Fanad Lighthouse
[Apologies for the silence. Life got busy. But time has permitted me to accumulate a wealth of experiences to share, and stories to tell. So, welcome (back), and stay tuned for more regular posts.]
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Clearly I was a bit naïve about the time and energy involved in moving a family to a new country, getting everyone settled, and getting myself sorted and up to speed in a new job.
And I could not possibly have anticipated that we would be faced with having to move into four houses in four months, struggling to find one that felt like a place we could call home – as far as a rental house can feel like one’s own home.
Our first residence was actually student housing – temporary, vacant for the Summer, and the only place that we found that would allow us to have our dog with us.
The next was too good to be true: a spacious four-bedroom house in town, for a reasonable monthly rent. We soon found out why: at 11 pm on our first night in the house, the nightclub adjacent to the property erupted in concert, as a live band played its first notes. While we had expected to hear the occasional thump-thump from the club, the decibel levels we experienced beggared belief. We had not noticed that the club had an open-roofed smoking area, through which the sound from the club flowed freely up a hill and into the house – an amphitheater effect. We were up until the music stopped at about 3 a.m. We spent that time searching online for a new home. We found one that looked promising, visited the following day, and moved in two days later.
With apologies to the landlords of this third house, ours was a bit of a desperation move. We simply needed to get out of the night club house. While House Three certainly made a good first impression, after moving in, we came to the sad realization that it would no amount of space reconfiguration would give us the space to accommodate our belongings, which are still in transit somewhere in the southern Africa region.
Enter House Four, which we secured yesterday, and into which we will be moving in the next week or two. It is larger, and unlike House Three, unfurnished – a rare find for a rental house in Ireland, I am told. (“Like hen’s teeth”, as folks here are fond of saying.)
All of this has provided plenty of fuel for those not infrequent moments of panic when I wonder if I lost my mind with this project. But then I remind myself that this could happen anywhere, and try to focus on those sublime, blissful moments when I feel that this is where we are meant to be.