Now our rental car sat off to the side of the road, and we unloaded suitcases and musical instruments to get to the spare tire.
There wasn't one.
Mike, Leeds, Meg and Charlotte and I were on the trip to Ireland we'd saved for, planned for and dreamed about for years. Using money Mike and Leeds and I had made from playing weddings, farmer's markets and drunken St. Patrick's day bar celebrations, sales of our very home made CD, and from returning bottles for deposit, we'd saved enough to cover flights to Ireland and a rental car.
When I'd mentioned the trip to my friend Joel at a family party, he'd told me how much he and his wife Val had loved their trip. Joel's usually pretty taciturn, but he was almost poetic about the friendly people and the beautiful scenery, and emphatic about rental car spare tires. The spare in their rental car had not fit. They'd lost half a day dealing with the situation. "Check your spare" he'd warned in his laconic Joel fashion.
I'd told Mike and Leeds the story, and reminded them of the spare at the Shannon airport. There had been a few predawn grunts, we'd loaded our luggage in the car, and hit the road.
The drive was quite an experience. The car was a right hand drive, and Leeds was the designated driver. As we wended our way north toward County Mayo where we would stay with friends of Mike and Meg, we'd spot an ancient stone structure in the middle of an otherwise modern strip of businesses. There were a few palm trees, and wild fuchsia grew on the side of the road, and the stone walls between fields were only one or two stones wide, clear indicators of a climate where the temperature rarely dips below freezing. All the landscape was green under low clouds. Throughout our trip we would rarely see the sun. it's also a climate where the temperature rarely gets above 65.
In the little towns the roads were narrow, and Mike and I frequently yelped as Leeds barely cleared street signs or car mirrors. Leeds laughed at us, and kept driving.
We stopped for breakfast at a road house, and experienced our first Irish breakfast, sausages, "rashers"(bacon), potatoes, fried tomatoes, baked beans and "fried eggs" which were truly fried, cracked into a vat of spitting, hissing oil, and cooked until crispy around the edges. We would not lose weight on this trip.
Further up the road we tangled with a traffic circle, repeatedly taking the wrong spoke of the wheel, and winding up back where we had started. finally, all of us were yelling at Leeds to "pull over and look at the $X%#%1 map." So Leeds did, instinctively beaching our Ford van on the "verge"(shoulder) on the right hand side of the road. After one more false try, and a brief, almost incomprehensible conversation with a local, we got headed in the right direction.
Even major arteries in Ireland are pretty narrow. And we were north of the River Shannon where stone walls are more common than trees, fields are cut into tiny patches by criscrossing walls which run smack up against the road. Again, Mike and I were cautioning our fearless driver, watching sharp rocks whiz by within inches of our tires. Leeds opened his mouth to laugh at us again, and it happened.
We hit a rock, slashing along it's sharp edge. It didn't puncture the tire, it ripped it open. Again we limped to the right hand side of the road, out of necessity this time. The wall on the left with its protruding destroyer of tires left no room for a "verge"
And we had a patch kit. No spare. I kept my mouth shut. It was ominously quiet on the side of the road. No house in sight, no cell phone, probably another two or three hours from our destination.
Eventually a truck came along, and a fellow rolled down the window.
"You yanks got a problem?" he asked. Now how did he know we were "Yanks?"
He and his friends stopped, talked through the situation, and called a friend of theirs, a mechanic in the next town. The mechanic soon arrived, looked over the situation, and allowed as how he knew where a tire to fit our van could be found. He took Leeds with him on the tire hunt, and the good Samaritans in the truck headed off. We waited by the car.
Within moments, the quiet of our isolated stretch of road was broken as a large vehicle crested the brow of the hill. It was the rig used to paint the stripe down the center of the road. The fellow operating it took a look at us, started laughing, and stopped painting for about 20 feet when he passed us, retracting the arm on his rig. I wonder if he came back and got it later, or just left it, spreading the tale about the crazy Yanks who broke down on painting day.
Eventually Leeds came back with a $200 tire, and a hair raising tale of riding with a native. 120 K (70 mph) on narrow roads, through farmer's fields, rounding corners to face tractors loaded with steel beams. As he torpedoed through the country side with a seemingly oblivious stranger at the wheel,Leeds found himself wondering what would happen if they were killed. Charlotte had his passport and no one would even know whose body was in the wreckage, and the rest of us would never know what had happened to him.
The mechanic, unaware of the fear he'd inspired (or maybe chuckling to himself) got Leeds back to us, unnerved, but in one piece, quickly changed the tire, charging $30 for his time, probably two hours of finding, fetching and changing.
We loaded back into the van with Leeds at the wheel, and off we went. The combination of the flat tire and the wild ride had modified his driving style a bit. Mike and I could sit quietly in the back seat, enjoying the stone walls, cottages, sheep and occasional bits of 12th century stone work. We were most definitely in Ireland.
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