Chapter 2

Green rolling hills passed by in a flash as I drove across the Irish countryside. I’d landed at Dublin International Airport at the ass crack of dawn, bleary-eyed after a twenty-six-hour flight from hell. A quick stopover in the middle hadn’t helped much, but I was finally in Ireland and on my way to Derrydun, which the map told me was in County Sligo. A rental car had been pre-booked, and to my joy, I’d been driving across an unfamiliar country with its funny road signs and imperial measuring system for the last three hours. Miles or whatever. Half were in kilometers due to some random change in the law and no one seemed to know how far away anything was for sure. Things seemed really close but were actually really far away. Thus, the three-hour drive I was currently enduring.

Following the directions the GPS gave, I took the turn off the main highway and traveled down a smaller road through some fields and then a forest before buildings began to shimmer through the trees.