Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Ireland Revisited: Prologue

View from our hotel window: two planes departing from San Francisco International Airport.

One year ago today, Diane and I left home on our way back to Ireland, but we didn't leave Northern California that day. We stayed the night of Monday, August 2nd, 2010 in a hotel near the San Francisco airport, thinking that we would be more rested for the long flights to Dublin that way. That was probably true, but we were both so excited that neither of us slept much that night, anyway.

What follows for the next five weeks in this blog will be short, day-by-day accounts of our second trip to Ireland on the one-year anniversary of the days -- or at least that's my intent. Despite having had a year to prepare for this exercise, I haven't written out the posts ahead of time, so the project might morph a bit as we go on.

Destination: the Bothy, Birr Castle Demesne.

My main hope for these blog entries is that they provide context for photos from the trip that will appear over on sharrington.net, as a similar project did a year after our first trip. Those photos will start to appear on August 4th, but each entry here will have a picture or several, too, as this one does.

The Ft. Harrington pickup, waiting to be picked up in the hotel parking lot. Adam and Lynda met us at the hotel to say good-bye and for Adam to take command of the Dodge. (Viewed in a larger size by clicking on the photo you can read the stickers: Offaly and Tipperary, the two Irish counties in which parts of Birr Castle Demesne lie.)

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A HUGE THANK-YOU

Regular readers of this blog know that we live in a place that isn't exactly easy to care for or, for newbies, to get to. It is inhabited by more animals than is reasonable unless you're in a business that requires them, like farming or chicken-racing. It requires a lot of work just to keep the rain forest from taking over, let alone keep "clean," a word I seem to remember meaning something other than what it does after a dozen years of living in Fort Harrington.

It is, in short, a hard place to take care of.

It's especially hard to take care of it if it's not where you live, is two hours or more from your home and your spouse, and is not set up properly for you to do what you need to do for a living (say, for example, has no suitable studio space but does have a dog that barks at random times, both of which can be a hindrance if you're in the voiceover business.)

Adam in Ft. Harrington

Thank you, Adam Harrington. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Next: August 3, 2010 -- The return begins.

4 comments:

Ronnie said...

Glad to relive any part of your Irish adventures, as I enjoy rereading the accounts of my own trips over there. Just wish I'd written all the details and taken all the pictures you did. Carry on...

Nostalgic for the Pleistocene said...

Looking forward to this!

Chicken-racing??

Sherwood Harrington said...

Ronnie - You write that you "enjoy rereading the accounts of [your] trips over there." I would love to read some of that, no matter what the level of detail or illustration is! As for volume of pictures, digital photography is what makes that possible for me from both the cost and convenience aspects. If we had gone in 1986 and 1990 instead of '06 and '10 the level of illustration would have been orders of magnitude lower.

Ruth - The hard part is finding jockeys.

Ronnie said...

One of these days I need to get a scanner. If I do, I may send along a few bits from our travels - more like Cheaper by the Dozen than like yours. There were nine of us and 14 pieces of baggage, had to check both counts regularly.