what I learned in Ireland on a bike tour with a toddler.

hope you like pub food!

We just finished a six day bicycle tour through Connemara region of Ireland.

We’re traveling back to London now, so this is being written on a tiny screen—be gracious with my words/formatting. Also, I just looked again at my last news(love)letter. Oh shit—am I a mommy/travel blogger now???!? Shit! Ahhhhhh well.

What I Learned:

• The kindness of strangers will never cease to amaze me.

  (the rambunctiousness of my toddler will seemingly never cease.)

• Many Irish people speak Gaelic instead of English.

  (I had no idea.*)

• Ireland has gorgeous swimming beaches!

  (I had no idea.*)

• No matter how idyllic the location, I will always be a little disappointed if the place we’re staying in doesn’t have a TV.

  (though, if you can get your toddler to put on a song and dance show for you, it will absolutely be better than anything you’ve ever seen on Irish satellite TV.)

• There is nothing like the freedom of riding a bike.

  (and that freedom multiplies when you’re riding away from bus loads of American tourists.)

  

• The Sexy Romance score of being on a bike tour with your toddler is 0/10.

  (“hello sweaty love of my life who usually finds me decently attractive. I just mashed my downstairs bits into a bike seat for 28 miles and have lost feeling in parts of my buttcheeks. would you like to tap this? just mere feet away from our sleeping toddler who just made us complete a round of the Hunger Games as a bedtime routine? no? you sure?”)

• The Family Time Romance score of a bike tour in Ireland is 11/10.

  (I’ve been wanting to do this adventure since before we had a kid. we had our hard moments… one day it poured for almost the whole ride and Marcelline cried for almost an hour. it was horrible. but the adventure was so worth it, so much fun, and such beautiful, quality time spent together.)

• My spiritual age might be 11.

  (at one point I thought my spiritual age was 30, but after this bike tour I think I’m an 11-year-old. I love riding bikes with my friends, man. and I am very motivated by sour candy. and I love swimming and diving. and I’m awkward and gangly still. yeah, 11.)

• Irish people fucking love fish and chips.

  (so. much. pub. food. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t want anymore French fries for a good, long time. and potatoes are my favorite vegetable!)

• Tablets are proof that god exists and that she loves parents.

  (in part of my romantic dream about this vacation, I thought, “it would be so great if Marcie didn’t have any screen time.” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I was an idiot. I’ve wised up, and now Evan and I get to have quiet moments together at beautiful restaurants.)

  

• I am on a sabbatical.

  (no, not in an official way. my employer didn’t offer me that, because I am not a male pastor nor a decorated professor. but I loved how Olatunde Sobomehin talked to the New York Times about sabbaticals and realized, this is exactly what I’m doing. )

  Sobomehin came to view sabbaticals as a way to resist the destructive “work, work, work” culture that he grew up in and that he says characterizes Silicon Valley. Instead, they offer a path “to rest and restore our connection to our God and our calling on earth, and to birth new iterations of our purpose and find new layers of our calling,” he told me. He now thinks this change of pace is necessary for quality work to be sustainable, a way to “step back to level up.”

• I love the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

  (we bought a book of his and read poems out on the road or over dinners. it was beautiful. it was affirming.)

Digging

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

*I blame Texas public schools.

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A Little View:

(photos from the week.)

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Blood, Sweat, & Tears:

BLOOD = Something that made me feel like me. Something that made me feel like the blood pumping through me is mine and mine alone.

SWEAT = A really hard something.

TEARS = Something that made me cry.

BLOOD

Our first night on the Aran Islands, it was the Summer Solstice—the longest day of the year. Evan and Marcelline fell asleep by 9pm, but I wanted to go to the beach and watch the sunset… at 10pm. I ventured out of our bed and breakfast and ran into three American women also on a bike tour together. I told them I was heading to the beach to watch the sunset, they told me that’s what they were gonna do, but one of them lost their phone. They offered me a Heineken and I graciously took it—a beer I would never pick out, yet tasted delicious after a long day of biking in the sun.

My dad celebrated my arrival into this world with a Heineken beer:

By myself on that beach, on the longest day of my 38th lap around the sun, I thought about where I came from, who I am, how with the colors of the sunset bleeding through the sky, it felt like all of my life was weaving together—over and up and through—to make this moment.

SWEAT

Okay, y’all know I LOVE this Lug-A-Bug thing. It has been so awesome. And we had Marcelline on it, in Dublin, walking like a mile to the train station, when it started really pouring rain. We thought we could do it. I mean, we could have done it! But this cab driver pulled over and said, “Get in the car! No fare. Your baby is looking like she needs a snorkel out here! No way are you walking—get in the car! No charge!”

And he took us to the train station whilst showing us photos of his grandchild. It was so lovely. And also such a parenting fail.

TEARS

In 2019, I had a miscarriage and it broke me. One day, shortly after, I was walking to work, listening to KEXP when the song “Nothing Arrived” by The Villagers came on and I just lost it. The song felt like it was about a miscarriage. My miscarriage. I—being exactly who I am—reached out to Conor O’Brien of The Villagers to ask him about the song and make a piece of radio for KEXP.

It meant a lot. It’s still one of my proudest pieces. Evan’s aunt Jeanne (Marcelline Jeanne’s middle name-sake) even wrote out the lyrics of the song with a beautifully painted border for me, which I kept up at my desk for the duration of my time working at KEXP.

One day on this trip, we took a hike to a beautiful natural pool called The Wormhole. It was a lot of route-finding with very few patrons brave enough to set-out on a hike without a trail. In the middle of seemingly nowhere, about a half-mile in, a group of 20-something’s were coming from the other way. I heard that they were playing music and immediately thought, “oh great… THESE kinds of assholes. who play music out loud on the trail.”

And then I heard the song…

“What were we hoping to get out of this?
Some kind of momentary bliss?”

I stopped and said, “Oh my god, Evan.”

He stopped and listened and said, “Whoa.”

The group passed us. We stood there, continuing to listen to that song as it disappeared with them beyond the horizon.

“Well, I guess it's over
I guess it's begun
It's a losers' table, but we've already won
It's a funny battle, it's a constant game
I guess I was busy when nothing came

I guess I was busy (When nothing arrived)”

We heard no other song. We were just left there, standing together—as a family. I cried. Still sad about losing that baby, yes. But also just so grateful. During that period of loss, I couldn’t even imagine that someday I would be on a bike tour in Ireland with everything I could have ever wanted.

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Thank you for being here.

xxo,
Rachel.