The bucket list adventure I shared with Eileen last fall did not end with a little ferry
ride from Mallaig to the Isle of Skye on All Saints’ Day. We had bigger plans
for the second half of our trip. Giant plans, in fact - plans so gigantic that
if we could’ve followed in the giant’s footsteps straight from Fingal’s Cave on the Scottish side of the Causeway to
get there, we would have.
Our determination to rock
it big on holy ground required instead that we fly into Belfast and drive to
the northern shoreline of County Antrim to reach our landmark destination, the Giant’s Causeway - one of the windiest
points in Northern Ireland. It was November 3rd, and it was (not
surprisingly) a very blustery, cold winter day.
To step out of our car was
to step headlong into a forceful wind that was so biting it made us question our
reason for being there in the first place. Just how bad did we want to do this?
Eileen gave me every opportunity to back out, but I’d told her from the
beginning that I was in, and in I was. So we sucked it up - faces frozen in
place from the icy cold - and leaned into the wind that seemed determined to
knock us over in the parking lot as we strived to reach the visitor center with satchels in hand.
Inside that suitcase full of costumes Eileen had been
determined to schlepp across several continents were two pink morph body suits,
pink ballet slippers, and frosted long haired wigs for this very occasion - but
an on-site costume change would be required. We giggled like two giddy schoolgirls
behind our respective bathroom stall doors while we struggled (over many layers
of long underwear and as much insulation as we could manage) to change into
those pink morph suits.
Once changed, we walked out
of the bathroom camoflauged in sweatsuits, wigs securely safety-pinned to the
hoods of our morph suits. No one even noticed that we had transformed ourselves
into seasoned nymphs intent upon shamelessly
re-creating an amazing album cover from our youth in front of a hundred
tourists, many of whom were too young to get it. The album cover, of course,
was Led Zepplin’s “Houses of the Holy.”
Conceptually we may have
been dating ourselves, but we weren’t looking so old once we stripped off our sweatsuits
and began scrambling over those slippery octagonal stones against heavy winds
and seaspray like a pair of performance art monkeys … monkey see, monkey do.
It was awesome!
Sláinte!
© by DK King
Eileen
with a fist full of Irish soil Giant Finn MacCool’s Chimney Stacks as backdrop |