Carol and I leave for Ireland this week. She continues to nudge Rick Steves’s guidebook Ireland my way, and I keep nudging it back. I’m not being an idiot, at least not in this case. I’m also not being a snob just because I’ve been to Ireland once. That was more than 50 years ago, and about the only thing I remember is throwing up for two weeks straight working on a fishing boat out of Galway.

I’d prefer to idly wander there only to find them socked in and then remark, “My, how eerily mysterious were the Cliffs of Moher the day we stumbled upon them.”

   I don’t care much for guidebooks; Carol, however, finds them quite useful in figuring out places to go and how to get there. I, on the other hand, have no places I want to go, so I don’t really care how to get there. I find information, plans, schedules and itineraries confining. Some of my most satisfying travel experiences have begun cluelessly.

   I want travel to be more like a vacation. You know, the kind where  you’re asked what you are doing for vacation and you answer: “Nothing. I ‘m going to sit in a swimming pool with a tiki bar in the shallow end.” I want to apply that same vision to travel as much as possible.

   I don’t want to plan to see the Cliffs of Moher, because I don’t want to get there and be disappointed to find them completely socked in. I’d prefer to idly wander there only to find them socked in and then remark, “My, how eerily mysterious were the Cliffs of Moher the day we stumbled upon them.”

   Are the pubs friendly and low-ceilinged, with dark, half-timber beams and a roaring hearth, with a genial proprietor who knows how to pour a proper Dublin pint**? (Back in 1971, I thought watching my partially poured glass of Guinness casually placed on a shelf behind the barkeep, and seemingly forgotten about was because I was an ignorant American. Turned out it was because he respected me as a Guinness drinker – and also that I was an ignorant American.)

   Anyway, an evening within those cheerful walls would offer me as much enjoyment as the Cliffs of Moher on a clear, sunny day.

   Mind you, we’re going to the Cliffs of Moher, along with several of the other Irish destinations Rick Steves instructs us to visit. Job One for me is to make sure Carol is happy and has a successful trip. And she knows, as well, what makes me happy. She even plans to have a Guinness or three with me from time to time.

   I spent almost three months in Ireland in the late summer and fall of 1971. I’d struck up a conversation with a stranger in a pub one evening, and by the end of the night I had a job as a deckhand on his fishing trawler. I traveled with that carefree attitude for nearly three years throughout Europe and North Africa. Most of it with the luck o’ the Irish at the end of my extended thumb.

   I’d like to keep some of that magic in the travels I have left.

*I know. Never say that to an actual Irishman. I wonder what happens when you do?

**You can YouTube it, if you’re that interested.