What if you really are Irish?

All this St. Patrick's Day excitement got me thinking about our trip to Ireland last May for our daughter's wedding. I am Irish, Scottish, English all mixed together, but of course I claim the Irish part. Kathy is 100% Slovenian, but she gets more into today than I do. Perhaps she's Irish by injection, as they say.

Revswife asked for more photos, so I thought I'd drop some of them from our Ireland adventure in this post. (flickr was acting up , though, saying the uploads weren't going through when they were, so this looks kind of clunky.)

So there we were, plunked down in a strange country where we had our future son-in-law Peter and daughter Ann to protect us from the Celtic hordes. And son Patrick--he made a great tour guide, graciously taking us around to places he had already seen. We had the best time, visiting Glendalough with its ruins, walking our legs off all around Dublin, and taking the train across the country to Galway in the west. Oh yes, there was a wedding in the middle of all that.

We felt quite European on the train, buying sandwiches to eat on the trip. Kathy wisely chose seats with a table in the middle, so we could spread out our maps and figure out where we were on the three hour ride. The train was kind of empty, but that suited us just fine. On the return trip, it got a little more exciting as the police were called to escort a man off the train. He was drunk, and insisted on badgering another man and woman. We left the station a little late, but everyone was very happy we didn't have to listen to the fighting all the way back to Dublin.

I could just listen to Irish people talk all day. That charming accent is a pleasure to hear.

And the food--whatever was served in a restaurant, it was served steaming hot--so hot you couldn't eat it for some minutes till it cooled.

And the streets--everytime you turned the corner you would happen on yet another quaint scene that you had to capture on film..well, I had to capture anyway. My camera got me in trouble one day when I got separated from Kathy and another couple we were traveling with. All of a sudden, I was alone on a crowded Dublin street. So I used this principle I developed when attending professional conferences. Simply stated, it is this: whenever you want to find someone, stand in one place and eventually they will walk right by you. It worked in this instance as well, as I stood on a traffic island and eventually they appeared, panicked, looking for little old me.

We really did leave a part of ourselves there. We'll go back, especially since Peter and Ann will be there. Maybe we'll swing through the south next time.