The Keogh Connection The Keogh family of Killarney is a long-standing part of County Kerry and has had great influence on all of Ireland and, indeed, all of modern civilization. Its descendants include a young lass, Fancy Nancy, who hails from Ithaca, New York, and who has come back to Ireland and County Kerry in search of her roots. Of course the irony in all of that is that her roots are firmly entrenched in…
Merzy Doats and Tom Toms I have been admonished by faithful blog reader Lonnie to dispense with the blogging while on a family vacation and focus instead on my family. I take all blog comments to heart and always try to be a better man, but on this one I must disagree. Do you remember that scene in A Few Good Men when Tom Cruise has Colonel Jack Nicholson of Guantanamo Bay on the witness…
The Cats in the Irish Cradle My son Roger is thirty-seven years old and I am particularly pleased to have him along with me on this week in Western Ireland. Roger is, for all our differences, more like me than not. There are many ways to notice this, but the best way is to spend a week in a “strange” new land with specific culinary customs. Now some would say that Ireland is more like…
Tir na nOg In the land of Tir na nOg there lived a faery that wore size 14W Adventure Crocs. Some would call him an ogre and some would call him Grumpy Gramps. What was clear was that he enjoyed feasting on the stories of the realm of the Otherworld, the place where the faeries lived and heroes visited on quests of honor. Tir an nOg was a place just outside the realm of man,…
Comfort and Clansmen Here’s the thing I have never reconciled about vacations, I almost always forego comfort to be with my clansmen. Like any basic experiment, you need a control, and my control for this purpose is my home, whether a primary residence or a secondary home (I currently have both). We all work very hard to make our homes homey. We have all our stuff (per George Carlin) around us in the most convenient-sized…
Riding the Rails to Kerry We always knew it would be an adventure to drive in Ireland on the left hand side of the road, but little did we realize how much of adventure we would experience on the first day. To cut to the chase van, let’s summarize by saying that one of four vehicles is down for the count and at least one other is due for some rental company settlement. We have…
Virgin Slave Ship I begin by acknowledging that I will never evoke one gram of sympathy for the plight I will be describing in this story. I am officially on vacation as of three hours ago. We are on our way to Ireland for two weeks with all sorts of family and friends. I booked this trip and the house we have rented nine months ago and made a point of booking the flights at…
Staging Retirement The way I write these blog stories is to think about what’s on my mind, think about what topics might be interesting enough to write about and then asking myself if it fits into the basic categories I have defined for myself and written about for the past five months. Not that complicated, but fortunately, still requiring some chin-rubbing and pondering as I like to be more than just mindless in most…
Lord of the Dance In 48 hours I will be arriving in Shannon, Ireland, gathering up a gaggle of family and friends (19 to be exact) and we will drive in two rented 9-passenger vans and one 4-passenger car the three hours to Westcove, where we have a peaceful and large (operative word is large…as in sleeps 26) manor house and grounds on the Ring of Kerry, right on a lovely cove that looks…
Borderlines This is not the pro-immigration rant you have all come to expect from me in this blog. By the way, I am very pro-immigration and I do seem to be ranting more lately (mostly at work and at the moon over Mr. Trump), but this piece is about different borderlines. I am haunted by great movies and there are very few that are greater than Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. I think…