Dave's Travel Journals

Runaway Sheep!

In the Air - Dublin to Copenhagen:
August 30, 2000

By Dave Fox

I'm flying from Dublin to Copenhagen right now... on my way home to Seattle. My last tour ended 10 days ago -- probably with events that would be worth telling about if I could remember them. But it all feels very far away now.

I flew from Bergen, where the tour ends, back to Oslo, where I met my friend / co-worker / co-musician / drinking buddy, Rhonda. We hung out in Drøbak and managed to procure a guitar and the most beautiful fiddle I've ever played from a local violin maker.

After staggering through Oslo for a couple of days, crawling through Drøbak's pubs for a couple of nights, and introducing my Norwegian family to fajitas, we hopped a flight to Dublin.

I had a plan for our arrival in Dublin: pub food for dinner, folk music in a tourist-free pub, and... well, perhaps a wee glass of Guinness if I was feeling really super adventurous.

Rhonda and I quickly reached a conclusion: Dublin sucks.

Actually, it doesn't, which I discovered on my swing back through the city today after a week in the countryside. But our first night was a disappointment. Someone at our hotel sent us to the Temple Bar area, claiming we'd find the best music in town. What we found was a drippingly trendy neighborhood, clogged with tourists and Irish yuppies.

By the time we got there, the pubs were done serving food for the night. We tromped around in search of dinner for an hour before we settled on a fast-food place that sold "patties" -- Irish meat pies, usually with lamb, only I think these ones were made with Slim Jims or freeze-dried Spam.

Terrified about what I had just done to my stomach, I raced for a Guinness to neutralize the toxins. There was music in the pubs we found -- not bad music, but music for tourists. In a highly unprecedented move, we decided to quit after one pint and get to sleep so we could hit the road early the next day.

In the morning we went back to the airport to pick up Seamus (pronounced "Shaymus"). Seamus was our rental car and friend. He was bright red, and resembled a miniature minivan -- room for four people, plus about three cubic centimeters of trunk space.

We drove to Dingle, known for its quaintness and lively music scene. Unfortunately, quaint has become synonymous with "too many tourists" and when a cozy village gets overrun with outsiders, the people who live there get understandably testy.

"They're trying to leprechaun us -- turn us into Disneyworld," one local musician told me. He blamed the Irish government and lamented the scourge of Riverdance.

Once we got out of Dingle Town and into the smaller villages around the peninsula, we found the Ireland we were seeking: falling-down stone churches from the 12th century, musty pubs where people still speak Gaelic, and approximately 12,370,002 sheep.

I had a run-in with a sheep one morning. I walked out of our B&B and spotted a nervous sheep trotting along the road, looking lost but determined. A farmer chased down the hill after the renegade, yelling at me to stop the beast.

Having grown up near Washington, DC, I sadly never received my sheep herding license and had no clue what this farmer wanted me to do with his sheep.

I knew the following:

1. The sheep was dirtier than anything I wanted to handle.
2. The sheep probably outweighed me.
3. The sheep had big horns with which it could potentially beat the crap out of me.

I looked at the farmer for more detailed instructions than "Stop that sheep!" By this point, the farmer and the sheep had both passed me on the road. The farmer had overtaken the sheep and was flailing his arms, trying to scare the animal back up the hill toward me. "Don't move!" he yelled at me.

The sheep ran toward me. I moved.

It ran around the back of a house, which I was much closer to than the farmer, who then instructed me to chase after his sheep and scare it around to the other side of the house. He promised he would catch the beast on the other side. So I ran after the sheep, which finally cornered itself in a dead-end alleyway behind the house. The farmer wrestled the very perturbed sheep back to its home. That was my big Irish cultural experience for the morning.

© Copyright Dave Fox