To Ireland, for Love and a Sign

I traveled to Ireland to sign up for a European dating site.  Long story short: Unbeknown to me, I signed up with an international dating site that soon made its memberships exclusive to only Europeans by setting up firewalls to all its other members. Before they changed their format, I had met a man from Holland and almost fell in love. The night I messaged him my phone number my membership was cancelled.  My pleading on the telephone to a London-based customer service representative of the site to allow me in one last time to get a message to a potential love interest was rejected with a cool, "Sorry, that is no longer possible."   So, I decided I to try to find this man anyway, researched the cheapest places to visit in Europe, and purchased a five day/four night stay in Howth, Ireland. I figured after I arrived in Europe, I would sign up with the site and message the man from Holland.  

My adventure began on the coastal town of Howth, several stops outside of Dublin on the Dart train line. I was so excited to get to my hotel room to log into the dating site to tell the site to "kiss off" with their policy of exclusively that I did not notice much about the country I was visiting except that its people were genuinely friendly and that it had palm trees and herons, a surprising realization since I thought such birds and trees were only found in tropical climates.   My taxi driver said that Ireland had a moderate climate and extreme weather was relatively unknown in the country.

My trip was wonderful. I never found the man I intended to find on the site even though I spent hours skimming hundreds of pages of its members from The Netherlands, so I relegated my failure to an attitude of "it wasn't meant to be" (when I returned to the States I was once again kicked out of the site).  Still, Ireland had other things to offer. 

My hotel window faced a beautiful green golf course, forest, and Ireland's Eye, a small island with a craggy cliff off the coast that seemed to have a secret meaning to the Irish who darned share it with me, even though I asked everyone I met. I wandered around the grounds of the hotel where I stayed and ran into the oldest grave in Europe with its large stone markers; climbed a steep hill that overlooked the Irish Sea and the city of Dublin; drank Guinness at the hotel bar; walked around the narrow paths of a cliff at the edge of town and was later told that it was the most popular place in Ireland to commit suicide; wandered around the Howth Castle; and spent every night downstairs at the pool and heat rooms of the hotel where I flirted with the Irish men who shared stories with me about their haunted Irish pasts, including tales of watching horror films play in old spooky cemeteries.

I didn't plan on enjoying Ireland as much as I did and regretted not having much time to venture and explore more of its city and countryside. So I rode a red bus around Dublin and heard about the Norman and Vikings invasions. I walked around famous churches, parks, and the prison where Irish resistance were tortured and  killed. There was so much history to the place, I could only take it in bits and pieces as it came from the tour operator's microphone as I rode around the city, but I could hardly hear his stories over the voices of loud Americans who never stopped talking. When I got off the bus, I ate fish and chips at a famous eatery but was a bit overwhelmed by the huge portions of the meal.

Then I ran into the real reason I traveled to Ireland, and it had nothing to do with signing up for an international dating site to meet who I thought was a potential love interest. I was simply there to confirm a life change, to know that my instincts were sound, and that I had not made a mistake by leaving my old life in Florida, walking away from friends, job, and home to move to Maine - a decision that still kept me up at night. I found this sign in a street market where a young woman was selling her painted prints on a large table. Usually, I hate to shop when I travel, and I wasn't going to do it, but her print of a beautiful, stoic, and cloaked fairy walking alone in a forest on a cool, snowy evening drew me in. When I turned the print around I read its title and quote: Path of Difference: "Don't die with your music still in you... follow your own path" (Wayne Dyer). And then I got that shiver of running right smack into a sign, coincidence, magic and miracle. I purchased the print and happily left Ireland the next day for my new home in Maine.