The Silence of the Rhododendron The Irish countryside is as lush as its name, the Emerald Isle, conveys. Everywhere you look where there is no stone, there is something vital and green growing. In fact, when I learned that the Irish soil was generally lacking in the nutritional qualities to support much agriculture, I was surprised. I would have guessed the opposite. The give-away is that when you look at the hillsides you see what…
Our Trip to the South Pole Killarney is a fine old town that has a grand cathedral in Saint Mary’s, the Killarney National Park and plenty of other attractions and shopping. That said, I’ve been in Killarney four times in ten days and have been in the cathedral (the stained glass and the stonework are indeed exceptional), have been to Ross Castle twice and Muckross House once and driven through the National Park twice on…
High Tide at Westcove Southwestern Ireland is comprised of four fingers that project out into the Atlantic Ocean. There is a road that meanders through all four peninsulae called Wild Atlantic Way (it actually covers 2,500 km from the top of the island to the very southern part of Cork). The common aspects of that road are that it follows the sea and it’s about as narrow as any road you will ever drive on.…
Tempus Fugit I am no Latin scholar, but I did take four years of Latin in high school. My mother, who had never taken a moment of Latin during her education through graduate school, was convinced that Latin was an extremely useful course of study for a young man heading out into the world. You may recall that doctors used to write their prescriptions in Latin so as to make it less likely that scoundrels…
Reason and Rebirth The Old Country is not so very old any more. I just had occasion to look at Ireland’s level of household income versus that in the United States. The US is at $44k where Ireland is $25k. But when you look at it based on purchasing power parity (PPP dollars) the numbers skew considerably to $60k versus $76k. So in absolute terms the income level in Ireland is only 57% of the…
Edgy Ageism Week Two of the Grand Hibernian Tour is underway. What distinguished this week from last is that the participants are, for the most part, from my wife Kim’s side of the ledger. Siblings, friends from Wabash, Indiana (the ancestral spawning-ground of the Grogg Clan), Theater friends (Showboat, State Fair, Gypsy and Lennie’s Wild Mouse Ride) and a googly-eyed nephew and his beloved Ashley. My friends on this voyage, besides all the befriending I…
Flags of the Realm In case you haven’t been paying attention, we are in Ireland for a few weeks. The length of a vacation is a tricky thing. It seems like the biggest risk is to under-book and leave yourself wishing you had a few more days wherever you are off to. That is certainly less than ideal since fulfillment versus being left wanting does help soothe the demons within. I went a lot to…
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…