Partial Credit.

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment
Today has found the intrepid Horan family wedged between two nights in a guest house near Dingle, Co. Kerry, on the southwestern coast of the island. With two nights in the same place, we are left with the ability to idle away an entire day, and brainstormed for amusements. This area is in the center of a quickly growing Irish surfing scene, and we thought that that would be fun. We found board and wetsuit rentals for 25 Euro, and had nearly pulled the trigger before consulting the surf report. Fortunately we hopped online and saw that it forecast a 23-25 foot swell. We decided that today was not our day to surf.

Harry and I instead decided to go for a stormy trail run on Mount Brandon. After a spartan breakfast that paired nicely with the Eastern Bloc hospitality afforded us by our Hungarian waitress, the two brothers set forth towards the trail head in the wind and the rain.

By the time we started the run, the storm had lifted slightly, and we managed to climb a rutted dirt road through dry set stone walls and bleating sheep. The clarity could not last, and before long we caught up with the ceiling. As though directed by some cosmic maestro, the trail exhibited a graceful diminuendo to make way for the 50 meter visibility that was settling in. We looked up into the haze to where a ravine petered to a runnel and back down to where a stone pillar stood as our last landmark before a sea of gray consumed the landscape. We discussed pressing further into the tempest before rationalizing that relative to the amount of exercise we had gotten in the previous week, this really was quite strenuous, and, that “we’re going to die out here.”

Harry sizes up the storm and looks for the trail.

We retreated to the car (elapsed run time: 13 minutes) before heading out for an out and back on the relative safety of the gravel country road. We accepted partial credit for our run ambitions.
Harry negotiates Drew Creek.

The rain continued on our drive back towards the guest house and as we were weaving through the outskirts of Ballydavid a silhouette emerged on the side of the road and indicated that it would like a ride. Never ones to to leave a stooping old man out in the rain, we slowed down, pulled over, and he crawled into the back seat.

We greeted him and were met with some indecipherable dialect of muddled speech, so addled by age and whiskey that after I posed that he may only speak Gaelic, Harry wondered if he was speaking anything at all. No matter, the man fastened his seat belt and we were off. We had made it only 100 meters before he indicated to us through insistent mumbling and gesticulation that we were going in the wrong direction.

I have not hitchhiked often, but my understanding of the process is that it is uncommon for the rider to inform the driver that he is going in precisely the wrong direction.

But the man seemed quite comfortable, and who were we to throw him back out in the weather? Besides, it was a layover day on the coast and raining. We headed back past where we’d picked him up, and started looking for where he might want to go. He indicated forward, mumbled to himself or his audience, and would  from time to time erupt laughing to some private joke. We continued driving through the narrow, twisting roads of rural Ireland and before long the lanes widened, the houses became more sparse, and we were headed towards the open road. I thought perhaps to Dublin, but Harry seemed to think we were headed more towards Galway.

Harry asked him where he was headed, although at this point we were fairly committed to driving until he indicated that we should stop. “A Laic,” we understood him to say. Harry looked for A Laic on the map, to no avail. “Can you show us where A Laic is?” Harry asked him, holding up the tourist map of the entire island. He responded only with another large grin and two thumbs up. We settled in for the long haul and hoped that we didn’t run out of fuel.

We never made it to Galway or Dublin. We found ourselves before long returning to Dingle by a route more direct than we knew. While it was quite in the opposite direction that we had intended at the time, we expected that it would save us some effort when we headed back in the afternoon. Before our new friend set off on foot into Dingle, we shook hands and snapped a quick photo.

We made it to Dingle!

Just as he turned a corner to disappear I had a revelation. “Best of luck, Alec!” we called to him. He hunched his shoulders more against the storm and turned silently out of sight.

#Trail

Chapter 2

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
I’ve made it to Ireland now, and after an uneventful flight and bus ride, met Harry and my parents in Dublin. Dublin is a concise but frantic city with an international flare and treacherous road crossings. In addition to cars being on the wrong side, which, however easy to comprehend from behind a desk is entirely unnerving when it comes time to plunge into the road, but the drivers and pedestrians there seem to give no credence at all to signal lights. The city seems to have a great depth and texture to it, but in only two days I never felt like we so much as scratched its superficial surface. I suppose I’ll have to revisit.

We’ve made it now to Adare, the earliest known location of Drew, my mother’s maiden name, and by way of Cashel. My dad was in Ireland in 1978 on vacation, tooling around in a rental car and seeing the country. He spend most of the time cruising small towns for music, conversation, and photos of the local scene. He promised more than a few portraits to be delivered to the subjects of these photographs. So secondary to the stated goal of tracing the Drew roots, this trip is, in part, to fulfill an old promise.

It turns out that small towns in Ireland are still very small. We stopped for dinner in Cashel, where a photo that had hung in my childhood home my entire life was taken. It pictures five old men, sitting on a bench, in wollen coats and billed hats. A picture of Irish romanticism.

Kevin only had to display the image to two people before the proprietor of the restaurant declared that she knew each man in the photo. They were all deceased, but we missed the youngest man’s wake by only a week. The woman went to school with his daughters and promised to deliver it that night.

We found no trace or recollection of the Drews in Cashel.

We checked into a hotel and took to city to find a pub, and now, at the epicenter of our heritage, some roots. We found a number of lame duck tourist trap bars lining the main street, and with the wind out of our sails luffed back towards the hotel. We were only halfway back when a dark haired man of about thirty sized us up, and without interrupting his cell phone conversation directed us with only a pointed finger to enter Bill Chawke’s.

Inside, a moment later, he explained to us that he saw two young lads with their folks heading away from the only pub in town with anything going on, and that when the parents headed to bed this would be the only place to be. Furthermore, he and his mates had just won their hurling match.

The entryway is guarded by bronze busts of seven republican martyrs of the Easter Uprising. Our new friend, Fitzy, was a bit of a buff on local history, so we asked him about the name.

Fitzy: Drew? Nae, no Drews. We’ve got a couple of Kellys. The two lads behind the bar are both Kellys. Never heard of a Drew, though. Where you headed next?
Us: Dingle.
Fitzy: Dingle? Don’t call it Dingle. It’s An Daingean, but when you’re there look up An Canteen and find Blondie. Tell him Fitzy from Vienna sent you. He’ll love it.

 We chatted for a while more before he dismissed  himself, “with a few things I need to do,” and then disappeared towards the dance floor.

We spent the rest of the night chewing the fat with some of the older codgers in town, who also don’t remember any Drews. Disparate accents may have contributed to our lack of headway. An early conversation with a man who by the end of the night would be going by Viscount Wilson went something like this:

Wilson: And which family are you looking for?
Us: The Drew family.
Wilson: A Jew family? No, I don’t remember anyone like that. How long you in for, where you headed next?
Kevin: Gandanga.
Harry: Aldongka.
Ben: Tatanka.
Wilson: What the fuck are you saying now?
Harry: Dingle.
Wilson: Oh, fuck, yeah, Dingle. I don’t know if there’s any Jews in Dingle either.

A while later the folks turned in and the revelry put to and end by what was either a fight, or someone falling off of a bar stool (which one it was is still up for debate), Harry and I found ourselves chatting with Wilson/Sir Wilson/Lord Wilson/Viscount Wilson. He was quite a fellow, and the rhetorical fencing resumed right away. At one point he took off his glasses, and Harry held up three fingers. “How many?” he asked. Wilson sat, perplexed, for a moment and said, “because of the whiskey?” The conversation drifted to his family.

Ben: You have any kids?
Wilson: Yeah, I’ve got three of them. Well, I killed them.
Harry: You shot them?
Wilson: No. I put their feet in cement and threw them off a bridge. They were eaten by a dolphin. Or a donkey. I can’t be sure which.

From there the conversation deteriorated into a comparison of the relative swimming abilities of donkeys that he had known.

Before long we finished our Guinness, but the older man still had a full pint, and didn’t seem to want to drink alone. He went through each of the young bartenders and tried to get them to pour us a beer after hours. It went something like this:

Wilson: Hey Tomas, what do you say we get these lads another beer?
Bartender 1: No, you know we’re closing up for the night.
———-
Wilson: Say Sean, I’m just sitting here for a bit, how’sabout getting these Americans one more pint?
Bartender 2: If you’re asking for pints of water I’ll be happy to pour ’em.
———-
Wilson: Seamus, I asked Jonathan if it’d be all right if you got these guys a couple drinks. He said yes.
Bartener 3: If the question that you asked and received the answer, “yes” was, “can I go home?” then yes I agree with him. The answer is yes. The door is over there.

After his final defeat he looked at us both with a glimmer, “you’ll never get if you don’t ask,” he said, and took another sip.

In Bruges

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
“You’re going to Belgium?” One of my more outspoken and discerning food critic friends asked with obvious distaste, “To do what, see how much mayonnaise you can eat?”I have to admit that I had similar reservations about the food. I had heard about the waffles, and the french fries, and I kept hearing about buffets that offer fifteen different kinds of mayo infusions. Honestly, I was sort of expecting the cuisine to be like  in England (another country that I have never visited but still feel strongly that they have horrible food). Fried everything, extra grease, slathered in mayonnaise, and served in a soggy paper cone. Yet the Belgian tourism office website declares in huge font straight away that this place is a “Foodie’s Delight,” that fine haute cuisine abounds with the quality of the French and the quantity of the German. Of course I understand that the Belgian tourism office website exists solely to get people to come spend money in Belgium, and that they’re likely to have a palpable bias, but I figured that if the food was really as bad as I imagined, that they might just not mention it. So I came in cautiously optimistic, with an open mind.

I come to tell you now that the cuisine of West Flanders is unbelievably good. In your face, haters.

Whether it’s braised rabbit in a rich and spicy bearnaise (with a heaping side of fries), mussels steamed in white wine and garlic (with a heaping side of fries), or a chicken, crusted in herbs and roasted to succulence (with a heaping side of fries), it’s all magnificent. It seems as though Belgian tourism got it right. It really is haute French cuisine, and plenty of it.

A nice dinner doesn’t really come cheap, though, it’s easy to spend $30-40 before even ordering a beer. So it’s a good thing that the street meat is just as good. A bratwurst is just a few Euro and those waffles we keep hearing about are even less.

I wish now that I’d taken a few photos of the food, but I just can’t quite get myself to pull the trigger on that in a restaurant. Maybe next time. I did get a snap of this $7 coffee in Bruges, though:

Worth it? Yes.

Straight up, WWI sucked.

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment
We’ve been tooling around the country near Roselare for a few days now. Really, ever since we got here. We’re getting around, now, to setting out from the womb of R&Breakfast for the cruel, cold, rainy, Belgian coast. I suppose if we had gone five days ago, we would have found sun and heat, but then, the Belgians are a people starved for sun and heat. If we had gone five days ago, then we also would have found crowds. Which terrify me. Even more terrifying than crowds are crowds of people speaking a language you don’t understand. And even more terrifying than that are crowds of people speaking a Germanic language that you don’t understand. If I thought that there might be crowds of people speaking a Slavic language that I don’t understand I simply wouldn’t go.

No, it’s much better that we find the beach wrapped in the damp embrace of misting rain and drear. I would otherwise find myself reduced to a quaking puddle of tears, self-loathing, and french fries.

These last few days in the Roeselare area have been a little bit of a blur. We made it back to Ieper/Ypres/Yjpr and Passchaendaele in a more timely fashion and made it into the museums which had locked the door in our faces before. We visited a couple of very small breweries, and a very large cookie factory. We rode bikes on some little roads and Tom really liked the light. We went to this rally race. Hollande was ridiculed by Europe and the NYT.

I’ve come to a couple of conclusions.

Belgium is, by many rights, the land of beer and chocolate (I haven’t been in to a chocolatier yet . . .), but beer selection in pubs is actually sort of limited. Beer production seems to be either at a national/international scale, or an incredibly local scale, without much in between. So when you go to a pub, you can get 3-4 of the national brands (think Budweiser, but more difficult to pronounce) and a handful of the local beers. But each bar has, pretty much, the same 8-10 beer selection. It’s not the orgy of innumerable tastes that I had anticipated. After a day or two you sort of find something that you like and roll with it.

This beer (available Sateside) warns us not to turn the bottle on its side or pour it into a juice glass.

We dropped in on the Saijsoenbrouwerij Vandewelle for a meeting with the brewer, a tour of the place, and a taste. Unreal. This is Chris Vandewalle:

Simply put, the man loves beer. And it shows. Even though Belgium is a mystical wonderland where beer is a cultural pillar and there is 1 brewery for each 6,500 people, they are susceptible to the same economic forces as the rest of the world. For decades the craft brewer struggled to compete with the scale of the national names (like Stella), but Chris explained to us that there has been a resurgence of awareness for small batch, locally made, seasonally available, organic, humanely raised and harvested, artisan beers in the last several years. Apparently there are hipsters everywhere, only in Belgium they seem to be doing some good.
Chris works four tens throughout the week so that he can afford to take Friday and spend fifteen hours brewing in his home operation. He only makes 4,000 liters a year for sale, “and more on weekends for myself, when I’m getting low.”

Chris shows off his grandfather’s recipe book

Also in Lo-Reninge we visited a giant cookie factory. All I can really remember from that is the anxiety that I felt when one of the cookies would sneak past all of the vacuum powered cookie sucker arms that moved the finished product from a conveyor belt. It makes me think that there’s a Finding Nemo-esque story in there somehwere . . .

Hang in there, little cookie. You are lost but not forgotten.
We also checked out the rally race on the way to the WWI museums. It’s big doings around here, and I couldn’t help but notice that many of the local drivers seemed . . . inspired. It also turns out that rally racing is way more exciting in a four minute clip on the internet than it is in person. We sort of just stood there with a group of Belgian rednecks (they exist) and listened to Adele on the iPhone in someone’s pocket. Every five or ten minutes a fancy and loud car would drive by real fast. Even though you could hear these cars coming from a mile away, and Tom and I were pretty sure that we could cross the street in less than ten minutes, and we promised not to sue if we got smoked by a rally car, the course marshal still made us go all the way around the finish.
Then we spent several hours in the Ieper and Passchaendaele WWI museums. 
WWI sucked.
So we’re off now to Bruges and the rainy coast.

Big Timers Only, Small Fries Need Not Inquire

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
Nico Mattan stood us up. But that’s a story for later.

After some breakfast, museuming, and a bit of high intensity napping, we made our way towards Izegem to check out the Izegem Koers pro race. The town has a bit of an American/Montana connection, it’s where the Euro Cross Camp is headquartered, and Tom has spent a lot of time there.

This area of Flanders is steeped in cycling heritage and rabid fanhood, and this race in particular has a long tradition of being a local holiday. We were told later that the factories in town close each year on the first Thursday in September so that no one can miss the event. I had heard tales of the drunken uproarious crowds, slinging accolades and jeers from behind riot barricades and bloodshot eyes; of old men, mothers, and children, worn bleary from beer, mayonnaise, and the exhaustion that comes from a whole day’s efforts seeped in partisan rage. I couldn’t wait to charge into that fray wielding sausage and beer, and immerse myself in Belgian cycling culture.

And yet our arrival set us upon a tepid corps of disinterested lookers on. At the finish line the riders came through to see one lap to go. The chaos and discord that I had so anticipated was in fact a viscous mass of thin lips and puckered faces. The race leader was alone off the front. He had earned five seconds and was resting his forearms on the tops of his handlebars, his face a picture of misery as he time trialed off the front before the tattered remains of a chase group which bore down behind him. It was an ideal of the glory and self flagellation that I think synonymous with the Flandrien, and yet they were met with silence. Muffled conversations continued without pause, a man sitting near me never looked up from his newspaper. As they came through the riders edged to the right side of the road to avoid the wispy plume of cigarette smoke that wafted from the beer garden and onto the course.

Hours later a fan explained to us that while, yes, the race is a local icon, perhaps 100 years old, it is still a local race. “Oh yes. The riders here are professionals, but they are very low level,” Glen explained when I asked him about the lackluster fans, “with the Vuelta going on now, all of the big riders are there.”

And there it was. These young men had born their flesh and their souls for the amusement of a crowd that wanted celebrity.

But to say that the fans were ungrateful would be misleading. They just didn’t seem particularly invested in the results of this race. The entire city was in the grips of a celebration of cycling. An extemporaneous carnival filled the marketplace. The only businesses that were open were the bars, and the recent bout of fine weather ensured that they were empty inside. Instead the streets were flooded with jubilant packs of friends and families.

The Wild Rockies Landscaping European Office was enlisted to assist with the pretty impressive infrastructure that they had in place for a Thursday afternoon race:

And during the podium presentation, as twenty or thirty people looked dumbly on, we were instructed to applaud by a pirate, and 1974 Eddy Merckx supervised.

TomRob sizes up the street meat situation in Izegem.

These are the three person outdoor urinals that were strewn about the city.

“No no, your shoes are definitely more ‘Euro’ than mine.”

And we made it to one of the scavenger hunt sites: De Pekker.

The revelry couldn’t last forever, and before it got dark we decided to go. We talked about looking for the Team USA development house in Izegem, we’d heard that it was damaged in a fire (accident or insurance fraud, it’s up to you to decide) and wanted to check it out. “The only thing about going to the house,” Tom pointed out, “is that I really don’t know where it is.” And so we rolled back towards Roeselare. Most of the 10k between the towns is along a paved bike path which parallels a shipping canal. At one point, though, at the outskirts of Roeselare is a bar with an artificial beach, which doubles for commuters as a cyclocross sand section.

Outside of the bar is a spa that advertises with its own UNIMOG:

Best spa ever?

In the end we made it back to R&Breakfast just after sunset. “A Belgian sunset,” Tom pondered, “I haven’t seen many of those. One year when I was in Belgium I only saw the sun twice.”

I’m mostly just glad that the finer parts of American culture are making it across the pond.