Prior to our first visit to Ireland in years last month, I decided to formulate a plan of engagement, or in so many words, how to meet old friends, see familiar places, and experience Ireland north and south as we knew it, and how to do that while giving a nod to my acute osteoarthritis and the constraining limits to my mobility. I could only walk short distances and could not stand for more than a few minutes. A far cry from my three- and four-hour history walks through Dublin, Belfast, and other place in earlier years. I obviously needed a plan.

My wife Jean, in vigorous good health despite a hip replacement last year, would be at my side and helping.

I first decided that as much as we loved the west of Ireland and our Flaherty cousins in Co. Kerry, we foreclosed on any cross-country travel. We agreed on confining our travel by rental car to northeast Ireland: Dublin, Dundalk, Carlingford, and Belfast, with Derry City our farthest western destination. The first obstacle we faced was the difficulty of renting a car in the Irish Republic for over 75 senior drivers like myself. I requested and got letters from my auto insurance carrier and my doctor here attesting to my health, my ability to drive without restrictions, and that I had been accident-free for five years. Voila, no problem said Hertz.They treated us very well, with the exception of a quirky GPS that went mute twice.

Our ten-day visit began with a leap of faith: How would I be able to penetrate the Ireland we had visited so often in healthier days and not be a burden or spend sedentary down time sipping pints and perusing my Irish newspapers. The plan was to drive from Dublin to Derry, with stops along the way, check into our center city hotel, park the car, and, especially in Dublin and Derry, rely on taxi cabs and limit ourselves to short or doable walking spurts.

Our first stop after our car pickup at Dublin Airport and its new and spacious facility was the Schoolhouse Hotel, a converted red brick 30-room hotel with character and a pub framed in dark wood with responsive service located a short stroll from Merrion Square. Our first surprise that evening in the bar was running into an old friend from Boston, Peter St. Clair O’Malley, a partner in Croom Consultants, Cambridge. I didn’t recognize Peter initially with his grande-type beard and lip cover, then I did, while Jean eventually pinned him down and we all had a grand laugh. I should have known him instantly by the Plough and the Stars baseball cap he was wearing, but it and its owner were far from home and we had landed at the airport just shortly after five o’clock that morning.

Dublin’s city centre was our destination the next morning by taxi to St. Stephen’s Green and the much honored Little Museum of Dublin. After paying our admission I left a card at the front desk asking if I might be able to chat with either of the two museum founders, curator Simon O’Connor or director Trevor White. During the tour, Trevor White identified himself and we chatted briefly. Later, I had a much longer talk with Simon and we discussed material, letters and an IBM typewriter of Christy Brown’s that I had received from his widow Mary, and the looming possibility that Christy, the quintessential Dubliner of “My Left Foot” fame, should be a distinctive part of the museum’s Dublin collection. The museum does intend a tour to several American cities in 2015, and I talked up Boston as a likely port of call. We will be talking soon again.

Later that afternoon there was another taxi ride, to Glasnevin Cemetery to visit Christy’s gravesite.  I hadn’t been back there since his burial in 1981, and we also wanted to check out the new Glasnevin Museum and the archives. Sadly, his well-kept family plot off in the distant St. Paul section of the huge cemetery and without a jitney or other accommodations for the disabled it was simply unreachable on foot for me.  Disappointed, we saved a few euros going back into Dublin by a city bus.

Jean and her tiring companion then signed on for one of those well-done, on-and-off Dublin city tours. It was good value at roughly $15 each. We finished off our busy Dub Day with a pub supper at the Old Stags Head on Dame Court, soon (2020) to celebrate its 250th birthday and still featuring some of the best pub grub in town. I still have at home a 200th anniversary ashtray dated 1970, a relic of a bygone era. Some habits fortunately are hard to break.

The following morning we headed north towards Dundalk and our favorite Irish hotel of wistful memory, the Ballymascanlon House Hotel, with its surrounding garden, lawns and lush 18-hole golf course and a gentle blending of a centuries-old facade and entrance with a glistening new addition of glass and state-of-the art amenities. Checking in we caught a glimpse of one of the late Irene Quinn’s sons, Oliver Quinn, and his son, who now runs the hotel with his father. Oliver is an old friend of earlier times and was a warm and generous host on our frequent visits there.

Still ahead of us less than two miles away from the Ballymascanlon in Deer Park, Revensdale, was the high point of our trip — Julia Traynor, who along with her mother, our beloved “Aunt Minnie,” hosted Jean and me as newlyweds 45 years ago — May, 1969 – as we began our honeymoon in Ireland. They have been our Irish family without papers ever since and we have been back to them over the years but not since we last left them, on 9/11/2001 as the twin towers were being leveled in Manhattan as we watched the televised horror from Julia’s home.

On this trip, we had a chance to see Julia’s son Ronan and his two children, Aisling, 6, and Rory, 3, both born since our last visit there. Julia knew we were coming so it was not a shock for her to see us rapping at the door. After hugs and glad tidings following our hiatus, we scrambled to fill in the missing years before the tea and welcoming sandwiches and sweets appeared. Then a short drive to Karen and Ken Lynch’s home overlooking Dundalk Bay and a welcome by Karen, whom we hadn’t laid eyes on in 13 years. Karen’s children, Patrick, Aaron, and Aoife, welcomed us and then husband Kenny joined us. The youngsters were full of questions and beaming with happiness at the invasion of the two Yanks, old friends of their mom’s and grandmother Julia.  If there is anything more engaging and joyous than a room full of beautiful Irish children, I have yet to see it. It was everything a family reunion should be, and the memories are with us still.

On Friday we were off to Belfast looking for a parking spot at the Wellington Park Hotel on Malone Road when our friend of 35 years, Frank Costello, appeared. Frank, who has been lecturing at Queens and hosting seminars at the celebrated Linen Hall Library between consulting trips, found us a spot and we accepted his invitation to sit in and observe his seminar on the Famine at Linen Hall that afternoon with the author and historian John Killen.

Later that evening Frank and wife Anne, both involved, active residents of Belfast for more than 15 years and parents of four sons, hosted a small dinner party at the hotel for the O’Donnells with an added participant, Margaret “Mag” O’Brien, a native of Savin Hill, Dorchester, who had been part of the Linen Hall event. It was a grand, memorable evening distinguished by Frank organizing the hotel lobby sound system so we could hear tunes from a CD by Jean of American Songbook songs she had recorded several years earlier. The food was great, the service outstanding, and the music just right. A night to remember.

On Saturday morning before heading to Derry City, Jean and I had breakfast with one of Ireland’s outstanding statesmen, old friend Alasdair McDonnell, SDLP Leader, MP for South Belfast, and a doctor who has set aside his medical practice for now to lead the constitutional nationalist party in these sometimes fractious days in the North. Alasdair brought along his youngest daughter, 11, who charmed us and kept us off the politics for the moment.

We drove on the dual carriageway from Belfast to Derry and the Derry City Hotel, a hotel neatly tucked into downtown Queens Quay overlooking the River Foyle and the Peace Bridge just steps from the Guildhall, the seat of government in this deeply appealing city center. Jean took a solitary walk along the Foyle, enjoying the balmy, dry weather that had been our lot for most of the days in Ireland. Rain at night; sunshine, with dry and moderate temperatures during the days. As Jean walked the Foyle, I relaxed with tea in the bustling hotel lobby.

We attended evening Mass Saturday at St. Eugene’s packed cathedral, a short taxi ride away. Later we had dinner at the old Custom House, a few yards from the hotel, which had a warren of Victorian-style rooms upstairs reminiscent of the dinner scene in John Huston’s film of Joyce’s “The Dead.” A fine restaurant with great food for value and a rich history to match.

On Sunday we did a few things that we had promised ourselves we should accomplish while in Derry City.  We took a bus tour of the area capitalized by the iconic Free Derry sign, adjacent to the now serene site of Bloody Sunday, the Jan. 30, 1972, massacre of 13 innocent nationalists. Behind the Free Derry sign there was row after row of neat housing where in the early days of the Troubles respected friend Paddy Doherty (Paddy Bogside) led the Siege of the Bogside that helped make the Catholic/nationalist acreage famous for its resilience and thirst for justice.

Later, we spent much time in the Guildhall. The last time I had been there was in 1995 to participate and speak (with others) to a crowded room marking the “near miracle” of a magnificent Foyleside Shopping Centre that many in the days before the Good Friday Agreement said could never be built. I recall the early debate in Boston during the construction of the stunning edifice, the second largest in all Ireland, that the Provos would never allow it to go unscathed and that a atrium style roof cover was too tempting to the paramilitaries and would surely become a target of mortar fire. That never happened and I am quietly proud today to have played a small, supporting role along with many leaders in Boston, not least the O’Connell Brothers Construction Co., with dogged heroes like Arthur Casey, construction chief for O’Connell, who gave a tireless chunk of two years of his life to the project, Mayor Ray Flynn, BRA chief Steve Coyle, who offered his support and design ideas, Boston Ireland Ventures, and the good people of Derry who all worked together with Boston to build something meaningful and lasting. The Foyleside Shopping Centre did not exist 20 years ago except in the vision of a handful of counter-intuitive patriots who came together to make peace. Today, the average foot traffic of the Foyleside shops is an astonishing 180,000 people a week.

As earlier agreed to by ourselves and Karen and Kenny Lynch, we returned to Carlingford on Monday, near the end of our long-deferred visit to Ireland, and had dinner that night at Schooner’s at McKevitt’s Village Hotel Restaurant in beautiful and historic Carlingford. The Lynches, Julia Traynor, and the O’Donnells spent hours discussing a half-century of  adventures with our lifetime friend, Julia’s late cousin Roger Grant, who left us at age 81 after long years at the hospital section of the Chelsea Soldiers Home.

The ties in the Omeath, Dundalk, area, where the O’Donnells spent so many happy moments on frequent trips to Ireland are deep and abiding. On a personal and social level they were weeks and months over time when I was an inadvertent student gaining some muscle in the life-living game, when I learned so much about the Irish, family life, the comfort of faith, and the meaning of family and community and friendship.

To the Rileys, the Traynors, the Lynches and all the good people of the wee county who have persevered and triumphed over adversity, I thank you for giving us warmth, comfort, and cover, and for teaching one pilgrim via unpedantic parables of life, how to enjoy the gifts you have been given and appreciate the journey.

•••
 The O’Donnells paid their own way for all the costs of this trip, with the exception of some fine dining moments when we were guests and grateful companions of friends we have known and cherished throughout many of our 45 years together.

However, for their patience in answering our pre-departure questions and for making the ride and our days in Ireland such a pleasurable experience, Jean and I thank Exploring Vacations (Mulligar) for our auto rental and accommodations. We appreciate and thank Crystal Travel (West Roxbury) for the good seats you found for us on the Aer Lingus A300 flights to and from Ireland. I also want to thank Aer Lingus and Crystal Travel for working together to arrange wheel chairs going and coming at two airports.
And to the people of Ireland stretching from Dublin northward to Derry, and points in between, we remain in your debt for the many, many kindnesses and occasions of good will and generosity that enriched our recent travel day. The experience left us with the assurance that the people of Ireland are everything and more that we believe they are.