A full day of landscapes. Dramatic. bleak landscapes. Boggy, rainy, sunny, rainy and sunny simultaneously, sea-crashing-on-rock landscapes. Howling gale where you can hardly stand up landscapes. Piles of peat allegedly drying by the roadside as the track threads through empty bog and mountain. Low light grazing the hills of Donegal, and white cottages gleam against the brown. Seacliffs drop two thousand feet to the Atlantic, as a gang of college kids from Limerick gnaw on sandwiches before hiking to the clifftop. One of them is from Seattle.

And a full evening of dancing. After a nap (nothing begins before half 10 at night), and a chinese meal delivered by a blonde waitress, and a disco version of the Titanic song in the background, I headed for Laghy.

I was in for a different evening than the one I expected. The musicians mounted the stage, two late-middled guys in shimmering red vests and sporting a saxaphone and a guitar. Their first song: Yellow Rose of Texas, then Beautiful Dreamer. The crowd wasn't shy, the dance floor filled immediately with women and men, dressed up for the night. The men were in full suits, and hardly anyone was under 60.

Then a waltz, then a polka. Three women had crowded in with me on the curved, peeling red naugahyde couch. "I know this," I said. "Do you want to dance?" Step-kick-step-step-step. One-two-three. Just like Edie taught me. "They do a mix of old time and country dances here," my partner informed me. "If it were just old-time no one would come."

I danced waltzes and The Highlander and learned the Long German and Shoe the Donkey. The local one-step swing took some getting used to, after innumberable "sorry's" from my partner I finally puzzled out the form. There's no improvisation in a swing move here, you do what your partner expects, when they expect it, no variation allowed.

It may not have been a traditional Irish dance experience, but it was an authentic Irish experience.

January 1999