There are several ways to walk from Doolin to Fanore on the Wild Atlantic Way. I think we picked the longest, toughest, wettest, and most rewarding.
Or maybe it picked us.
Our walk takes us up near the top of Slieve Elva – the highest point in the Burren – with misty views, from the Cliffs of Moher to the ghostly Aran Islands to Galway Bay and the vaguest wisp of Connemara beyond.
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We’re In the Rock Shop Tea Room, well south of the Cliffs of Moher, an ironic place to begin a five-day hike around the rock-strewn Burren Way. Buying stones to add weight to our backpacks has no appeal but tea and scones do. And, I won’t kid you, it is awfully cold outside.
No need to rush into this thing.
Besides, my stomach needs to settle after riding the 350 Eireann bus along sinuous, snaky, undulating, rolling lanes for two and a half hours – essentially doing in reverse what we will attempt over the next five days.
At our table, we face the Atlantic and Hag’s Head Point as we sip coffee, tea, and scones. Sooner or later, we’ll have to step out the door and step onto the trail.
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Before you set out to walk The Burren Way in Western Ireland, you are entitled to a bit of self-indulgence. Some good food and drink, some music, some flat terrain to walk, some shopping, perhaps.
Self-indulgence doesn’t get any better than bookending the Burren with Galway and Dublin.
That’s the plan: Live it up in Galway and Dublin, walk it down on The Burren Way.
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A walking vacation in Ireland was supposed to be a birthday present from Rose Alcantara to me a couple of years ago. We both thought that the idea of a 70-year-old man walking around the Emerald Isle was perfectly sound and a touch romantic.
You know: a shaggy old gent dressed in tweeds, canvas spats, a carved walking stick, one of those adorable wool caps the sheepherders wear, a small daypack with wine, cheese, and brown bread. Maybe a pipe.
I envisioned gentle green-carpeted trails beside burbling brooks from which I could snag a trout on a fly rod for dinner back at the lodge. There would be castle ruins, steaming beef stew, leprechauns, sheep a plenty, and fey red-headed colleens waving from windows as I walked through quaint and ancient hamlets.
You know what happened. Because it happened to you as much as it happened to us. And it wasn’t banshees, laddie.
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Sometimes you just have to get out there and walk. Anywhere will do. Just walk.
Most mornings, that’s me walking Moppit, struggling for control over the master/pet dynamic with a willful and intelligent opponent.
I want to go left, she wants to go right. We both freeze in our tracks and engage in a game of blink, staring into each other’s eyes with fiercely competitive stares. It is Moppit who decides when she’s had enough of this walking nonsense and communicates her desire by sitting firmly on her tush. It is Moppit who sets the pace, decides what needs to be sniffed or peed upon. For my every step forward, she executes a complex zigzag pattern worthy of her genetic heritage.
She is a sniffer, a searcher, a chaser, a marker of vast territory.
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Since the beginning of the Covid sequestration, I’ve been taking the occasional walkabout here in San Miguel de Allende. I’ve even taken some that were inspired by my beloved city but strictly products of the mind.
Honestly, we’re all kind of feeling like we are at the “break out” point.
I hope this will help.
Below is a selection of the walks — real and fantasy — that I’ve enjoyed over the past few months.
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The rainy season has begun in San Miguel de Allende and brings with it an abundance of lush and impossibly green vegetation. There is a freshness to everything — the streets, the air, the flowers now blooming everywhere in mad bursts of color.
Walking though older parts of San Miguel feel like you have been transported to dense tropical forests in an era far removed from the present.
The perfect getaway for the homebound in the Age of Pandemic.
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Text by Hermann Hesse: “Trees,” from “Wandering: Notes and Sketches”
Photographs by Robert J. Hawkins
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.
And even more, I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs, the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. Continue reading
A man and his wife and their dog go for a walk.
There is no punchline.
Stepping outside feels alien enough
Without turning it into something else.
San Miguel is pared to its essentials Continue reading
Peña de Bernal sticks out like a sore thumb. That’s part of the pleasure in photographing the monolith. From almost any vantage point you can take an awfully good photo. On the day we were there, the sky was mostly hazy overcast, great for photos and hiking.
Walking up the well-worn switchback trail of Peña de Bernal I had the oddest feeling that I’d been here before.
I hadn’t, of course. Which is why we were hiking this trail on Friday.
And yet … Continue reading
Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 