Ireland and Back Again, a tale by Jesse

Most of the pictures were taken by David, (thanks!) and I'm hoping to put up some pictures from other people too, and I took most the notes used here. If you can't stand the prose, check out the pictures; I'm only putting up a fraction of the total number of pictures taken. All together, we took over 500 pictures!!!!

I'm going to date these so that they can be read straight down the screen, from beginning to end, so if you see the date on the bottom of the post doesn't match up with the date I put at the top, you'll know why.

So without further ado, let's go to Ireland!

Day One: Plane Delayed and Cliffs of Mohr

Plane Flight - Eventually
We got off safe and sound, at least onto the bus and the plane at Reagan, but Philly is taking a while. Katie is feeling really sick - fever, chills, really bad aching, headache, and a throat that's barely letting her swallow at all. I'm trying to get some fluids into her, but I hate asking her to swallow since it hurts so much. Fortunately Joyce was a nurse and Andrea has some antibiotics for earaches, so along with Tylenol, Asprin, and Ibuprofin, Katie is thoroughly doped up. She was feeling good this morning with just a slight sore throat! Yikes!

It's after 1:00 am and the plane still hasn't taken off or even loaded. It should have left at 9:30! The flight is 6 1/2 hours long, so even if it were to take off at this moment (1:30) it wouldn't get to land until 12:45 pm, Ireland time.

On the up side though, we've all spent five hours playing Nertz. I'm getting the hang of it now, and we've even had other passengers come over and join in! One guy that came over is a martial artist that has a couple tricks he performs at demonstrations all over - a one-armed, two-fingered pushup! That was so cool!

God bless us all, we're finally taxiing away from the gate! It's 1:50 AM, EST!

Sleeping on a plane is rough but not impossible with enough incentive. I watched a bit of the movie, Fever Pitch, and ate dinner and managed a good 3 hours of sleep. Thankfully Katie slept a lot more than I did, and is still asleep (7:45 EST, 12:45 Ireland time). Hopefully that will help; she had quite a fever last night.

The group seems to be in OK shape considering, so hopefully with an easy day today we'll all be feeling energetic enough. I got a shot of David's hair - it's quite the site! We're descending! Look out Ireland!

Cliffs of Mohr
We checked out the Cliffs of Mohr which had some really spectacular views! We had gotten lots of warnings about the winds that have at times been strong enough to send a cow over the edge, and there have been tourists swept over the edge too. I wasn't sure how the group would react to me getting right up to the edge, and it would probably made a bad example for the kids, so I kept from getting to the very edge.

Along the path up, there were people set up with crafts and a couple musicians to whom you could drop a couple coins. One was a really good harp player, and when she heard we were dancers, she played a reel for us to do a few steps! Our first performance! 30 seconds! :^)

Dinner Dinner was at a pub in town, Lisdoonvarna, and was a "wee" bit slow but quite good and it was at a traditional Irish pub which was really neat. When you think of all the stereotypical Irish pubs in old movies like The Quiet Man you'll have a great picture of this place! It was perfect! Most of the group headed back, but I and a couple others stayed to hear an Irish group play at the pub. It was so cool! There were three of them, one on a VERY COOL celtic drum, one on a flute and whistle, and one with a hand accordian. It was so much fun to sit there and listen and watch. I really did feel like I had dropped into a movie set of a pub! One of the audience even sang an Irish ballad about a young woman who marries an younger boy and is complaining to her father. They soon have a son, but when the young man was only 19 he dies, and the woman is mourning for her much beloved lover. The singer was an older gent, a bit hoary, and with a scratchy voice. It was truly the perfect setting! I didn't think that scenes like this really existed!

And a happy anniversary to Jack and Janice Gates today! Very cool that they can spend their anniversary like this! God bless 'em! I was walking with a Joyce and Mary, hopping from pub to pub to listen to music, and we saw some fun signs: The Matchmaker Bar and a place that advertised the Best Crack In Town! We eventually tried to call a cab (called a people mover) but they were going to be almost an hour and we didn't know how to get back to the B&B! Thankfully our coach driver, Michael, had come into town for a pint and was good enough to walk us back. What an awesome first day in Ireland!!!!

From the upper left:
1) Katie is coming! She's got a bit of a sore throat here, but no way is she letting that slow her down!
2) We're taking a bus from Leesburg down to Reagan. We're all ready to go!
3 & 4) Well, during the flight delay at Philly, we learned the wonderful game of Nertz! I have no clue where the name came from. We played for at least 5 hours! We even had other people on the flight come over and join us for a while!
5) Before we left, the teens had all made shirts for the flight over, and here was one of my favorites. Hannah has excellent taste IMHO! Everyone else had on BRTC shirts. I'm sure we were quite the site!
6) Our flight from Philly to Shannon was delayed several times for "mechanical reasons" and instead of 9:30, we finally took off at 1:50! We got a kick out of this sight though: 1:00 AM, but the flight is still on time!!!
7, 8, 9) Our first sight in Ireland? The cliffs of Mohr on a clear, sunny day! A miracle! The winds were fairly light, so we didn't have to worry about blowing off, which does happen every once and a while!
10, 11) Here's the teens! We've got a fun group of them on this trip. That Dana is a bit weird, but still cool! :^D They also had an old tower that we could scale and there was a telescope at the top, what a view!
12) Katie's still wiped from being sick. She's feeling much, much better but is still tired and a touch of a headache.
13 - 16) Here's the Ore A Tava house that we stayed in. It's really nice! Of course any place will look good if David's in it!
17 - 21) We walked down the road to pick up the coach, and it was a really nice walk. Very pretty! There was a gorgeous little flower garden that the more botanically inclined photo-ed extensively!

Day 2: Burrins Lahinch Irishman

I'll get some pictures up on this post this weekend, but for now I'm feeling lazy, so it's text only.

The B&B provided breakfast (duh!) and it was really good, but so far no black pudding or sausage. :^( Today we hit the Burrins - and entire set of plains and hills made of rock and stone. We got some nice group pictures and there were some fun climbing rocks that were razor sharp (managed to slice my palm a bit) and slimy and best of all were a cliff, at the base of which were more rocks and a pounding surf. Oh, I had fun!! Ran around a bit with Katie on my back and managed to scare Joyce. A successful start to the day! :^)

It's been so much fun to see everyone getting to know each other. Our tour guide, Colleen, has her son, Will, along with her to help with the tour and to spend time in Ireland. He's Australian and American, his heritage is Irish and he works in Missouri as the head chef instructor for Ruby Tuesday's. Because the English populated Australia with prisoners and the Irish were at odds with the English, a lot of Irish people got sent down under. He's very cool and comes to Ireland three or four times a year, so he's very comfortable and knowledgable. But he insisted that I have a "true Guiness, not one of those one in the States that comes from a can."

After the Burrins we went over to a little town some of the golfers might recognize: Lahinch! I didn't get to see the course, but a course that we did drive by looked like a nightmare for a newbie golfer. Some of the roughs looked like if you sliced the ball too far in, you wouldn't be able to get to the ball, much less swing! I think my score would be around 450 on that particular course. They also had a good beach at Lahinch with waves large enough for some small surfing. After taking a walk around the town with Charlessa and her parents, we watched the surfers and swimmers for a while. It looked pretty chilly at 18C, but at least most of them had wet suits on.

Again, a group of us stayed to listen to music, but this time it turned into more of a pub hopping time since all the pubs with live, traditional music were packed to standing room only. Along the way we ran into two hen parties (bachelorette parties). The bachelorette party with the bride-to-be wearing a chicken suit with a "Bradley Free Zone" sign around her next was my favorite!! ROTFLOL! The rest of the party was wearing leis and grass skirts. When they heard we were dancers they got Andrea to wear a grass skirt and a lei and do an impromptu clogging performance, and then "chicken girl" did an irish step demo that was very cool. We then found out that she was an Irish champion dancer!! We teased Andrea for the rest of the trip that she was out dancing in the street wearing a grass skirt and a lei. I found out just a couple days ago that the next morning, Will was talking to Charlessa's parents and said, "The tall lady put on a grass skirt and lei and was dancing." Thinking that he mean Charlessa they were certainly a bit startled!

The highlight of my evening, and the source of a running joke was when a group of (I suspect inebriated) girls at a table I was walking by yelled out, "Look, there's a real Irishman!" and as I turned to look I caught a big flash. I hate to imagine the dumb/surprised look on my face that they must have caught. I did the first couple steps of Dance Above The Rainbow (it has a faintly Irish-looking step) and they cheered. I didn't dare open my mouth and expose their mistake!!

First five pictures - us at the Burrins.
6) They had the TINIEST roads; our huge bus took an expert driver!
7) At Lahinch the beach had some great waves and the kids loved it. Its golf course is famous too, but at hundreds of euros to play a round, we decided to pass!
8) Instead, while in Lahinch Charlessa's family and I took a walking tour of the place!
9) Here's the B&B we stayed at. They were VERY nice and served some great breakfasts!
10, 11) They had a couple of interesting signs there in Ireland! There was also an official Matchmaker festival! I'm sure they had lots of crack at that festival!!!
12,13,14) Here's Dromoland Castle, now a 23 star hotel that is regularly graced by royalty and the insanely wealthy. WOW! No wonder! It's also supposed to have a really premier golf course.
15, 16) Bunratty Castle was way more than just the castle, it included a lot of recreated grounds around it. Including a sign that told how CORN was ground into OATMEAL at a mill!!! ROTFLOL!
17, 18) And these two REGAL looking kings.... ;^)

Day 3 Irish Step Shopping and Talk

Welcome = Failte!! (pronounced fall-cha) I have been wondering what that word meant, and I finally tracked it down after seeing it everywhere!

Today was our first day of Irish Step Dance lessons, and it got off to a wee bit of a rough start. Our guide led us around three sides of a square trying to keep us off the main roads, but it took us longer than expected and we showed up a half-hour late. Though after that it went really well.

The teacher started us off on their basic step - a kick-jump-step-step series that totally bamboozled me the first few times. I tended to (and still do) do the step like a skip rather than the jump it's supposed to be. I think that considering that most of us never had any sort of Irish Step experience that we did well. Of course Katie was awesome, and Laura and Mary were both really good since they also had some experience way back when. Hanna was also really good; she has always picked up steps very easily in clogging and is very good at following tricky weight and balance shifts.

We did a solid two and a half hours of lessons and by the end we had a single short dance and a couples-group dance that worked out similarly to a contradance. Only we had to do Irish steps while we were doing the figures! Contradance on steroids maybe!

There was a little boy there of seven and his sister of ten who both did demonstrations for us. The boy looked exactly like what I have always imagined a fawn (the half goat/half man variety) to look while dancing around playing the pan pipes! His dancing was so cool!! It was a mixture of soft shoe style and hard shoe style. Apparently he sometimes performs the part of the young version of the hero in a dance that is touring around - To Dance On The Moon. He is really, really good, and it certainly doesn't hurt that he's as cute as a button dancing around!

And then we follow behind with our dancing and I feel like a bull clomping around on the tips of my hooves. I know there are videos that were taken and I'm vacillating between wanting to see what I actually looked like and wanting to destroy the tapes before they can be seen. :^)

After lessons were done, David and I escorted the teens of the grouop around town for an afternoon of shopping. We kept a pretty loose rein and it went well. Except for one thing — they ate pizza for lunch!!! We fly thousands of miles to a foreign country, there are dozens of pubs in sight with great food available, and they want to eat pizza!!! One of the guys at the pizza shop was pretty cute though, at least to Dana and Katie. They others kept insisting he looked like a rat or a weasel or something. I'm sure they were just jealous that he wasn't looking at them!

I've got to keep a closer watch on what I say, because I'm supposed to be one of the adults on this trip, but I keep making smart comments back to the kids. Hmph. Sometimes it seems liek I never made it past highschool. I finally tracked down the third item on my list of things to get for myself. A nice silver, celtic patterned ring, a nice blanket, and finally a heavy, knit, Irish, woolen sweater. It's an Aran Island Mills sweater — 100% wool, scratchy, intricately knit, and a nice shade of green. Very much what I had in mind! Now on to the odds and ends for others. I was the easy one! What on earth do I get for my mom or dad?

It's late, 12:15 Ireland time, but my body still has echos of US time because I'm still up and going. Will, Charlessa and I just spent a couple hours chatting up just about every topic under the sun. Literally. I can't imagine that there is a topic that we didn't cover, or at least mention. Then Charlessa and I stayed up even longer talking and making sure that we truly had covered ever possible topic, before working on our Irish moves. Hopefully we won't be back to square one when we go back tomorrow. Charlessa has wonderful posture while doing the steps and looks so light on her feet compared to what I feel like. I can tell that I'm still musceling the moves along and they aren't flowing smoothly. More practice needed!

1) Starting off our hike to practice we are looking good. At least he is.
2) And yes, we're still walking 40 minutes later!
Next 7) We are all dancing away. Katie always seemed to have nice high jumps along with Mary. What a workout it was!
10, 11) We demonstrated Rocky Top and Just Joshin' for them. They saw a lot of Irish step dance steps in Just Joshin'!
12) Dana of course likes to do fun lifts and throws. Good timing on David's part to catch this one so nicely!
13, 14) Here is Four Star Pizza and Pizza Boy! Thousands of miles and we eat pizza. Sheesh!
15) I hope we didn't alarm the owner if he saw us all posing with his car. SWEET!!!
16, 17) And how many girls can we cram into one photo booth?
18) How about we show pizza boy this picture! Two lovely young ladies, sticking their noses in ice cream. What class and style! :^)