I'll Turn This Car Right Around!

When I was a kid, family vacations meant one thing - piling into the family car and driving to New Jersey to visit my dad's family. We loved being in NJ: seeing our grandparents, aunts, and uncles; running around a backyard big enough to have both a basketball court and a baseball diamond; climbing the big leafy trees; trips into NYC to see musicals, the Natural History Museum or the Bronx Zoo... Being in NJ was fantastic.

Getting there, well, not so much. We didn't have a four-door car with air conditioning until I was a teenager. So most of these trips involved the three of us kids, wedged into a hot sticky backseat, squawking like a bunch of wet hens.

This was back in Ye Olde Days of Parenting, when parents did not reason with children. I don't really understand the people who reason with two year olds who are strapped into prams or car seats. When I was a docent at Lincoln Park Zoo, I had ample opportunity to observe these sorts of ridiculous moments in parenting. Like the couple and their two year old, who was in one of those fancy off-road sorts of prams. The mother had either been in a recent bar fight or had had a nose job. Given their designer clothes and fancy pram, I'd bet my money on the latter.

In a voice dripping with faux patience, the mother said, "Now Jordan, Mommy's boo-boo hurts. So we're going to go home after this." Jordan responded with the sort of ear-splitting screech that makes an air raid siren sound like the pleasant chirping of song birds. As Jordan wailed and his mother wheedled, I wondered why they didn't just leave then and there. The kid was strapped into a pram and a family isn't really meant to be a democracy. It's more of a benevolent dictatorship in which votes by the subjects are more suggestion than mandate.

When I was young, kids were kids and parents were parents. A parent did not reason. A parent issued declarations and you had better believe them. The declarations usually consisted of what I consider to be the golden oldies of parenting:

• I'll turn this car right around!
• I'll hit you so fast, your head will spin.*
• You're going to have fun if I ever to break every bone in your body.
• I'll give you something to cry about.
• Don't make me come up there.
  
  *Middle Brother and I are pretty sure it's 'spin' although we did on occasion think that it sounded like 'swim.' We once had a long discussion about this and decided that it was usually spin but maybe, when we were going to the pool, it made sense for it to be swim.

I was reminded of these idyllic summer trips when I was driving my family around the wilds of southwestern Ireland. When the original plans were made, Peter was scheduled to do most of the driving in his 7-seater Nissan Patrol. Only he found out that he had to work, which left me figuring out how to fit 4 adult passengers into Leo, my tiny Peugeot 306 hatchback. (Thankfully, he's a five-door.)

I'm a Scanlan, so I love a good packing puzzle. I figured out that we could indeed all fit, since my dad would have enough leg room behind me. I'm so short, I sit right up on the steering wheel like a granny. My mom would have to sit in the back, given her nervousness. That left one aunt in the middle of the back seat and one in the front.

It went pretty well except that we'd all get frayed around the edges toward the end of an outing. The last few days were especially trying. On Thursday, we drove up to Clare via Listowl in County Kerry, then up to Tarbert to catch the ferry to Killimer. This route had the dual advantages of eliminating the need to go through Limerick city and cutting 85 miles off the trip, but it still seemed like the journey took forever.

Not only was poor little Leo hauling five adults, he also had a boot loaded to the top with luggage. I reckon we were pushing Leo's kerb limit by a good 150 - 200 pounds. The car was a champ although the suspension was squeaking and groaning from time to time. (A quick call to our mechanic assured us that the noise was only the result os springs that needed oiling.)

I drove up to Listowel about as fast as an octogenarian on barbiturates. I crept along at about 60 KPH and got out of the way of faster traffic whenever I could. The ride was squeaky and my mother's "Whee!" trick wasn't working quite so well. On the plus side, the backseat passengers were very cooperative and didn't fight at all. On the minus side, a certain passenger did a fair bit of backseat driving. (Finally, I snapped and said rather snarkily 'You know, I do process the same visual data as you.')

By the time we got to Tarbert, desperation was setting in. I sent Peter the following text: "Waiting for ferry now. Feels like this trip will last forever." The ferry was a godsend. As well as its aforementioned advantages, it also offered the most crucial ingredient for road trip success: novelty. It broke up the monotony of the drive splendidly.

In Clare, we found a place to have lunch and then set out for the Cliffs of Moher. Although lunch had resolved any impending low blood sugar levels, it had been a long day and everyone was getting a bit stroppy. At one point, I found myself saying, half seriously, "I'll turn this car right around." Everyone knew it was an empty threat, just like my brothers and I knew on those long trips to New Jersey. At least County Clare is not as long as Pennsylvania.

In Search of the Elusive Puffin

When we had our honeymoon in Scotland in 2004, I had a short list of things I absolutely wanted to do:

• Go to a distillery.
• Take a trail ride.
• See puffins.

We went to not one but two distilleries. I spent a delightful albeit terrifying 90 minutes on the back of a speedy thoroughbred, racing through the hills and sheep fields near Kingussie.

The puffin seeing was not as successful. We skipped a trip to Handa Island, figuring we'd get to see puffins on our trip to the northwestern-most point in Scotland: Cape Wrath.

I suppose we might have seen puffins at Cape Wrath, assuming we'd been able to see more than five feet in front of us. The area was socked in by the sort of fog you'd think only exists in spy movies - thick, oppressive, and vaguely menacing.

We were able to take the boat across to the Cape and the bus ride up to the lighthouse, but it was something of an exercise in futility. We couldn't see the lighthouse until we were within a few feet of it. The only wildlife I saw was a one-eyed trouser snake, which I glimpsed when I blundered around a corner where a cyclist was using the Great Outdoors as a toilet. (There was a pack of cyclists on the trip and I guess one of them was meant to be 'guarding' the loo area but was derelict in this duty.)

Seeing puffins went onto my lifetime to-do list, but I always seemed to miss out. Peter got to see them when he took his photography trip to Iceland. Last year, I thought I'd get to see them on Skellig Michael, but weather prohibited the trip twice. So you can imagine how excited I was when I planned to take my family on the boat tour at the Cliffs of Moher.

When the morning of the boat tour arrived, it was raining and a little misty. My hopes of seeing a puffin plummeted. On the boat, I eventually made my way to the bow, which gave a much better view. Plus, one of the crew, Sean, was hanging out there and pointing out the sights. When Sean pointed and shouted "Puffin!", I craned my neck to follow his finger, only to have him retract his statement and declare the bird was actually a guillemot.

Disappointed, I still kept my eyes peeled for the tell-tale white and orange face. Before long, Sean pointed and shouted "Puffin!" again, only this time, it was the real thing. The puffin was swimming about 10 feet from the side of the boat. It paddled along and then, in a smoothly practised gesture, took off into the sky and flew away.

Excited doesn't even begin to cover how I felt. I had no idea they swam along on the top of the water. I don't know why I the thought had never occured to me, since I knew they had to dive to catch their dinner.

The most surprising thing about the puffin was its size. Much like when you see Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" in art museum, puffins are much smaller than you thought they were, but otherwise they measure up to expectations quite well.

Besides their cute little faces, I was also amused by and taken with their little orange feet. One of the puffins dove down under the water and I could see his bright little feet for longer than I could see his body, like they were waving good-bye as he plunged deeper and deeper into the dark water.

Sometimes, when you've waited so long to do something, the experience doesn't quite measure up to the myth you've built up in your head. I'm happy to report that finally seeing the elusive puffin was even better than I'd hoped.
Ed note: Peter took the picture above in Iceland.