Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dog walker who lives and works in Contoocook.

In my last My Turn, I wrote about happy accidents my family has experienced while traveling, totally unplanned moments that became treasured memories. On our trip to Ireland last summer, happy accidents were nearly as plentiful as the sheep we saw every day through the windows of our tour bus.

We decided on a bus tour rather than a cruise around the British Isles, which made all the difference. That mode of transportation gave us plenty of unscheduled time, and unscheduled time is prime time for happy accidents.

Our first happy accident unfolded in Dublin on the first night of our trip. Before the trip, a friend suggested seeing a play at the Abbey Theatre. I was interested but didn’t buy a ticket in advance because we had two days in Dublin, the day we arrived and the following day, on which I had scheduled a distillery tour. I didn’t want to buy a theatre ticket and risk not being able to use it due to jet lag or whiskey fog.

On the day we arrived in Dublin we met up with our daughter for dinner. She had been in Dublin for two months on an internship. After dinner, I figured that Nancy Jo and I would head back to our hotel for a jet-lag crash. Nancy Jo, however, wanted to walk around, and I’ll never turn down a walk. A couple of blocks from our hotel we came across a theatre. The poster out front looked interesting. We went in, twenty minutes before curtain time, and forty Euros later, the two of us were sitting in the fifth row.

The play we saw on the spur of the moment was Fun Home, the 2016 Tony Award winner for best musical, and it was the best stage production that Nancy Jo or I had ever seen. It tells the story of cartoonist and graphic novelist Alison Bechdel and does so in a highly creative way that went straight to my heart. I sobbed through the closing number, and will never ever forget my happy accident at the Gate Theatre.

Our second happy accident took place in Killarney, in County Kerry. As we drove through Kerry to Killarney on our tour bus, our guide pointed out all the green and gold flags we kept seeing and explained that people were flying them to support Kerry’s Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) football team, which was scheduled to play Dublin in the All-Ireland Final — Gaelic football’s Super Bowl — on the night we were scheduled to spend in Killarney. When I expressed interest in the game, our guide made sure we got into Killarney in time to find a pub with a big-screen television.

The pub we found, like every other pub in town, was standing-room only and filled with Kerry supporters rooting on their home team. The atmosphere was electric, and we shared a table with an Irish couple who explained the game to us. Coincidentally, the edition of James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” I was reading on the bus had several footnotes that explained how the GAA had been founded in the 1880s to promote traditional Irish sports, as part of a broader Irish cultural revival intended to stoke Irish nationalism in the face of English oppression. The All-Ireland Final in Killarney is another precious memory I had no idea I would be making when we touched down in Dublin.

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Our third happy accident grew out of our second one; the Irish couple we watched the All-Ireland Final with told us about the Galway Races, the biggest event of the year in Irish horse racing. The races run for seven days, and we were scheduled for an overnight in Galway right in the middle of race week. Our daughter thought that the races sounded fun, and our tour guide got us into Galway in plenty of time for us to catch the shuttle bus out to Ballybrit racecourse, so off we went.

The racing was interesting, flat racing, hurdles, and steeplechases on a grass track. The spectators were a spectacle, clad in suits, elegant gowns, and Kentucky Derby hats. And I won sixteen Euros on a two-Euro bet on the feature race. It was yet another memorable moment in Ireland, and completely unplanned.

We even encountered some happy accidents we could eat. As we pulled into Waterford, we decided to have dinner in the bar in our hotel, but by the time we got there, the kitchen was closed. No problem. After a few keystrokes on her phone, our daughter found us an Indian restaurant where we got a meal that was better than anything we could have gotten at the hotel bar.

The next night, in Spanish Point, we misread the menu and ordered a giant tower of seafood for dinner. If we had read the menu correctly, we’d have been put off by the price and ordered something different, but after polishing off the seafood tower, we realized that it was worth every penny.

So, on yet another trip, many of our most memorable experiences were happy accidents, totally unplanned and unexpected.