Before our vacation in Ireland this summer, my family had to make an important decision.
Do we drive while we’re there? I say “we” intentionally. When you’re driving on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car, after spending the night wedged between two strangers forty thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, driving is
a group effort.
First, we set a rule for our college-aged children: No talking to Mom and Dad while we’re driving. Sure, the odd “Look at the sheep!” or “A castle!” was fine. But anything weightier, anything longer – no. That had to wait until we weren’t driving. “Ooh! I need my Social Security number. My professor is applying for our visas. For my study abroad next month,” my oldest piped up from the back seat. “He needs it today.”
Barreling down the Irish equivalent of an interstate, at the Irish equivalent of sixty miles per hour, I wasn’t sure I could regurgitate my own Social Security number, let alone my daughter’s. The second rule we agreed upon was that I would drive, my husband would navigate. In the rental agency’s parking lot, my husband turned to me from the passenger side. Which should, you know, be the driver’s side. But I try not to argue with a country who can make beer with a head so creamy, it could be bovine instead of gaseous. “I love you,” my husband said. “Remember that.”
The first thing I realized was how hard it is to determine your place in space when you’re on the wrong side of the car. It was not all that different from teaching my kids to drive. “How do I know,” they’d ask, “if I’m in the center of the lane?” I don’t know, dude. You just know. Point the car in the right direction and stay there. “You’re driving on the shoulder,” my husband observed. Easy for him to say. He didn’t have a double decker bus bearing down on him from the opposing lane, so close I could read the passengers’ lips. I love you, he’d said. Remember that.
The car’s dashboard displayed a graphic of our car in relation to the road’s lane lines. It, too, said I was hugging the shoulder. I corrected the steering wheel, wondering as I did so if the dashboard graphic loved me as much as my husband does. Because I sure loved it.
The next obstacle? Local roads. You know how when you’re driving on the Schuylkill, and the river is on one side, and that rock wall thing is on the other, and you’re thinking, “That car in the next lane is so close!” My friends. The Schuylkill is as capacious as the Arctic tundra when compared to local Irish roads. I read that, because the Romans never conquered Ireland, Irish streets are only wide enough for two horses to pass. Worse, the Irish somewhere along the way decided most roads needed a stone wall bordering them. A stone wall overgrown with vines and flowers. Which is beautiful. But also camouflages the stone wall. So you may think, “Boy, this road sure is narrow! And there’s no shoulder. And there’s a car coming in the opposite direction. I’ll just nudge closer to the soft vines and flowers.” But what you’re really doing is intimately acquainting that stone wall with your side view mirror.
And maybe – maybe – that’s why the Guinness flows so freely in Ireland. It sure does help you forget the harrowing drive from the rental agency. And that’s good. Because somehow, you need to get that car back.
Contact Wendi Rank on Instagram @wendirank
