The Joys of Ireland in the Off-Season

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Plying Ireland's roads reveals much about the country's character. You're on your honor at an Irish gas station; you pay after you pump. At another petrol station, a friendly attendant showed me how to inflate metric tires and top off the fluids, and Carmel chided me when I proffered a tip. The Irish help one another without compensation, I learned.

Narrow Roads

They also navigate by the names of towns rather than road names or exits, so we often plotted our course by picking up "the road to Galway," or some other far-off spot. It takes some getting used to for those from less close-knit corners of the earth.

I contemplated these customs during the few spare moments when I wasn't alternately skirting oncoming traffic or keep from careering into the ditch as I navigated the impossibly narrow roads. Forget about rapid thoroughfares—seemingly every road in the country bisects a series of small towns where drivers slow past a parade of pubs, churches, and the people who inhabit them.

At one stop, on the way to the outpost of Clifden on the western edge of County Galway, I stopped in a pub to ask directions to a small hotel. A patron described the course in the curiously parochial Irish fashion ("drive down that road a ways, past the rugby pitch—you know where that is?"). Five minutes later he emerged, found us at our car, and told us he'd thought better of it and had new information to impart.

Four days of driving up Ireland's western edge gives a sense for just how pastoral the country remains, while sitting squarely in the modern era. At Eugene's pub in Ennistymon, County Clare, the business cards of patrons past festoon the walls, including a few from Google. Up the road, Lisdoonvarna is known for its annual matchmaking fair and a song about it by the folk singer Christy Moore.

Out in the Hinterlands

We drove the lowlands through Clare's rocks and marshes, then through the bogs of Connemara along the coast of County Galway. One night we passed far-off fires burning in the fields—and engaged in a mostly fruitless search for a vacancy—before bedding down in the small, family-run Carna Bay Hotel, where we watched the Irish-speaking hostess of a musical variety show on Gaelic TV. The simple, clean rooms go for about $120 a night,

The Carna Bay revealed itself through a combination of repeated inquiries and blind luck. If we'd been in front of a computer instead of wandering the hinterlands of Ireland at night, the hotel's helpful Web site includes an extensive "how to find us" section that features a zoomable Google map and the inn's GPS coordinates. The next morning, we pointed the Saab through farmer's fields stocked with fat cattle, and rocky rolling hills with nary a soul among them.

After stops in some of Ireland's less trafficked towns (we drank coffee under a strong March sun in Westport, and ate Indian food in Ballina), we ended up at Lough Rynn castle for a night before departing for Dublin, less than two hours away.

As we walked through manicured gardens at dusk and shot photos of the castle keep and gates, I began to see how Ireland's constancy runs at a level more fundamental than the myth-making that keeps beckoning travelers to return.

Ricadela is a writer for BusinessWeek in Silicon Valley.

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