A visit to Donegal

Eleven days in Ireland, it turns out, is exactly the right amount of time to adjust your perspective on just about everything.

That's what my wife and I discovered over the last couple of weeks.

Ireland was a logical destination for this year's vacation, because our younger son has lived in Dublin for eight years or so. And because he lives there and we live here, we don't see him that often.

Our trip this year was sparked by a telephone conversation with younger son a few months ago. We talked about finding a part of Ireland we hadn't experienced. I mentioned looking for a cottage with a thatched roof. Our son mentioned County Donegal, the northernmost county in Ireland, with its extended Atlantic coast and interior mountains. As we talked on the phone, I Googled "Donegal thatched cottage" and immediately found a link to donegalthatchedcottages.com. These cottages are on Cruit Island, and we decided an island stay would be interesting.

And that's how we came to head north from Dublin in younger son's new car on a 5 1/2-hour drive to Kinncasslagh, the village on this side of the one-lane bridge that connects to Cruit (pronounced "Crutch") Island.

Donegal is an area of Ireland where just about everyone speaks Gaelic and, of course, a beautiful, almost musical, English. In Ireland, road signs are in Gaelic and English, except in Donegal, where the road signs are only in Gaelic. Town and village signs are in Gaelic too.

Gaelic, I am here to tell you, is not Spanish 101. It was great fun to listen to the locals carry on conversations we could not understand, but we wondered if we would ever be able to learn to carry on a conversation.

Most Donegal families are quite large, we soon discovered, and it was great fun watching the children do ordinary things. I guess that's the wannabe grandparent of our grandchildless reality.

On several occasions we saw babies in strollers too young to carry on conversations in either Gaelic or English, but they played peekaboo with us, made faces at us and laughed with us. I suggested to my wife that babies speak a universal language, and it almost always makes you smile.

More than once we saw older children doing the kinds of things that merit disapproving words from parents. And we watched one table of four children between the ages of 8 and 11 -- two boys and two girls -- share bowls of seafood chowder, cockles and mussels, the fish special of the day and a chocolate-caramel cake, making deals for bigger bites or more of the savory juice left over from the shellfish.

Kids, as most of you well know, are the same everywhere.

The adults of Donegal, however, are quite reserved. They are not unfriendly, but they wait for the folks with the distinctive American accents to initiate a conversation. That's when you repeat a familiar litany:

"Where are you from?"

We quickly learned they already knew we were from the U.S. They wanted to know which state.

"Missouri," we'd say.

"Ah, yes, a lovely state."

"You've been there?"

"On a bus tour to Branson."

Or this:

"Missouri? I hear it's lovely. My husband is from Minnesota."

The Irish are keenly interested in news from the U.S. The political conventions were the top story in both the big Dublin newspapers while we were there. It would be difficult to find anyone in Ireland who hasn't been to the U.S. or isn't married to someone from the U.S. or doesn't have a relative living in the U.S.

This small part of the Sullivan (O'Sullivan to the Irish) clan is now expert on County Donegal, an amazing and beautiful place in an amazing and beautiful country. Go if you can. Remember that the No. 1 destination for Irish tours is Graceland, which is closer to Cape Girardeau than Branson.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editorial-page editor of the Southeast Missourian.