Only 39 days left to our Belfast adventure. It seems like only yesterday we were on the front end of seven months in the UK. But now our thoughts already are starting to turn, half way at least, back to life in Decatur.
Restarting all those magazines we stopped. Arranging for our cleaner to go through the house to erase seven months of another family living there. Being reunited with Gunner, our beloved cat. Will she remember us? Will she leave us fecal presents to show her displeasure at our leaving? Going through seven months of junk mail. Reassembling my office. Wondering how many weeds have infiltrated the yard. Getting accustomed again to a humid Georgia summer.
A lot in the rear view
So far, including Northern Ireland, we’ve been in nine countries, seen four professional football matches and a similar number of big houses. We’ve glimpsed masterworks from Rembrandt, Picasso, van Gogh, Michelangelo. We’ve toured at least a half-dozen Gothic cathedrals and about that many scenic coastal towns. Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and London. Doolin, St. Ives and Falmouth. We’ve seen henges great and small.
We pulled 220-million-year-old fossils out of the sand and muck at Lyme Regis. We still talk about the fantastic (and cheap) sushi dinner we had at a Berlin restaurant that had reopened just that week.
I haven’t had the fortitude to map how many miles we’ve traveled in the UK and continental Europe, but I know it’s an eye-popping number. I shudder to recall the many roundabouts where I went the wrong way and had to turn around—especially in Cork.
We’ve dined with several noted authors, including poet Michael Longley, literary critic Edna Longley, fiction writer David Park, playwright Ann Devlin and historian Jonathan Bardon. And we can’t forget Stephen Rea, who helped launch Marilynn’s edition of the Stewart Parker novel “Hopdance” in Dublin on our wedding anniversary.
And more to come
And with just 39 days to go, it seems like we have an impossibly long list of things yet to do that don’t include packing up the flat, getting rid of what we’ve accumulated and making our way home.
We’re going with our friend Eileen to see puffins on Rathlin Island tomorrow. Marilynn has a book reading Monday in Dublin, and another one in Edinburgh on Friday, where she’s going to attend a Fulbright Scholar conference. At the end of the month, she’s off to Derry for a Canadian Association for Irish Studies conference.
At the same time, a good friend of mine from Murfreesboro, Tenn., Karen, will be in Belfast to take in the sights for a few days. As Karen leaves us for Kilkenny, Declan and I will join Marilynn in Derry to visit friends and (at least) see the Grianan of Aileach, a prehistoric stone fort that’s around 10,000 years old. Derry’s a great city we’ve visited several times but is always worth a look. We’ll also spend a few days in Donegal, the county in the northwest corner of the island.
We return to Belfast and leave two days later for eight days in northern Portugal. I really don’t know much about that since Declan planned this trip with Marilynn’s help, but I do know it includes a tour of a football stadium in Braga built at the edge of a rock quarry. And in between our return from Portugal and the flight home, Marilynn’s Belgian friend Béné will be with us. She was a fantastic tour guide when we were in Antwerp, and we likely will be feeble imitators. We also hope to see Stewart Parker’s old friend Sam Fannin, who’ll be visiting Northern Ireland from Spain.
After all of that, once we’re back in Decatur, I think we may need a vacation.
To Europe ... and Back 