Leaving Dublin, heading for the airport, 5:00 AM, we found ourselves for just a second on Grafton Street in November. Young people in costume walked slowly, barefoot, weaving their unsteady ways to wherever home happens to be. Reality sinks in. Kavanagh’s Queen of Hearts is merciless. Without getting too sappy about it, I feel some…
Halloween in Dublin was a perfect night to go on a literary “pub crawl.” Our crawling party consisted of myself, Maureen’s brother Dan, his wife Christina and their children Cole and Ava. Cole was dressed as a Wraith, and Ava was in character as a lil’ devil. The city bustles with students who dress in…
Aside from visiting Williamstown and looking up the Family Tree, the other part of our mission was to cheer on Christy O’ as she ran the Dublin marathon. Christy was having some problems with a hip flexor and wasn’t planning to run a personal best, but she was determined to finish. Christy’s friend Tony O’Donnell…
Tom McCoy pilots the bus as if it was a cruise ship–smooth, steady, certain. And when we weren’t listening to Martin’s power ballads on the CD, Tom was happy to toss out bits of knowledge. For instance, the Derrynasaggart mountains are going through a wide scale reforestation program with lots of Sitka spruce and Canadian…
Somehow we’ve managed to avoid darkening the door of a church thus far. But we haven’t avoided Jesus, because there on the red flocked wallpaper in Danny Mann’s is a framed picture of the Sacred Heart. Danny Mann’s is a pub in the traditional style, with dark wood beams and wallpaper that looks to be…
We we hit Killarney a battalion quickly formed to go shopping. I decided this would be a good chance to snag another geocache. Armed with my trusty GPS it didn’t take long to pinpoint the coordinates on the western bank of the River Deenagh. The clue was that the cache would be in a hollow…
It is a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him… Edmund Ludlow This morning Tom McCoy took us along the Western coast of County Clare. We stopped outside of Kinvarra for a Kodak moment with a pastoral scene on one…
Back to the Raddison for dinner. Someone in our party spotted Martin Sheen at our hotel, rumor is that he lives in Galway part of the year and goes to university. The lobby was full of Australian football players, in town for the anual Irish/Aussie grudge match of International Rules football. The Aussies stayed up…
By all appearances Williamstown is a typical Irish farming community. The population is about 300. The town consists mainly of three pubs, each next door to the other, and a church across the street. What’s different about Williamstown is that two of the three pubs are up for sale while the church is undergoing a…
People tell you how green Ireland is, but they’re only telling you half the story. You never hear how brown the countryside is, grass turned to rust by the high iron content of the soil. Even the fresh mountain streams run a kind of gunmetal color with yellow foam breaking around the rocks. Some places…
Feck (pronounced “fake” or “fehk” in Irish) is an acceptable word in mixed company, whereas fuck (pronounced “fook”) is vulgar. Feck is an obscure word, meaning something in the neighborhood of “forceful.” The word feckless means the opposite–weak and impotent. Just don’t overuse feck or feckin’…especially not around a crowd of native Esperanto speakers or…
It didn’t take long for this group to find itself in a pub in Galway. The pub was The Quays (pronounced like “keys” and rhymes in Irish poetry with “today’s” and “always.”) The decor of this pub is one part Gothic cathedral and one part shipwreck. Colored glass blocks are set in the floor and…
We reached Ireland in the dark before the dawn, flying over the towns of Doonaha, Kittish, Knock and Kilmurry McMahon. The little villages looked like light-up models of neurons–a central nucleus with branches in five or seven directions, connected to other village neurons by a ganglia of early morning motor cars. I imagined a parade…
This is as good a place as any to start the story: thirty thousand feet over Atlanta and about to begin our descent to Hartsfield-Jackson. My legs are griping from five hours tucked under the seat and I’m too bored to spit. What do I expect from this trip? I’d like nothing more than to…
