and innovation, continually draws me back. From that first wide-eyed encounter with Rembrandt's Wunderkammer to my many returns since, it remains a true cabinet of curiosities that continues to shape my view of the world.

Part 1 Check out the story of the sinking boat here.

Part 2 Check out the story of nearly being swept out to sea.

I woke in a panic. No one knew I was here. If anything happened to me, how would anyone find out?

After my time in Maupiti, I had returned to Huahine. I was feeling lost. I had never taken more than three weeks off since I started working at seventeen. Now I had left my job and was wandering through a part of the world that seemed incredibly exotic to me just a few months ago. I hadn’t worked in over two months.

The insecurity of realizing I didn't have a job, didn't have a reason to get up, was startling. If I died here, who would tell my family? Two months ago I had left a fast-paced job working in IT where every minute of my day was consumed with meetings and work. Now, if I didn't get up, no one would notice. I thought about what the step into retirement would mean, even though it was a distant idea. The uncomfortable truth was that without work, I had no idea who I was.

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I was staying in a hostel on Huahine, a place with basic facilities. I had a bed in a dormitory with six beds. There was no one else staying there, or at least I hadn't seen anyone. Even the proprietor was absent. I had seen her briefly when I arrived, and she had shown me the bed and bathroom before disappearing.

I had been feeling unusually tired for a couple of days. At first, I thought it was just the long days spent under the hot tropical sun in French Polynesia. But as I lay there contemplating my purposelessness, the discomfort was becoming different, more intense.

My body felt like it had been run over by a truck. The fever was the first clear sign—my body temperature shot up, and my skin was hot to the touch. It was then that I noticed a rash creeping up my arms, a red, splotchy pattern spreading across my skin. I felt a sudden chill despite the heat around me, and a sense of dread washed over me. This wasn't just a bad cold; it was something worse.

I dragged myself to the local medical clinic—there was no hospital on the island. The nurse checked my temperature and examined my rash. Then she told me I had dengue fever. An outbreak had been spreading through the islands, and as soon as she mentioned it, I remembered the notices I had seen in Raiatea while waiting to hear about the boat.

Dengue fever is a viral illness spread by infected mosquitoes. The mosquitoes that carry dengue are active during the day and bite ferociously. I have always had bad reactions to insect bites. I had ignored the numerous welts I'd received since arriving in the islands. They swelled into red lumps that made me look like I had the pox.

The nurse explained that there was nothing she could do for me. I should be fine, she said, but I needed to stay hydrated, and if I started bleeding excessively, I should come back. Bleeding excessively! What the hell did that mean? I would find out.

As I trudged back to the hostel near the other end of town, I stopped at the store and bought two large gallon containers of water. I struggled under their weight, the plastic handles cutting into my hands as I plodded the rest of the way back. I felt like shit.

Back at the hostel, the symptoms intensified rapidly. Nausea rolled through me in waves, and the pain behind my eyes became unbearable. I struggled to even sit up, the sharp pain in my joints making every movement excruciating.

The distance from my family felt further now than ever before. Thousands of miles separated us, and in this moment of weakness, loneliness cut deeper than the physical pain. I wished for my mother's hand on my forehead, checking my temperature like she used to when I was a child. Even a familiar voice on the phone would have been comforting, but I couldn't muster the strength to make the journey to the phone box outside.

I forced myself to drink water constantly, knowing dehydration would only make things worse. My arms trembled as I brought the weight of the large plastic bottle to my cracked lips, sipping slowly to keep it down. Food was another challenge entirely. The small pack of crackers on my bedside table was all I could manage—bland enough that they might stay in my stomach, though the thought of eating made me grimace.

By the third day, my joints had swollen to the point where every movement brought tears to my eyes. I needed to use the bathroom, but the short distance across my small room suddenly seemed like miles. With a deep breath, I pushed myself up from the sweat-soaked sheets, my skin peeling away from the damp fabric.

The room spun violently as I stood. One step, then another. My knees buckled as a wave of nausea hit me without warning. I didn't make it to the bathroom. The pain triggered my gag reflex, and I doubled over, vomiting onto the floor. The smell made me heave again, adding to the mess. I leaned against the wall, tears streaming down my face, feeling utterly helpless and alone.

Cleaning up was torture. Each bend and stretch sent lightning bolts of pain through my inflamed joints. Using a towel to soak up the mess, I inched across the floor like an old man on all fours, pausing frequently as dizziness threatened to overwhelm me.

On the fourth day, I understood what the nurse meant about bleeding excessively. I woke with the pillow stuck to my face with blood from a nosebleed. The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth. When I spat into the sink, bright red blood swirled down the drain. My gums were bleeding freely, the blood seeping between my teeth no matter how gently I tried to rinse. I stared at my pale hollow-eyed reflection in the cracked mirror above the sink, blood on my lips. This was what dying alone looked like.

The panic was worse than the pain. If my body was breaking down, how would I even get help? I could barely walk to the bathroom, let alone make it back to the clinic. The nurse's warning echoed in my head, but "excessive bleeding" felt like an understatement when you're watching your own blood pool in a sink with no one around to care.

I sat on the edge of my bed, holding a towel to my mouth, and for the first time since getting sick, I genuinely wondered if I might not make it through this. Not from dengue itself, but from being so completely alone with it.

As the week progressed, small victories emerged. By the fifth day, I could make it to the toilet before the nausea overtook me. The fever began to break, coming in shorter waves rather than the constant inferno of the first few days. My sheets were still damp with sweat each morning. The bleeding from my gums had stopped, leaving only tender, swollen tissue as a reminder. My nosebleed had slowed to a trickle.

I began to believe I would survive this. The rash had started to fade, and though my body still ached, the pain had dulled from unbearable to merely miserable. With each small improvement, I felt a flutter of hope. I wasn't out of danger yet, but for the first time since falling ill, I could imagine feeling normal again.

Two weeks later, as I finally felt strength returning to my body, I walked out to the turquoise lagoon. After fleeing a sinking sailboat, nearly being swept away from Maupiti, and facing dengue fever alone, I had discovered something the busy IT professional back in Seattle never knew existed. I had found not just my capacity to survive, but my ability to be fully present with uncertainty. The fever had broken, but more than that, so had my old understanding of who I was without the anchor of constant work and purpose. I was ready to return to my boat Saoirse and the world I had left behind, with a better understanding of myself.

Every time I walk along the promenade in Waterville, I feel a visceral connection to Ireland. Standing at the edge of the Atlantic, with nothing but ocean between myself and Liz and the American life we’ve built, I feel my identity knitting itself together. I know Liz loves this place too, we have explored the ring together, picking out special places and making memories. Even after twenty years of living abroad, this beautiful stretch of Irish coastline still takes my breath away every time I return.

As someone raised in Kildare, where the seaside was a place we went for summer holidays, I never expected this Kerry coastline to become so important to me. Yet now, when I'm in Seattle, thousands of miles from Ireland's shores, this place returns vividly in the quiet moments before sleep—the salt-laden air, the profound feeling of standing at the edge of something vast and eternal, the knowledge that I belong to this place even when my daily life unfolds elsewhere.

The Ring of Kerry, a 100-mile route circling the Iveragh Peninsula in southwest Ireland, has become a pilgrimage. Each trip is like following a spiritual rosary, each landmark an ancient prayer that pulls me deeper into myself. Traditionally beginning in Killarney, this path traces a landscape where mountains plunge into the ocean in displays of natural grandeur, but for me, it maps a geography of belonging that I carry within me across oceans.

Killarney nestles at the edge of its national park, its existence intertwined with the natural beauty at its doorstep. Before tourism transformed this region, before Queen Victoria's 1861 visit cemented it as a destination, this was simply home to generations whose roots go back to earliest times. I see it now through the dual lens of native and foreigner, appreciating it with both the intimacy of home and the perspective distance provides.

As I head out, Carrantouhill rises on my left. It's no Denali, but it's Ireland's highest peak, and seeing its summit emerge from clouds feels like meeting the gaze of an old friend. There's a comfort in these modest mountains that the towering Cascades of my adopted home cannot provide, a sense that the land itself is scaled to human experience.

As the sun climbs higher, I arrive in Killorglin as the town prepares for the day. This ancient settlement holds the distinction of hosting Ireland's oldest fair—Puck Fair—a tradition with pre-Christian roots where a wild mountain goat is crowned "King Puck" each August. The fair began as a market for farm animals, and business is still conducted today. It has evolved into a long weekend of craic and ceol, one I've had the pleasure of recovering from in my younger days. Near the bridge spanning the River Laune stands a bronze statue of King Puck complete with a crown on his head.

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I've been away long enough now that Ireland's changes sometimes shock me. New buildings, new roads, new faces. But Puck Fair remains, a reminder that some things don’t change.

The history of this region stretches back millennia. Stone circles and ring forts dot the landscape, silent witnesses to the ancient people of this place. Today's road largely follows paths established by these early inhabitants. Driving along, I think of how I have added my footsteps to this ancient route, even as I've wandered far.

The landscape changes to bog land, with men out engaged in the busy ritual of harvesting turf. I remember stacking turf in the shed at the back of our house at home. An important connection to the land that Irish people have had for generations. The pungent smell of turf on the fire will always transport me to Ireland.

Then, Glenbeigh appears as a picturesque town with flowers and decorations put up by the locals, no doubt for the annual Tidy Towns competition. As we drive by what the locals call Glenbeigh Towers, the ruins of a castellated mansion, I am reminded of the sorrowful history of the place.

The local land agent was vicious in evicting the local people as he extorted rents from them to build the castle for Lord Wynne. The place was hated by locals and destroyed by republican forces during the War of Independence when it was used as a British base.

The countryside's wild beauty reminds me of Kerry's complicated past—how privilege and oppression have always existed side by side here, how the most beautiful places often hide the most painful histories.

As the road winds toward the coast, the landscape unfolds like chapters in an ancient book. The air grows saltier, carrying the scent of seaweed and wildflowers. From an elevated vantage point near the Mountain Stage, the splendor of Dingle Bay stretches before me, with the distant Blasket Islands reminding me of the stories of the legendary Peig Sayers. I always pull over here, knowing the view awaits me like a gift every time.

My next stop is Caitin’s Pub in Kells. I always stop here and wander in for a snack and sometimes something stronger.

I chat with a bartender who knows me well.
“Breakfast ?” he asks, handing me a bag of King crisps, cheese and onion, my favorite.
“Breakfast of champions, make it two” I say.
He laughs. “Are you out chasing faeries?”

“Chasing the ghost of my accent.” I smile.

I step outside, opening the crisps. The smell hits instantly—cheesy and salty—but it carries me across time. The crisps aren’t just a snack; They are keys, unlocking memories I didn’t know I’d buried.

Approaching Cahersiveen, the ruins of Carhan House appear. Once a fine Georgian house, it was the birthplace of Daniel O'Connell, the "Liberator" who championed Catholic emancipation in the 19th century.

In the center of the town is the O'Connell Memorial Church, one of the few Catholic churches in the world that honors a layman. Built of granite and black limestone, the distinctive Neo-Gothic church stands as an architectural anomaly in rural Ireland. The cornerstone is a marble slab sent by the Pope from Rome, where in grisly reciprocity O'Connell's heart is buried.

As Valentia Island comes into view, I'm transported back to childhood weather forecasts on the radio. Valentia, once just a distant name from the far west coast, now materializes before me as I leave the town behind. The sight of the weather station brings back memories of listening to the distinctive voice on the radio as all five of us kids crammed in the back seat coming back from a Sunday drive somewhere.

After exploring Cahersiveen, the road continues along the coast, rising and falling with the dramatic shoreline. Just past the town, road signs shift to Irish, and I enter the Kerry Gaeltacht, a region where Irish is still spoken as a living, everyday language.

In Seattle, my Irishness is sometimes a party trick—an accent, a toast, a story. But here, in the Kerry Gaeltacht, where the road signs shift to Irish, I feel the weight of what I’ve lost.

I am sad to say that my Irish is not as good as I would like, and in some ways, I feel shamed by that. My language has atrophied in America. Language holds culture like a cup. Every word forgotten, feels like a spill I can’t clean up, each word I've lost feels like a wound.

When I discover a Pop-up Gaeltacht event in Seattle, I make a pilgrimage, yearning to practice in real conversation rather than through a screen. Music connects me to language. Sean-nós singing or a slow air on the fiddle creates an invisible bridge across the ocean between my two worlds.

The road curves, new vistas open before me, until I reach Waterville, the village stretched along a perfect crescent of shoreline where the great Atlantic surges against golden sands. This is where I feel most at home and most like a stranger—a paradox of emigrant life.

This is my favorite spot for a morning break. I love walking along the promenade, the smell of the sea washing over me as I take in big gulps of fresh Atlantic air. The scent of salt spray and the rhythmic sound of waves breaking against the shore create a sensory experience that follows me back to Seattle, where the ocean smells a little different, but where the Pacific's rhythms speak the same language.

After my walk, I leave Waterville and I see the Eightercua standing stones, this ancient place is said to be the burial place of Scéine, the wife of Amergin, the leader of the Milesians. The Book of Invasions (Leabhar Gabhála Éireann) tells the story of the arrival of the Milesians, and the death of Scéine.

Amergin was the first of the seven sons of Mil to set foot in Ireland, he was a poet and chanted a magical incantation to the spirit of Ireland, known as The Song of Amergin. The song of Amergin is the earliest voice from the dawn of West European civilization.

I whisper a line of the Song of Amergin to myself, rough and half-remembered.

“I am the wind on the sea…”

For a moment, I believe it. I belong—not just in body, but in lineage, language, and land.

These ancient places in Ireland put me in touch with the sagas and stories that make up where I come from and who I am. I feel a special connection to these most ancient of places in Ireland.

My journey continues through Caherdaniel, where Derrynane House offers a unique window into more modern Irish history as the home of Daniel O'Connell, hailed as the Nelson Mandela of his day. His opposition to slavery and commitment to non-violence, color the lens through which I see the world.

In season, the hedgerows burst with fuchsia, their vibrant colors creating natural bouquets against ancient stone walls. The explosion of blackberries begs me to stop, and I pull over at a pull out where an ould fella is picking berries and filling his basket.

As I pluck a few berries, I savor the fresh flavor in my mouth.

He grins at me like a little boy, “Tá rudaí a phiocann tú féin blaiseadh níos fearr.”

“Tá tú ceart”, I say, juice running down my chin as I smile. Things you pick yourself do taste better.

Just around the next bend lies the charming village of Sneem. It is a perfect arrangement of brightly colored buildings clustered around a two central squares and split by a stone bridge spanning the Sneem River. Its name derives from the Irish "An tSnaidhm," meaning "the knot," aptly describing how the river loops and winds through the village. I love the Irish way of painting houses in this vibrant palette, the burst of color defying the often-gray skies.

This is my regular lunch stop at the Village Kitchen, where the aroma of homemade soups and freshly baked bread greets me even before I open the door. The café is a cheery place with benches outside when the weather is good. I love their fish and chips. In my Northwest home, you can find excellent fish but the chips are better in Ireland. In America they are always trying to make them fancier, I don’t want truffle fries, I want proper chips.

The road climbs toward Moll's Gap, but that is not really a hardship; the increasing elevation reveals ever more spectacular views. I slow down, weaving through the heather-covered mountainsides at the pace of a leisurely stroll. The changing light as clouds pass overhead makes for a new painting every minute. Each turn in the road reveals another vista that catches in my throat.

As the landscape unfolds, I put on some music—traditional tunes, sea shanties, and a touch of bluegrass. Though my modern repertoire remains limited, these melodies weave threads that stretch across the ocean to my life in Seattle, where I listen as I cook, work, or simply sit remembering.

Moll's Gap appears as a natural viewing platform, named for Moll Kissane who ran a small shebeen (illicit pub) here during the construction of the original road in the 1820s. Moll was famous for poitin, and this area is still a hotbed of illegal distilling.

The panorama unveils the full majesty of Macgillycuddy's Reeks, Ireland's highest mountain range. Another perfect picture stop where the changing light surrounds you in timeless beauty.

Ladies View comes next, named after Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting who expressed their delight at the vista during the royal visit of 1861. On clear days, the lakes of Killarney sparkle below, their island-dotted expanses commanding attention. The oak woodlands climbing the lower slopes create a tapestry of green that changes hue with each passing hour. I take a photo to send to Liz. I know she’ll recognize it, its one of our places.

Just after Ladies View, as we turn the corner, I see the ruins of Mulgrave Barracks looming like a medieval castle. The blackened walls testify to the destruction wrought by the Royal Irish Constabulary as they retreated into the town during Ireland's War of Independence in the early 1920s. Kerry was a crucible during the War of Independence and in the civil war that followed.

In March 1923, as the Irish Civil War drew to its bitter end, Kerry became the setting for "Terror Month," when anti-treaty attacks and booby traps prompted the Irish Government forces to retaliate by executing seventeen prisoners with explosives at locations like Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge, and Bahaghs.

I think about this darker history as I drive these peaceful roads. The beautiful Kerry countryside, with its mountains, lakes, and coastal vistas, carries these painful memories from that terrible spring. How strange to love a landscape that holds such savagery in its memory, to feel both the pull of belonging and the push of history's ugliness.

Nearing the end, Muckross House stands as a monument to Victorian prosperity, its gardens reflecting the aspirations of a bygone era. This Tudor mansion, built in the 1840s by the Herbert family, carries the weight of Irish history in its walls. The Herberts nearly bankrupted themselves preparing for Queen Victoria's 1861 visit, their desperate social climbing mirroring Ireland's complex relationship with the British empire.

This estate, once a symbol of Anglo-Irish privilege, became Ireland's first National Park in 1932 when gifted to the new Irish Free State. This transformation, from colonial showpiece to national treasure illustrates the way Ireland has moved forward.

The Ring of Kerry is my medicine wheel, my prayer circle, the path I follow to remember who I am and where I come from, even as I build a life elsewhere. The rosary is complete, I have said all my prayers.

The soul of Ireland draws those of us who have wandered far from home. Home becomes more complicated with every passing year of living abroad. It's no longer a single location or even simply a place. It is where Liz is, it is Ireland, it is on a boat, it is the Pacific Northwest, it is by the sea and in the embrace of my family.

Between my annual visits home, I find myself walking the beaches of Washington, recapturing the smell of the sea most of all—the salt, the damp, the wildness. Sailing has made me appreciate the sea anew, the rhythm of the waves, the cry of gulls wheeling overhead. In quiet moments, suspended between the land and the ocean, I feel perfectly at home in the world.

Note: This is based on a true story related to me over a few drinks in a pub.

Steve was having one of those days that customer service training manuals conveniently forget to mention. You know, the kind where the universe seems to have penciled in a note on its calendar: "Today -- Make Steve question his career choices."

The fluorescent lights of the Anchorage airport terminal buzzed, a sound Steve ignored. His polyester uniform collar itched against his neck as sweat began to form despite the air conditioning. The recycled air carried the distinct scent of travel anxiety.

It all began when a group of three flustered guests arrived, radiating the particular panic that only comes from watching your cruise ship departure dissolve before your eyes. Anchorage is a major airport but to get to Seward was a two-hour transfer by coach. The last coach to Seward had departed, where their floating hotel was preparing to set sail without them.

"We have to get to Seward!" announced a tall woman with immaculately coiffed silver hair and oversized designer sunglasses perched on her head. Martha, as Steve would soon learn, was the self-appointed spokeswoman of the group. She clutched her Louis Vuitton handbag like it contained the nuclear launch codes. "Do you understand what's happening? We've been planning this Alaska cruise for fourteen months!"

Beside her stood her husband Harold, a man whose permanent hunched shoulders suggested a lifetime of yielding to Martha's force of personality.

"Now, Martha, let the young man speak," Harold murmured, his voice barely audible over the airport announcements echoing through the terminal. With thinning gray hair and quaky voice, he radiated quiet resignation.

"I'm speaking, Harold! Someone has to take charge!" Martha's voice cut through crowd noise with a tone that makes souls shrivel.

Enter Steve, Customer Service Hero™, armed with nothing but a clipboard, a smile, and the desperate optimism of someone who wanted to help.

"Folks, I understand your concern," Steve said, in a soothing tone. The clipboard in his hand was slick with sweat. "But I think we have an option. There's a flight to Seward available that will get you there in time for the ship."

The small group fell silent, the terminal's cacophony of rolling luggage, muffled announcements, and distant jet engines suddenly seeming louder.

"A flight? Is it safe?" asked a younger woman, maybe in her thirties, with anxious eyes. " I'm Debbie, by the way. " She smiled nervously, extending her hand to Steve with a tentative gesture that suggested this level of assertiveness was new to her.

"Perfectly safe, Debbie. These pilots navigate Alaskan skies every day," Steve replied, shaking her hand. Her palm was clammy against his. "The alternative is missing your cruise entirely."

"How much?" barked Martha, her fingers already reaching into her handbag.

Steve named the price, wincing internally as he said it.

"Highway robbery!" Martha exclaimed, the veins in her neck becoming more pronounced. "Harold, can you believe this?"

Harold, who had been silently wishing for invisibility, turned and nodded. "Whatever you think best, dear. The ship won't wait."

The credit cards emerged from wallets. “I will make the arrangements”, said Steve, already mentally calculating that his shift would end after he had helped them out.

.The sharp, plasticky smell of new luggage and desperation mingled as Steve guided them outside to the company van. Steve slid the van door open. "Your chariot awaits," he said with a smile that felt increasingly strained. The road to the airstrip was a series of potholes, each bump sent shock waves up their spines.

At the small carrier airstrip, the wind whipped across the tarmac. Steve herded his charges toward the check in building. On the tarmac stood a tiny plane, its metal skin gleaming dully under the cloud-diffused sunlight.

"That? We're flying in that?" Martha's voice reached a new octave. "It looks like a toy!"

"It's a DeHavilland Beaver," Steve explained, raising his voice over the wind. "Legendary bush plane. Alaska's workhorse."

"Well, I hope it’s safe, because if I die in a Beaver, my children will never be able to engrave it on my tombstone with a straight face," Harold commented.

As the plane took off, Steve exhaled deeply, watching it disappear into the vast Alaskan sky. He was taking the van home and allowed himself a fleeting fantasy of going home, enjoying a beer, maybe even experiencing what non-customer-service people call "relaxation at the end of a long day."

Steve almost made it all the way home, was about to turn in his driveway when his phone rang, its harsh electronic trill cutting through his momentary peace. Caller ID said it was the airstrip.

"Steve speaking," he answered, his stomach already clenching in anticipation.

Alaska's weather, like a toddler on a sugar high, had abruptly changed its mind. But the truth was crueler – the plane had actually made it to Seward, had even circled above the cruise ship so the passengers could see it through the clouds, their vacation tantalizingly visible before the painful decision was made to return to Anchorage. The captain had been forced to abort the landing and head back.

"They could see their ship," the voice on the phone explained. "They're... not happy."

Steve's fantasy popped like a soap bubble in a hailstorm as he turned the van around. So close and yet so far. When Steve arrived at the airstrip, the guests were already there in the terminal building, seated on an L-shaped couch arrangement with a long glass-topped table. They were positioned at the point of the table, faces twisted with the kind of anger usually reserved for lost luggage. The flight personnel were nowhere to be seen, having wisely abandoned these fuming travelers.

Steve strode in confidently, ready for battle and determined to give it his all to absorb their anger and somehow make things better. Their vacation was crumbling, their cruise ship was leaving, and clipboard-wielding Steve was now their only hope—or more accurately, the focus of their frustration. In their minds, it was somehow his fault they had booked air too late for the last coach, and even though he had tried to save their bacon, it was now his fault they hadn't made the ship.

Remembering his training, Steve made a split-second decision to sit directly in front of them, on the coffee table rather than taking a seat perpendicular to them on the couch.

Customer service rule #37: Always be at eye level with distressed customers. It creates connection and trust.

What the training manual failed to mention was rule #38: Make sure the glass coffee table top is actually attached to its base.

Time slowed as the tabletop tilted like the deck of the Titanic. The vase of fresh flowers—placed on the other end of the long coffee table to create a "welcoming atmosphere"—launched into the air in a majestic floral explosion. Water arced gracefully, catching the light in a fleeting rainbow before gravity reclaimed everything.

The sound of shattering glass punctuated Steve's internal scream.

Water splashed everywhere, dousing his face, soaking his shirt and pants, and splashing Debbie’s shoes. There was this excruciatingly long moment of awkward silence as everyone processed what had just happened. But with absolutely no pride left to lose, Steve ventured into an apology for their missed cruise and laid out their options. Surprisingly, neither he nor the guests ever mentioned the unmentionable Flower Incident. To their credit, they moved straight to the business at hand. The sheer absurdity of the situation had shaken them out of their anger, and the distraction gave them the ability to listen.

Maintaining his professional smile, now more of a facial muscle spasm, Steve delivered the coup de grâce: "I'm afraid your only option now is to stay overnight and fly to the next port tomorrow."

The only available accommodation? An establishment whose Yelp reviews consisted mostly of creative reinterpretations of the word "avoid."

As Steve drove them to their new lodgings, a moose—because Alaska wasn't done with him yet—decided to play chicken with the van. Steve swerved, his life flashing before his eyes, his life choices coming into sharp focus. Much to the guests' delight, this was actually a highlight—after all, this was still their few hours in Alaska and they'd gotten to "flight see" and now spot a moose. The former wasn't exactly a positive experience, but the moose sighting definitely was.

As they continued driving through Spenard with the radio playing softly in the background—Steve trying to maintain a calming atmosphere as it was now around 9:30 PM, still light in Alaskan August but nearing dusk, the news broke in with the shocking report that Princess Diana had died in an automobile accident.

The guests weren't British, but they didn't have to be to feel the heaviness of that announcement. That somber news accompanied them all the way to the hotel and may have either humbled them or further defeated them, as they didn't give Steve any grief about the accommodations, as questionable as they were.

The hotel lived down to its reputation. The smell was an unholy fusion of decades-old cigarette smoke, industrial-grade disinfectant, and what Steve could only describe as "essence of despair." The carpet pattern seemed designed to hide stains that science had yet to classify.

As he hauled their luggage into the room, one of the guests looked at him and asked, with complete sincerity, "Is this the best day of your life?"

Steve managed a smile that deserved an Oscar as he backed toward the door. "Just another day in customer service, folks. Just another day."

As he drove away, Steve contemplated a career change. Perhaps something less stressful, bomb disposal, maybe.

But he knew he'd be back tomorrow, clipboard in hand, ready to face whatever fresh hell awaited.

Because that's what customer service heroes do.

They endure. They persist. And occasionally, they destroy coffee tables in spectacular fashion.

As our van rolled to a stop, the setting sun painted the Botswana sky in hues of orange and purple. After hours of being confined in the cramped space, our legs ached for movement and our minds yearned for the comfort of proper accommodations. Little did we know that nature had other plans for our arrival.

Our host greeted us with an apologetic smile and unexpected news. A herd of elephants, desperate for water during the dry season, had rampaged through the property and destroyed the water system outside the main house. With a shrug that suggested this was merely another day in Botswana, he explained that we would be staying in huts scattered across the property, with dinner served in the main house.

"The elephants were here just this morning," he added casually as we gathered for our meal overlooking the damaged pool. Deep footprints and broken pipes offered silent testimony to the recent visitors.

The journey had left our group of friends thoroughly parched, and we settled into the bar while dinner was being brought out. Throughout our safari, we had developed a creative solution to quench our thirst – improvised cocktails we affectionately dubbed "Polokwanes”. The ritual began days earlier when we purchased liquor and sodas but realized we had no glasses for mixing drinks. Being innovative travelers, we drank some soda and then used a rolled-up information sheet from Polokwane Game Reserve as a funnel to pour in the liquor. These makeshift drinks had become a cherished ritual during our trip.

Before dinner, I settled into the main lodge's sitting area with my friend Eric, a tall Nebraska man with a cheerful smile. We commiserated with shared complaints about the bumpy roads. Suddenly, I noticed a large red spider on the seat beside him. I leaped over the sofa with a yelp – I absolutely hate spiders, especially large, hairy ones like this specimen.

Our guide, Anthony, approached with the casual confidence of someone accustomed to skittish tourists. "That's a Roman Spider," he explained with a hint of amusement. "In Afrikaans, they're known as 'haarskeerders' – 'hair cutters' – or 'baardskeerders' – 'beard cutters.' Local myths claim they cut your hair to use as bedding for their nests."

"Are they dangerous?" I asked from my safe distance.

"They're not actually spiders, and they can't bite," Anthony assured me. "Completely harmless."

Harmless or not, the creature gave me the willies, and I maintained a respectful distance until a staff member removed it.

When dinner was served, Eric and I navigated the modest buffet together, loading our plates with options that appeared safest after a day on the road.

"Not much of a salad person," I confessed to Eric as I reluctantly added a small portion of the sparse offerings – just lettuce, tomato, and onion – to my plate. "But when in Botswana..."

The barbecued chicken and meat, seasoned with local spices, proved surprisingly flavorful, while the curious potato salad added a creamy contrast to the meal.

As we settled in to eat, the warm night air carrying the distant trumpeting of elephants, Eric suddenly exclaimed with satisfaction, "I like these big olives!"

I glanced at his plate and couldn't help but chuckle. The "olive" on his salad glistened with an unmistakable iridescence no food should possess.

"Eric," I said gently, lowering my voice to spare him public embarrassment, "I think that 'olive' just flew in and landed on your salad."

The look of horror that washed over his face as he realized he was about to eat a beetle was priceless. His fork clattered against the plate as he pushed it away. The laughter around the table momentarily drowned out the night sounds of the bush.

"I need the bathroom," Eric muttered, still looking pale as he stood up abruptly.

When he returned a few minutes later, his expression had transformed from embarrassment to shock, his eyes wide with a different kind of surprise.

"You won't believe what just happened," he said, his voice slightly higher than normal. "I was walking back and ran straight into an electric fence. Got quite a shock!"

This triggered a memory from my childhood. "That reminds me of growing up," I told him. "I once convinced my cousin to pee on an electric fence. Poor lad jumped higher than you did just now." I patted his shoulder reassuringly. "Don't worry – if he survived that, you'll be fine."

After dinner, as the darkness deepened around us, our host gathered everyone for another announcement. His expression had grown more serious.

"The elephants' visit did more damage than we initially thought," he explained. "They've knocked out power to the huts as well. The beds are made and ready, but we'll need to escort you in groups." He paused for effect. "The elephants are still roaming the area."

A nervous murmur spread through our group. I imagined a burly guard with a rifle would be assigned to protect us – someone whose very presence would deter the massive creatures from approaching.

Instead, our escort turned out to be a diminutive, elderly woman, her weathered face creased with a lifetime of sun exposure, who must have been at least 80. Standing barely five feet tall, she carried only a small flashlight.

"Follow me, stay close, and do exactly as I say," she declared confidently, her voice surprisingly strong.

Exchanging dubious glances, we formed a tight group behind our unexpected guardian. As we made our way down the sandy dirt road, the beam of her flashlight seemed pitifully inadequate against the enveloping darkness. Occasionally, the light would catch the massive silhouettes of elephants moving through the trees, their huge forms appearing and disappearing like gray ghosts.

The only sounds were our footsteps on the dusty path, our collective breathing, and the occasional snap of branches in the distance – signs of the elephants' continuing presence. The air smelled of dust and vegetation, with an underlying muskiness that I would later learn was the distinctive scent of elephants.

Suddenly, an enormous shape appeared directly on the road ahead, blocking our path completely. The elephant's tusks gleamed faintly in the moonlight as it stood motionless, regarding us with what I imagined was the same curiosity with which we viewed it.

In that moment of both awe and panic, my instincts took over. I looked for cover and spotted what my frightened mind registered as a potential hiding place – a small, spindly mopane tree standing alone near the path. I ducked behind it, pressing my back against its inadequate trunk, fully aware even in my fear of how ridiculous I must have looked. The "tree" was barely five inches in diameter and perhaps eight feet tall, offering protection that was more psychological than physical.

Our tiny escort didn't hesitate. She fearlessly stepped forward, waving her arms and making a series of clicking sounds with her tongue. To our collective amazement, the elephant's ears flapped once, twice, and then it changed course, moving off the road with surprising delicacy for such a massive creature.

The elephants moved through the bush like living bulldozers, indifferent to the cracking limbs and falling saplings in their path. A young elephant paused to wrestle a mopane tree thicker than a fencepost, toppling it with a casual shove before ambling on, satisfied.

The absurdity of my choice amused our escort. She broke out in a smile that was wide enough and bright enough to be seen in the darkness.

Red-faced but relieved, I rejoined the group as nervous laughter replaced our former tension. The shared danger, and my comical response to it, would be one of our stories for ever more.

As we finally reached our huts, the adrenaline of our elephant encounter began to subside. Our escort bid us goodnight with the casual air of someone who had just guided us through a garden tour. "And don't worry about the elephants, " she said cheerfully.

Inside the simple hut, we lit the provided lantern and settled onto the surprisingly comfortable bed. Through the screened window came the sounds of the African night – chirping insects, distant calls of nocturnal birds, and the occasional deep rumble that could only be the elephants communicating with each other.

As I drifted off to sleep that night, the distant rumble of elephants served not as a warning but as a promise of the wild experiences that awaited us. Tomorrow would bring new challenges and wonders in this untamed corner of Botswana, but for now, even without running water or electricity, I felt strangely at home in the heart of the African bush.

There are two types of cats in this world, those who wear invisible crowns and those who wear invisible clown shoes. In the house next door to mine, both types live under the same roof.

It was a crisp autumn morning when I first witnessed what I now call "The Launch." I froze as I watched a massive black cat back up ten feet from Susan's kitchen door, wiggle his substantial hindquarters, and hurtle himself like a furry cannonball toward the small cat flap.

The ensuing "THUMP-RATTLE-SLIDE" shook the entire back porch as momentum carried his bulk through an opening clearly designed for a much smaller creature.

The sound hung in the morning air for a moment. Then came the soft thud of cat feet landing on kitchen tile and a triumphant, gravelly "MROWW!" that seemed to say, Mission accomplished.

That was Ira. And somewhere inside that house, I knew his brother Bill was watching, whiskers twitching with mortification. They reminded me of the classic TV show The Odd Couple. Ira, of course, was Oscar.

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Bill and Ira, two brothers who share the same home but seemingly nothing else. If cats had LinkedIn profiles, Bill's would list "Model" and "Man about town" under experience. His golden eyes survey the world with practiced disdain, his long, lustrous coat shimmering in the sunlight as he makes his methodical rounds through the neighborhood.

"Mrrrow," he announces each day when he visits my porch. It's not a request but a delicate, aristocratic notification that I should feel honored to provide him with treats. The sound is soft but clear, like porcelain being tapped by a silver spoon. When he purrs, the sound is like distant thunder wrapped in velvet.

Then there's Ira, the feline equivalent of your cousin who shows up to Christmas dinner in a stained t-shirt and somehow still gets the biggest slice of pie. Where Bill glides, Ira galumphs. Where Bill sips, Ira gulps. Ira's LinkedIn profile hasn't been updated in a long time and lists his job as "Bouncer." Where Bill's fur smells faintly of sunshine and expensive shampoo, Ira perpetually carries the earthy musk of soil and adventure, with occasional notes of whatever he last rolled in.

"MROWWW!" Ira doesn't so much meow as announce his presence with a gravelly demand that reverberates through walls. His approach to life lacks Bill's finesse but makes up for it in audacity. The sound of his paws on any surface is a percussive experience, part determined march, part improvisational jazz.

One day while chatting with Susan, she first mentioned the incident that would become known as The Case of the Mysterious Manicure.

"Bill disappeared for three days," she said, her brow furrowed with genuine confusion. "When he finally came home, looking supremely pleased with himself, I noticed his claws, which had been desperately in need of trimming, were perfectly manicured. Someone had cut them. I hope he behaved himself."

I nearly choked on my scone. "Are you telling me that someone randomly decided to trim his nails?"

"Either that or someone has adopted Bill," Susan replied.

Later that day, I caught sight of Bill on Susan's windowsill, preening in a shaft of sunlight. He met my gaze across the yard and gave me The Look, eyes narrowed to aristocratic slits, whiskers angled just so, before deliberately turning his attention back to grooming his already immaculate paw.

He knows something, I thought. And he's not telling.

"I never planned to adopt two cats," Susan confessed one rainy afternoon as we watched the brothers, Bill preening on the windowsill, Ira sprawled across the floor like a spilled ink puddle. "I went to the shelter to pick up some people to help at the NPR pledge drive."

"I saw them in a corner cage, two eight-week-old kittens huddled together. They'd been rescued from a drain pipe during a thunderstorm. The minute I approached, Bill looked up at me with such... dignity," Susan recalled. "Meanwhile, Ira climbed the cage wall, lost his grip, and tumbled right onto his back. Then he just lay there, looking up at me like, 'I meant to do that.'"

A couple of years passed. Bill grew up to be the lover that he is today; Ira grew up to be a hunter. Bill would make regular rounds of the neighborhood—he was well known by everyone on the street. Ira, however, we only saw in passing. He would be hunting in our back garden, and it was always fascinating to see him at work.

Susan got used to the gifts brought by Ira, dead mice, rats, and one time a hamster that he found somewhere. My favorite story was when Susan woke up in the morning to find a not-quite-dead mouse beside her bed. I heard her screaming from our house.

One summer faded into autumn, autumn withered into winter, and winter finally surrendered to spring. The neighborhood fell strangely quiet as Ira went missing. He would regularly disappear for a day or two, but now he was gone.

The first frost came with no black paws leaving prints across Susan's frosted car windshield. Christmas passed without Ira attacking the ribbon on a single package, the house eerily silent without his thunderous paws. By the time crocuses pushed up, even their bright colors seemed to highlight Ira's absence.

"Nine months," Susan told me one April afternoon, her eyes red-rimmed as we sat on her porch. "The shelter says after this long..."

She couldn't finish the sentence. Bill, unusually, had taken to sitting beside her, occasionally pressing his head against her hand when she grew still for too long. The subtle sound of his purr, almost too quiet to hear, would rise and fall with Susan's breathing.

A month later, the shelter called, "They found him! Ira is alive! They are treating him."

I was working in the front yard when Susan pulled into her driveway, tears streaming down her face and a pet carrier in her arms. From my vantage point, I could see Bill sitting in the bay window, his entire body tense, tail swishing rapidly back and forth with a soft thwip-thwip against the glass.

The moment Susan opened the carrier in the living room (I may have been peering through the window), Bill approached with uncharacteristic hesitation. Ira emerged, noticeably heavier, his side shaved where he had gotten stitches, with one ear slightly tattered, and for a moment, the brothers simply stared at each other.

Then Bill did something I'd never seen before, he bumped his head against Ira's, once, quickly, before sauntering away as if it had never happened. The soft sound of their fur, the briefest whisper of affection.

The Look he shot me through the window dared me to mention it.

Ira displayed several new and peculiar behaviors after his return. He refused to drink water from his bowl, instead pawing at the bathroom faucet until Susan turned it on. He startled at the sound of the refrigerator motor, arching his back and backing away slowly. Most puzzling of all, he stopped hunting.

Ira's wilderness sabbatical had transformed him from merely plump to impressively rotund. This new circumference presented an unforeseen challenge, the cat door.

The first attempt was a quiet disaster. I witnessed Ira approach the door with his usual confidence, only to become firmly wedged halfway through, his front paws scrabbling for purchase on the kitchen tile while his back half waved helplessly in the breeze.

After Susan extracted him (with considerable effort and some creative vocabulary), Ira spent several days eyeing the door with uncharacteristic wariness.

But Ira was nothing if not resourceful.

It took him exactly four days to develop his signature move. I was fortunate enough to witness the very first successful Launch, that ten-foot running start, the rear-wiggle preparation, the full-speed charge, and the triumphant slide through the cat door that shook Susan's entire kitchen wall.

"THUMP-RATTLE-SLIDE" became the soundtrack of our mornings, as reliable as birdsong but considerably more dramatic.

As summer stretched into autumn once again, The Mystery of the Manicured Cat remained unsolved, but new evidence emerged.

"Bill disappeared again last night," Susan mentioned casually as golden leaves drifted down around us on the porch. "His fur was brushed to a shine when he returned. Someone is definitely grooming my cat."

Meanwhile, Ira continued his reign of cheerful chaos, leaving muddy paw prints across Susan's countertops and perfecting The Launch to an art form. His hunting trophies ended, and Susan was a little relieved.

Late one evening in early winter, in a pool of moonlight on Susan’s porch, sat both brothers, side by side.

Bill was grooming Ira's head, the one spot Ira could never reach himself, with meticulous care. Ira, for his part, sat, eyes closed in apparent bliss.

The moment Bill noticed me watching, he stopped, gave Ira a light swat, and sauntered away. The Look he shot me contained a warning I understood perfectly, You saw nothing.

The next morning, I spotted Bill on my porch at his usual time, his coat gleaming in the late winter sunshine. His golden eyes met mine through the window, and I swear he winked.

"You know who's been trimming your claws, don't you?" I asked as I placed his treat on the railing between us. He responded with The Look, refined, aloof, secretive, before delicately accepting the offering.

From Susan's kitchen came the now-familiar "THUMP-RATTLE-SLIDE" of Ira's morning entrance, followed by Susan's laughter.

Bill's whiskers twitched, and I swear he smiled. The mystery of the manicured cat remains officially unsolved, but I have my theories.

As rain pelted down on Bali's lush landscape, Liz and I embarked on an adventure to escape the crowds and discover the island's spiritual heart. Our destination was Besakih Temple, known as the Mother Temple, nestled high in the misty hills. With the weather showing no signs of letting up, we opted for a taxi to navigate the slick roads.

"Are you sure about this?" Liz whispered as we climbed into the taxi, raindrops sliding down her nose.

"It's a warm rain and the temple will be less crowded," I reasoned.

Our journey began in Benoa, a commercial town on the southern end of Bali. We had arrived on a cruise ship and had one day in port before our voyage continued.

We drove up into the mountains, stopping in Ubud, a town renowned for its arts scene and picturesque rice terraces. While exploring the rain-soaked streets, enterprising locals surrounded us with a rainbow of umbrellas for sale.

"Special price for you, miss!" called out a young boy with bright eyes, holding up a vibrant blue umbrella.

"We're soaked already," I said with a shrug. He grinned in response, undeterred.

We continued exploring, comfortably traversing the wet streets in our Chaco sandals. The warm rain fell in big drops that splashed against our skin; this was not Ireland, where rain was a much colder affair.

We paused under an awning to get our bearings when we noticed a couple studying a map with intense concentration. They stood out immediately, both with short-cropped hair that hadn't quite grown out, wearing an impractical combination of socks with sandals that were visibly soaked through. Each clutched an umbrella purchased from local vendors, which seemed to be doing only a moderate job of keeping them dry.

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"Excuse me," the woman said, noticing us watching them. "Do you know if this temple is worth the trip in this weather?" She pointed to a circled location on their map.

"We're actually heading to Besakih Temple ourselves," I replied. "It's supposed to be spectacular."

"First time in Bali?" the man asked, shifting uncomfortably as water pooled in his socks.

"Yes," I nodded. "You?"

"Second trip," his partner replied, adjusting her grip on her umbrella. "We're George and MJ. Retired military, settled in Ecuador after our service ended last year."

"Nice to meet you," I said. "Ecuador is quite a change from military life."

George nodded. "This whole wandering-around-by-ourselves thing is still new to us. No mission parameters, no squad, just figuring it out as we go."

"Are you also on the cruise?" MJ asked, checking her heavy-duty tactical timepiece.

When we confirmed we were, George pulled out a neatly folded itinerary from a waterproof pocket. "We've allocated forty-five minutes for Ubud, ninety minutes for the temple complex, and thirty minutes for lunch at a local establishment recommended by our research."

Liz and I exchanged amused glances. "We're more 'seat of our pants' travelers," she explained. "Our only plan is to be back before the ship leaves."

"That approach makes me anxious," MJ admitted with a self-deprecating smile.

"We're sailors," I explained. "We're used to adjusting course based on the conditions."

"Navy?" George asked hopefully.

"Recreational," Liz clarified. "We go where the wind takes us."

"That sounds terrifying," MJ said, but her eyes reflected a hint of envy.

"You two heading up to the temple now?" I asked, noting the rain was beginning to ease slightly.

"That's our next stop," George replied.

"Why don't we share a taxi?" Liz suggested. "Might be cheaper for all of us."

As we flagged down a driver, MJ leaned closer. "If you're looking for lunch later, try a local warung, they are the little family places, instead of the tourist spots. The food is incredible."

On the drive up, we learned they'd met during their second tours in Afghanistan, married after returning home, and had chosen Ecuador for its combination of affordable living and expatriate community.

As our taxi wound higher into the mountains, the conversation shifted to the island's history and culture. Despite their regimented approach to travel, their genuine curiosity and respect for local customs revealed travelers with open hearts, if overly organized minds.

We had left the majority of people behind, and as we approached Besakih Temple, it emerged from the mist like a dream, its tiered pagodas climbing the slopes of Mount Agung. George and MJ consulted their watches and decided to split off to follow their own timeline, promising to compare notes back on the ship.

Stone steps, slick with rain, led us upward through a series of split gates known as candi bentar. Each gate seemed to transport us deeper into a realm where the sacred and earthly intertwined. The scent of incense and wet stone mingled in the cool mountain air.

The temple complex unfolded before us in layers, with over 80 individual temples and shrines scattered across the mountainside. Our footsteps echoed on the wet stone as we navigated through courtyards adorned with intricate stone carvings. Incense smoke wafted through the air, mingling with the earthy perfume rising from rain-soaked ground.

The central temple, Pura Penataran Agung, commanded our attention with its imposing six-tiered structure. We climbed its steep steps carefully, each level offering a new perspective of the surrounding temples and the mist-shrouded valley below. Prayer flags fluttered and snapped in the mountain breeze, accompanying the distant sound of gamelan music drifting from nearby.

Dark clouds occasionally parted, allowing brief shafts of sunlight to illuminate the temple's stone surfaces, highlighting the centuries-old craftsmanship in the weathered carvings. We paused often, mesmerized by the ornate details: demons and deities locked in eternal dance, mythological creatures guarding sacred spaces, and intricate floral patterns celebrating nature's beauty.

Besakih stayed with us as we descended back to our waiting taxi. The spiritual resonance of the temple visit gave way to more earthly concerns as mid-afternoon hunger gnawed at us.

Remembering MJ's recommendation, we asked our driver to take us to a local warung rather than a tourist restaurant. He nodded approvingly and suggested a small establishment tucked away in a village.

Stepping inside, we found ourselves in a humble dining room where plastic chairs surrounded well-worn wooden tables. The menu, handwritten in Balinese script, might as well have been hieroglyphics to us.

"I don't see any prices," Liz whispered, a note of concern in her voice.

Before I could respond, the owner—a woman with laugh lines etched deeply around her eyes—approached our table, wiping her hands on a faded cloth.

She spoke slowly in Balinese and looked at us hopefully.

I shook my head apologetically. "No Indonesian," I admitted.

Instead of frustration, her face lit up with a challenge accepted. "You come," she said decisively, beckoning us with a wave.

Sensing our hesitation, she took me by the arm and drew us into the back of the restaurant.

We followed her through a beaded curtain into the kitchen's inner sanctum, which was a sensory revelation. Steam rose from massive pots bubbling on well-used stovetops, carrying the aromatic symphony of galangal, turmeric, and lemongrass. Chilies sizzled in well-seasoned woks, their spicy essence making our eyes water.

Language barriers disappeared as the owner guided us through her culinary domain with gestures alone. She lifted lids revealing fragrant dishes, pointing and nodding encouragingly. When she uncovered a pot of what appeared to be pork, she mimicked eating with exaggerated satisfaction, patting her stomach appreciatively.

Liz pointed inquiringly to another dish wrapped in banana leaves. The woman smiled and made a graceful undulating motion with her hands that somehow perfectly conveyed "fish." She then made a gesture of wrapping something and then touching her fingertips together repeatedly—perhaps indicating tenderness or the way the fish would flake apart.

Along the counter, dishes in various stages of preparation offered a visual feast: vibrant green vegetables, golden curry sauces, and deep red sambal. Without a single shared word between us, the owner somehow communicated the essence of each dish through an elaborate choreography of nods, gestures, and facial expressions.

A young girl of about ten appeared at the woman's side, watching us with curious eyes. The woman placed her hand on the girl's shoulder with obvious maternal pride, and the daughter offered a shy smile but remained silent. She followed us attentively as we toured the kitchen, occasionally whispering to her mother, who would nod or shake her head in response.

Through a combination of gestures, nods, and appreciative sniffs, we made our selections from the aromatic offerings before us. The girl ran ahead to prepare our table.

Back at our table, the dishes that arrived weren't exactly what we'd envisioned—we'd pointed at what looked like chicken but received fish, and what we thought was rice turned out to be noodles—yet each bite was a delicious surprise. The flavors were bold and complex, clearly born from generations of culinary expertise. Every spoonful revealed new layers of taste: sweet, sour, spicy, and savory dancing on our tongues.

"This is incredible," Liz murmured, closing her eyes to savor a particularly flavorful bite. "I don't even know what I'm eating, but I never want it to end."

The owner watched from a distance, her face glowing with pride at our obvious enjoyment. When the little girl brought us extra napkins, I asked her, "Did you help cook this?"

She nodded solemnly. "I make," she said, pointing to the sambal, chili paste that had nearly taken the roof of my mouth off.

"Very good," I replied. Her delighted giggle was worth the burning sensation.

As we prepared to leave, I glanced at my watch and felt a jolt of panic. "Liz! The ship leaves in forty minutes!"

The owner, seeing our sudden distress, quickly calculated our bill. Her daughter pressed a small woven bracelet into Liz's hand, a parting gift that brought unexpected tears to her eyes.

Our driver, sensing the urgency, navigated the winding roads with newfound purpose, occasionally taking shortcuts through villages where children waved as we passed. The rain had finally stopped, and late afternoon sun gilded the wet landscape.

"Will we make it?" Liz asked, tension evident in her voice as she fingered her new bracelet.

"No worry," our driver assured us with a grin.

We made it to the port with just five minutes to spare, rushing up the gangplank as final boarding calls echoed across the water. On deck, catching our breath, we watched Bali's coastline recede in the golden light of approaching sunset.

Later that evening, we spotted George and MJ at dinner, their faces animated as they recounted their perfectly executed temple visit to their tablemates. Catching our eye, MJ excused herself and came over.

"We saw you running up the dock!" she said, relief evident in her voice. "We were worried."

"We made it," Liz laughed, showing off her bracelet. "And thank you for suggesting the warung—we had the most amazing lunch experience."

As the ship glided through darkening waters, the warmth of Bali's welcome stayed with us, carried in a handwoven bracelet and the lingering heat of a great meal.

The first time I crested Maclaren Summit on the Denali Highway, I felt a visceral connection to the land. Complete silence enveloped me—the kind of silence that makes your ears search for sound. Standing at 4,086 feet with the vast Maclaren River Valley stretched before me, I felt part of the earth. Even after fifteen years of touring Alaska, this remote stretch of road still takes my breath away every time I drive it.

As a self-proclaimed transport nerd—yes, I'm the kind of person who gets excited about Roman roads and railway histories—I should be focused on the engineering marvel of building a highway on permafrost. Instead, I find myself captivated by the landscape's beauty and the whispers of history that echo across it.

When what is now Denali National Park was created in 1917, the only way to reach it was to fly or brave a winter dog sled journey. In 1923, the railroad arrived, allowing people to travel by train. After World War II, Alaska's residents petitioned for road access to the park.

The term "highway" might evoke images of a major thoroughfare, but the Denali Highway defies expectations. This modest two-lane, mostly gravel road first opened to travelers in 1957. Its construction proceeded in stages from both ends, primarily to transport supplies for bridge construction over the Maclaren and Susitna Rivers. The final link connected these two waterways, with much of the bridge work accomplished during winter months atop the frozen rivers, a trick learned by the Army Corp of Engineers when building the Alcan Highway during World War II.

The journey begins in the west at Cantwell, a town whose existence is intertwined with the railroad. When the iron horse arrived in 1923, this area was accessible only by dog-sled team. Cantwell was a flag stop on the Alaska railroad named for an Irish-American officer who had led the coastguard in Alaska.

During World War II, while Rosie the Riveter became an icon in the Lower 48, local Athabascan women took charge of the railroad yard operations in Cantwell when the men departed for war. Their work demanded intense physical labor in harsh conditions. To move iron rails, these women worked in coordinated teams, chanting songs to maintain rhythm as they threw their full body weight into a specialized lever called a gandy—earning them the whimsical title of "gandy dancers."

Alice Norton, Grace Secondchief, and their fellow gandy dancers earned recognition from the government for their vital contribution to the war effort. Sometimes, when the wind howls through the valley, I imagine I hear them chanting on the wind, their voices carried through time.

Leaving Cantwell behind, the real adventure begins as the pavement ends after just three miles. The crunch of gravel beneath my tires marks my favorite transition in Alaska—the moment when cell service disappears, and the journey truly begins.

Just beyond the first ridge, on one memorable trip, I stoppped near Brushkana Campground where a momma moose and her calf stood alongside the road. They were so close I could hear the calf's breathing as it steadied itself on spindly legs, its small body dwarfed by its mother's massive frame. I could see the mother's breath in the chilly morning air. Moose calves grow remarkably quickly, as much as 2 pounds per day, and can weigh 300 pounds by autumn. But in that moment, with morning mist still clinging to the valley, this one seemed impossibly fragile.

As the sun climbs higher, I often look across to see a float plane sitting on a lake that mirrors the endless Alaskan sky. The distant drone of its engine occasionally breaks the silence as I approach my first stop of the day.

The historic Gracious House emerges like a mirage on the horizon. Still standing today, under a different name, this roadhouse was established by Mark and Mary Gatias as a haven for travelers. While Mark attended to vehicles and flat tires, Mary nourished weary travelers with hearty meals and her legendary pies.

"This used my mother’s pie crust recipe," Mary once told me, sliding a slice of blueberry pie across the counter. "I use blueberries for the filling. It’s been in the family for generations"

Near the parking area stood a weather-worn Quonset hut dubbed The Sluice Box. This bar had atmosphere you could almost touch—its low ceiling adorned with dollar bills bearing visitors' names and origins, the wooden floor polished by decades of boots and stories. I typically arrive around 10:30am for the much-needed bathrooms, and there's time for a Bloody Mary or a slice of the famous house pie, its crust flaky and perfect.

The modern history of this region began roughly a century ago. Gold miners in the Valdez Creek region, near the Susitna River, forged trails eastward to Paxson and westward toward present-day Cantwell. Today's highway largely follows these pioneers' paths. There is normally no traffic on this route; I expect to see only one or two vehicles during the six-hour drive. The solitude becomes a companion of its own.

The Susitna River Bridge is one of my favorite places on the drive. I like to get out and walk across the bridge, the metal deck vibrating slightly underfoot with each step. From its steel span, I watch the braided channels below weave like silver ribbons through the valley, creating a landscape that pulses with life.

The river transforms with each passing season, making it a challenge for boat navigation, with sandbars appearing and disappearing.The engineers who built this bridge faced more than the usual challenges of distance and weather—they were attempting to traverse a living, changing entity.

During fishing season, the sandbars below often host determined anglers who set up camp, reminding me of how these waters have always fed humans.

The pathway ascends an esker or ridge formed by an ancient underground river when this area was fully glaciated during the last ice age. The vegetation changes with every hundred feet of elevation. Crazy Notch serves as a dramatic prelude to the view ahead. This distinctive geological formation emerged from the ancient movements of the Maclaren Glacier, which carved through this valley, depositing lateral moraines on both sides. A glacial stream later cut through these deposits, creating the notch that now serves as a natural snow trap, occasionally closing the highway with massive drifts during winter months.

As the road climbs through the moraine, the landscape unfolds like chapters in an ancient book. The air grows thinner, crisper, carrying the faint scent of alpine flowers. From this elevated vantage point, the magnificence of Mt Deborah, and Mt Hayes tower over the landscape. I can see the Maclaren River Valley stretching before me, with Maclaren Lodge standing sentinel on the riverbank. The river traces its path backward into the distance until, on clear days, the white and blue expanse of the Maclaren Glacier becomes visible—a frozen river that has sculpted this landscape for millennia.

Maclaren Lodge appears just when the sense of isolation reaches its peak, when I've driven far enough to wonder if I've somehow entered another world. This refuge at the highway's intersection with the Maclaren River is run by Alan and Susie and is an institution in the interior of Alaska. It is the destination for many travelers on this route in summer and in winter when snow-machine groups keep the place busy.

"How far did you come today?" Alan always asks, though he knows perfectly well where I started. It's his way of acknowledging the effort it takes to reach this place.

This is my regular lunch stop, where I see Alan and have a chat that invariably begins with the weather and ends with fishing stories. I sit by the pool table and eat my sandwich and soup, the windows framing a view that no five-star restaurant could match.

The soup is always good, the sandwiches simple. Out here, in the bush a long way from grocery stores, when you order your sandwiches, if you don't need onion or tomato or lettuce, it makes a difference. It's 240 miles each way to a grocery store from here—a fact that makes every fresh ingredient a small miracle.

After lunch there's time for a walk around, down to the bridge for a photo, time to play with the lodge dogs, or even a quick game of pool if I'm feeling sharp. Then it's back on the road, the gravel crunching as I head over the bridge and up the ridge toward Maclaren Summit. With each curve, the valley opens wider below me, until I can see for what feels like a hundred miles in every direction.

Maclaren Summit, at 4,086 feet the second-highest highway pass in Alaska, offers an amazing view across the vast expanse of the Maclaren River Valley. When I stand here with the wind whipping around me, I feel a profound connection to every traveler who has paused here: from Indigenous hunters who first blazed these trails, to gold-fevered prospectors chasing their dreams, to today's adventurers. Time is narrow in places like this, where the view has remained largely unchanged for thousands of years.

Beavers are busy at work here, and I see a large beaver lodge in a nearby lake. The beaver has built a dam to create a still pond, the water's surface occasionally broken by a sleek head or the slap of a broad tail. Like humans, beavers reshape their environment to create conditions favorable to themselves.

Because there are no trees in this landscape of tundra, the beaver has built their dam using only grass and mud, requiring constant maintenance. I've watched these tiny architects swimming back and forth, carrying mouthfuls of grasses to patch their structures.

The permafrost landscape alongside the highway showcases the construction techniques learned during the building of the Alcan Highway. This route will remain gravel due to the underlying glacial substructure. One of my favorite activities is to stop and explore the tundra on foot, placing my bare hand against the permafrost to feel its ancient chill just inches below the surface's summer warmth.

In season, wild blueberries dot the landscape, offering sweet rewards for only a few minutes' work. Their tart sweetness bursts in my mouth, tasting nothing like their cultivated cousins in grocery stores.

Just around the next bend lies one of Alaska's most magnificent geological features. Landmark Gap presents itself as a masterpiece of glacial architecture—a perfect U-shaped valley carved by ice age forces. Its walls tower hundreds of feet high, testament to the massive glaciers that once shaped this landscape. In autumn, caribou migrate through this corridor, sometimes in vast herds that darken the valley floor. I've watched these creatures follow paths worn into the tundra over millennia, the soft clicking of their hooves carried on the still air. Their ancient patterns remind me of the pattern of my life.

The Tangle Lakes Archaeological District preserves stories of hunters who observed these same migrations 10,000 years ago. This 225,000-acre district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, contains some of North America's earliest evidence of human occupation, with over 400 documented archaeological sites providing windows into this continent's distant past.

Here, evidence has been found of walls built to funnel the migrating caribou into killing areas where, armed with spears, these hunters would feed their families. From the earliest Americans to the Ahtna Athabascan peoples of the Copper River Basin, the Tangle Lakes area has served as crucial seasonal hunting grounds. Walking across this landscape, I sometimes find myself pausing to pick up a stone, wondering if it might have been touched by human hands thousands of years ago.

Modern hunters still frequent this area, for the same reason. This thoroughfare is almost deserted most of the year; the exception is September, hunting season, when you will see many vehicles and hunting camps crop up all along the way. The scent of wood smoke drifts across the tundra, and occasionally the sharp report of a rifle echoes through the valleys.

When I see people out enjoying the landscape today—hunting, fishing, or hiking—I think about the Athabascan people who were here before and lived in this landscape using just the tools of the environment around them. The Athabascans strive to keep their culture and traditions alive, maintaining a connection to this land that runs deeper than any highway ever could.

The pavement has returned but that is not really an improvement; the skin of the road is buckled with frost heaves. Time to slow down and enjoy weaving through the lakes and glacial erratics at the pace of a slow walk.

The Gulkana Glacier appears as a frozen river of time, its medial moraine drawing a dark line across the ice that speaks to geological forces beyond human comprehension. The Gulkana river valley opens below me, the silver thread of the Trans Alaska pipeline elevated to protect the fragile permafrost environment. Another perfect picture stop where you can never capture the feeling of being surrounded by such immensity.

The journey's finale unfolds as a magnificent crescendo. Mt. Wrangell dominates the horizon, a vast active shield volcano, named for the Russian governor of Alaska. On cold days, the steam from its crater is visible, a reminder that beneath the snow and ice, the earth remains alive and restless. Drum and Sanford pierce the clouds, their snow-crowned summits commanding attention even from those who have seen the world's great mountain ranges.

By the time I reach Paxson, 135 miles from my starting point in Cantwell, I've been transformed by the essence of the Denali Highway—it's not merely a road, but a passage through time that grounds me in the world. In autumn, when the tundra ignites with color and caribou move like shadows across the land, this truth is undeniable.

Each traverse of this remote ribbon of gravel serves as a thread connecting me to something greater than myself, a reminder that in Alaska, the wild heart of the land continues to beat strong and true.