Vacation was great, but so is home

The next time you see me sitting in a restaurant at an airport terminal eating a big bowl of chili before boarding a transatlantic flight, just bonk me in the head with a two-by-four and put me out of misery.

I wish I had told you to do that before my wife and I left on our recent vacation. I think the first part of our travels would have been much more pleasant.

The problem is that I can't say no to chili. Never could. The plain fact is I've never met a bowl of chili I didn't like.

In this case, however, the bowl of chili I was served at the airport restaurant clearly didn't like me.

You have no idea what I would have given for a few of the more commonplace Proctor & Gamble products. Airports, as many of you already know, purchase their toilet tissue from the same people who make wood shingles.

But I didn't let a little indigestion spoil the trip to Ireland and Scotland. As usual, we brought sunny weather with us. Everywhere we went, we were told how fortunate we were to have such good weather. What they didn't know is that we always have good weather when we travel. We've considered going into the travel-weather business. Tired of gray, rainy days? Invite the Sullivans for a vacation. It's just that simple.

I meant to send all of you a postcard. Really, I did. But, as you know by your empty mailboxes, I spent my time and money on other things.

Like gasoline for our rented car.

I pulled into a self-service station in rural Scotland one bright morning to top off the rental car's tank, which was more than half full. I knew gas was expensive, but I wasn't prepared for the sticker shock. When the pump went off, it appeared I owed more than 21 pounds. A quick money-conversion calculation led me to believe I was about to pay more than $30 for less than half a tank of gas. I asked the woman at the cash register if that were possible. She looked out at the car, sized it up and said it was not only entirely possible, it was, in fact, what I owed. As we quickly learned, a full tank of gas would cost nearly $75.

And we thought $1.45 a gallon in Cape Girardeau was pricey.

The best part of the trip was seeing our younger son, who has been living in Dublin the past three years. He managed to take two whole days away from his busy schedule to keep his parents in line. We spent one of those days at a castle estate, Malahide, a few miles north of Dublin. The castle was the home of the same family, the Talbots de Malahide, for over 800 years until it was sold in the 1990s.

I'm glad we were just visiting, because if we had to live there, it would take about three more centuries to remodel the place. Younger son, who uses his teenage years of lawn mowing as a reliable benchmark, was sizing up how many hours -- weeks? -- it would take to mow and trim the place.

We spent most of our time in northern highlands of Scotland, which gave us easy access both to the Atlantic coast and the North Sea coast, with mountains and lochs and waterfalls in between. I decided after a couple of days that northern Scotland is like a gigantic national park in which a few people happen to live.

Part of the time we went searching for cairns (prehistoric piles of rocks that served as burial vaults) and stanes (standing stones arranged like Stonehenge -- but a lot smaller). You have no idea what it's like to be in the middle of nowhere in a farmer's field walking among stanes and cairns with sheep as the only other living creatures in sight for miles.

We think we had a perfect vacation (we won't talk about the fog in Edinburgh that made us miss our flight home). We had beautiful weather every day, saw amazing sights and scenery and met fabulously wonderful people everywhere we went. But we were still glad to get back to Cape Girardeau and sleep in our own bed.

Plus, I think it's now safe to try another bowl of chili.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.