It is altogether fitting and proper that on my first visit to Ireland, I was spirited there.

It was not by design. 

Not a week earlier, I was sitting in the dining room at the Four Seasons in Chicago at a dinner party, chatting with a delightful friend now gone, a Chicago attorney, an Irishman with that special twinkle in his eye, all tweed caps and Irish wolfhounds, about Hawaii.  He'd never been there, and we'd just returned.

"What is it you love so much about Hawaii?" he asked me.

"The people," I replied.  

"That's what I love about Ireland," was his response.  

We came to the conclusion that it must have something to do with island people.  Lovely.  Welcoming.  Charming.  Gracious.  Embracing.

Neither had snakes. 

I had never been to Ireland, in spite of being married to an Irishman myself, and being, as my husband liked to say, IBM, Irish by marriage.  I took Bob Cronin's word for it.

We were off to Greece on a cruise of the islands, and Ireland was nowhere on the agenda.

******* 

The trip was fated from the start.   The first leg of our journey from Minneapolis to Chicago found us spending several hours on the tarmac in MSP because of tornadoes in Chicago, unable to pull back into the gate, unable to eat or drink anything, unable to get up to use the restroom in the plane, one of those terrible situations that passengers should never have to endure.  When we finally got to O'Hare, we were informed at the Alitalia counter while checking into the flight to Rome designed to connect us to our cruise from Athens that the ship had run aground on some rocks in the Mediterranean that morning.  Our Greek island cruise was cancelled.

"Go home," Alitalia told us.  "The cruise line is giving you a full refund."

Well, to be sure we were packed for two weeks in early May and had cleared our schedule.  Going home was the last thing we'd do.

In an instant, my husband and I both looked up at the departure screens, and did that crazy spontaneous thing that most people only dream about--we picked a destination at random.  Paris-Rome-Hong Kong-London-Tokyo.  We scanned the possibilities.

We looked at each other and said, in unison, "Shannon."

So Shannon it was.

I went to one payphone, and my husband to another.  I called British Airways since the BA counter was not yet open and booked us two business class tickets to Shannon, Ireland.  My husband called and got us a room for one night at nearby Dromoland Castle in County Clare.  

The rest would have to be made up as we went along. 

*******

We arrived in Shannon and exited the airport, only to be met by a spry gentleman of genial character and comely dress who happened to have a car.  "We've been expecting you," he said.  

We hadn't arranged any transportation.

*******

Settled in Dromoland, we headed to the gift shop.  I had two weeks' worth of clothing in tow, but all of it was sundresses and sandals and kit meant to be sported in the azure waters lapping against the Greek islands, not in the west of Ireland.

"Ah, there you are," said the woman tending shop.  "We've been expecting you."

I blinked my eyes.  It was Brigadoon. 

I found a perfect fine herringbone skirt, a warm mushroom colored Irish sweater.  Early May in Ireland was not early May in Greece, cool and green and lambs everywhere and morning dew. 

*******

We made up each day as it went along.  A single night became several at Dromoland, and our cheery driver took us wherever we wanted to go, The Cliffs of Moher, the Burren, pubs here, pubs there.  From Dromoland we went north to Ennis for nearly a week where we felt we belonged, in the ivy-covered Old Ground Hotel across from the cathedral, its dining room filled with little red-headed first communicants who'd stand at the edge of a long table and thank their overlarge families with great formality for coming to join them on that momentous occasion.

By night we'd head to a pub blocks away on O'Connell Street to listen to bodhran into the wee hours with the locals.

We became locals.  Before we left, we came within an inch of buying that charming hotel, uprooting our lives in America and changing everything.

*******

From there we went to Ashford in County Mayo, the castle owned by the Guinness family just outside the village of Cong where The Quiet Man was filmed with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara.

We went into town and chatted up a local innkeeper, an American woman who'd many years earlier married an Irishman and changed her life.

"Oh, there you are," she said.  "We've been expecting you."

By this time I was used to it, resigned to the fact that we'd been spirited to the Emerald Isle by a force greater than our own, by leprechauns and sprites and Celtic harpists and shopkeepers and bodhran beaters and cab drivers and the lot of them.  The whole lot of them.  It wasn't supposed to make sense.  It just was.

*******

By night we feasted on crubeens, and rhubarb fool, to the strains of angelic harp, and pondered our fate.

There we were, to be sure. 

For more about this magical corner of Eire, see:  The West of Ireland