Photos from Ireland

I had no idea we took so many pictures - there were over 150 of them, by the time I divested two cell phones and the digital camera of the images. I'm afraid I can't identify much of the scenery, but I was able to label many of the photos. I've put them up at the Picasa web site, and you can see them in a slide show. Just click on the photo to begin. The small images are cell phone pictures; the big ones were taken with the camera.

Getting Back to Normal ...

... as if this time of year could ever be called "normal."

Although we think the traveling is all done for the rest of the year, the holidays are creeping up faster than ever. We're filling the calendar with deadlines, meetings, and projects, and if we're not careful, the holidays will fly by before we've had time to enjoy them!

At work, the branches and units are busy putting together gift baskets to raffle off at our annual "cookie meeting" on the first Friday in December. We, at home, have just hosted a book club meeting, and are now scrambling to get ready for Thanksgiving in a few days. And after that come the Christmas preparations.

I am sorting through the photos we took on our trip to Ireland, and am turning them into a self-running slide show that I can burn to CDs and send to the families or post on the Web. I'm using a program called Picasa, which is a free download, but has many good features and is very easy to use.

The book about Eamonn Ceannt, "Supreme Sacrifice," has arrived, and I've put it on the "read next" stack. I've got both a knitting and a crochet project in the works, and I need to put in some face-time with my tiny garden to get it ready for winter. I don't expect to be taking any more time off from work, so these things will need to be done on my precous weekends.

Tuesday morning, I'm going to be making Cranberry Chutney and preparing an apple pie for Thanksgiving dinner. Patrick will be joining us. I learned recently that the daughter of my cousin Marie is attending graduate school in southern California, and I've enquired whether she might be free on Thanksgiving. Haven't heard yet what her plans are, but it would be great if she could visit. Sacramento is a stop on the Amtrak route.

The last couple of days in Eireann

The Internet connection at the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel was temperamental - they required we go through their proxy server, and sometimes the response time was slower than my dial-up connection at home! I think there were about 200 registrants at the gaming conference, so competition for the Internet at night was pretty fierce.

Laurel and I spent the last couple of days exploring the nearby towns of Dalkey and Dun Laoghaire, walking to the one and taking the local bus to the other. We did most of our personal shopping in Dalkey.

On Wednesday, Marty cut out of the conference to come with us to see some of the sights of Dublin. We walked to the DART station in Dalkey, and bought round-trip tickets to Dublin's Connolly Station for three and a half Euro each. The trains are fast, clean, and used heavily by commuters, similar to Sacramento's Light Rail, only much more comfortable.

In Dublin, there are companies that offer hop on /hop off bus tours that make a circuit of the most visited places in the city. We didn't have time to visit all of them, but we did get to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells exhibit and visit the library. Then we hopped back on the next bus and rode around the city to the Guinness Brewery. The self-guided tour was very well executed, and terminates in the "Gravity Bar" on the seventh floor, where we claimed our free pint of Guinness and enjoyed a 360 degree panoramic view of the city.

Our last stop was the Killmainham Gaol [kill MAIN um jail], made famous for housing and executing the rebels involved in the Easter Rebellion of 1916. It gave us all chills - there's no way to explain the feeling you get when you see those cold stone courtyards, tiny cells, and hear the guide's eloquent stories. Marty says his grandmother's uncle, Eamonn Ceannt (b. Edward Thomas Kent) was one of those executed, and the gaol historian invited Marty to sign the "family book" and took a picture of him. (They also said a new biography of Ceannt, "Supreme Sacrifice" is available at Amazon.com, so I ordered a couple copies this evening.)

By the time we finished the Killmainham tour, the hop-on/off busses had stopped running, so we hailed a cab to take us back to the train station for the ride back to the hotel. We spent the evening packing, in preparation for a 4 a.m. departure from the hotel for the airport. Marty had upgraded our tickets to business class, and we rode back to the US in a great deal more comfort.

Exploring Dalkey and Dun Laoghaire

Today, Laurel and I rode the bus to the town of Dun Laoghaire [dun leary]. Although the town is old, the shops are mainstream 21st century: Penneys, Burger King, and others like that serving mainstream fare for everyday living. Not a single tourist trap in the joint! We ate at Burger King and came back.

The Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel is a 10 minute walk (downhill) to the historic medieval town of Dalkey. In the last couple of days, I've made three hikes there to pick up a prescription, visit the castle and a craft fair going on in it, and to revisit the Dalkey Castle Heritage Center gift shop, where I bought my Irish sweater. The street is winding and narrow, as is the sidewalk; the houses all have names instead of numbers, and are painted in wonderful colors. It's a 20 minute walk (uphill) back to the hotel.

The Fitzpatrick Castle has a wonderful breakfast buffet. Here's a photo of the cereal bar - you hold your bowl under the cereal you want and pull the handle. Ditto for the milk. In addition, the buffet includes two kinds of eggs, several kinds of sausages and bacon (more like deli ham fried crisp), beans, fruit, muffins, Danish, and yogurt. Tomorrow, we're playing hookey from the conference and going to Dublin for a day of sightseeing.

We've arrived in Dublin Town

This morning after breakfast, I took a walk into the city of Cork. The bartender had told me the day before that the library was a ten-minute walk away, and so I decided to visit. His directions were good, and I found the main branch in the middle of road construction - sound familiar? There was a line of people waiting to get in at 10 a.m. - however, they did not make a mad rush for the Internet!! Most were browsing for new fiction or reading the newspapers in the reference room upstairs. One feature of the Cork library is its Music Library - housed in a room on the ground floor, it holds 25,000 CDs, tapes, and other music formats, including some print, and a reference collection.

We, having decided that the bus was not the optimum mode of transportation for us, decided to take the train to Dublin. That was a good move - we saw lots of greenery, cattle and sheep, a couple of ruins, and a couple of towns. The trip took about two and a half hours, compared to the 5 hours it would have taken by bus. We grabbed a cab to take us to the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel, about 20 miles outside of the city center. It sits on Killiney [kil EYE nee] Hill, and the view is beautiful, especially at night. We ate dinner in The Dungeon, billed as a family restaurant, and located in what was, in fact, the dungeon of the castle.

We have a suite, which is to say, a bedroom, a living room with 2 sofas and an upholstered chair, a writing desk, and a dining table with six chairs and a buffet. What is missing is the hide-a-bed and the second bathroom, so Laurel's bed was set up in the middle of the living toom, and she has to trek through the bedroom to use the bathroom. Lesson two of this trip: never assume that terms mean the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sightseeing with cousin Eugene

Eugene (far right) is my father-in-law's first cousin. He owns a farm in Ballyre [ba LEER], just north of Killeagh [KILL a], which is between Cork [kark] and Waterford. His daughter, Mary, lives at home with him and has been managing the household since his wife passed away three years ago. Two sons live nearby with their families: Eddie, who works on the farm and travels the world in his spare time, and Theresa, wife of his son John, and their three adorable children.

The weather today was first rate - cool and sunny, with partly cloudy skies. Eugene picked us up mid-morning, and we drove through Youhgal [yawl] to Garryvoe on the Atlantic coast. The beach was nothing but water-rounded palm-sized pebbles that clink like ice in a glass when you walk across them. Since the tide was out, I went out and picked out four rocks to show them how Hawaiians accompanied their hulas about Madam Pele, the volcano goddess. We told him how people never believe that taking rocks from Hawaii brings bad luck, and he busted out laughing - he said in Ireland, the rocks themselves are curses, and we were welcome to take away as much as we could carry!

I kicked myself all afternoon, because I had forgotten my digital camera at the hotel, and my cell phone screen is impossible to see in the daylight. I took some photos of the places we went, but missed some priceless views. However, thanks to Laurel, who's camera phone takes better photos than mine (see lovely greenery below,) we have been able to cobble together some good memories of the day.

Most memorable were the panoramic view of several counties from just beyond the "Vee," the Lismore Castle, which is the Irish seat of the Duke of Devonshire and straddles the Blackwater River, the view of the Knockmealdown [knuckledown] Mountains, all blue and hazy in the distance, and the magnificent Mount Melleray [MALory] Abbey and cathedral. We ate lunch at The Latch Restaurant, a tiny and very cozy local favorite, and then we took all the back roads back to our hotel in Cork [kark].

As you can see from my rough transliterations, sure and the Irish place names sound nothing a tall like they look on paper! Marty and I had the very divil of a toime following Eugene's conversation, even afther spending the better part of the day with him. We stopped several times to visit the loo, and decided against a sweet after lunch. Also, Eugene is very comfortable driving at speed on roads that are only 1 1/2 lanes wide, dodging delivery trucks and pedestrians, and parking in any available spot, whether or not he ends up facing the direction of traffic.

Tomorrow, we check out of the Metropole Hotel and take the train to Dublin [DAUB lin].

Getting to Cork

Here I sit in the Gresham Metropole Hotel on the bank of the Lee River in Cork. It's still dark at 5 a.m. (9 p.m. the previous day in California) 43 degrees,and cloudy, according to the Weather Underground.

Our flight out of San Francisco yesterday was fine, except the seats in the economy section were so tightly shoehorned into the jet that we were cheek to jowl with each other and had no way to move our feet for 10 hours! We timed our bathroom and stretching breaks so one half of the row left at a time - right half now, left half later. It was a gymnastic exercise to slide over one adjacent seat, and to slide over two was a nightmare for the folks in the row in front, as we hung for balance on the backs of their seats. We have vowed to upgrade to business class for the return trip.

However, they fed us two meals, a couple of snacks, and an endless supply of water - I think the flight crew wanted to keep us in our seats, because that snack cart trundled down the aisle about every 20 minutes.

One nice thing was that every seat had a little tv screen in the back of the seat in front, and the controls were in the arm of our seats, so we could roll our own entertainment. There was a choice of 4 movies, several television shows, umpteen channels of music, and that nice GPS map that showed our progress across the US, Canada, and the Atlantic Ocean.

The connection with Bus Eireann was very smooth - they have a ticket counter in the baggage claim area of Shannon Airport, and delivered us nearly to the Metropole Hotel. Along the way, we drove through that idyllic countryside you see in the picture books. It's just as green, but big as life. There lots of cows, sheep, and a few horses. For the distance we travelled, there were few houses, and the little towns we drove through tended to be a few storefronts, bars, etc. along both sides of the street. We passed through Limerick, Limerick Junction, a couple other small whistle-stop type towns, Mallow, and then Cork - approximately a two-hour ride, I think - we were so tired, we did a lot of snoozing on the way.

The Metropole, which sits across the river from the bus terminal, is an older hotel, but nicely appointed and very clean. The rooms are small (double bed instead of the Queens that US hotels offer), but very clean. We had a featherbed for a blanket, and the "bedspread" was purely for show: a piece about 24" wide that draped across the foot of the bed, looking like it had just been turned down for our convenience. Actually, that's a great idea, because I always remove the bedspread and stuff it into a chair when I retire, because it always weighs so much on my feet.

When I called Patrick to say we had arrived safely, he was stunned, because our trip had lasted 24 hours from door to door. I didn't realize it had lasted so long, but it explains why we were so tired when we arrived at Shannon - we had flown into the sun, so we had basically skipped the intervening night! We had flown from the noon of one day to the morning of the next day wothout it ever getting dark!

We decided to skip the whole "eating out" thing, and ordered sandwiches and curried chicken via room service. Then we showered and crashed for the night.

Marty, though, seemed to have asthma problems which became most noticeable when we arrived at Heathrow in London. He had to stop and rest occasionally while carrying our bags through the labyrinthe of security, customs, and the very long walk to the gate. Ditto in Shannon. He was up at night with his inhaler and hot shower - but seem s better this morning. I hope it was just stress! I hate to think he might be allergic to Ireland!

We got in touch with Eugene Kent, his dad's cousin, and we will be going to visit them this morning. Eugene will send his daughter to collect us about 10:30 and drive usto his place in Ballyre, which is near Killeagh, about halfway between Cork and Waterford.