CIE Day 2: Ring of Kerry Tour + Spectacular Musical Performance!

During the day, we did a lot of driving along the "Ring of Kerry", which is the name for the area of coastline extending from slightly North of Killarney down to the South Western tip of Ireland, and then back along the southern coast a little ways until it shoots northward up to Killarney again. It's comprised of a lovely selection of hills and mountains, woods, and coastline. So in addition to trying out this cool "panorama assist" feature of my camera which uses the edge of the last picture I took and my LCD display to help me line up panorama shots, I was generally able to get lots of lovely pictures of the Irish landscape, especially of a few bays and lochs.

We also swung through Muckross House, a 19th century mansion that Queen Victoria visited for 2 days in 1861. Ironically the incredibly elaborate preparations for that visit probably led to the bankruptcy of the family and the selling of the estate in ~1899. It passed through several hands and ultimately both it and its 1100 acres were gifted to the Irish state, so now it's a tourist place. We walked through some of the gardens briefly. Most notable thing about them was the size of the rhododendrons - some were more than 3 times my mom's height (so we're looking at 18+ ft) - I was impressed...Also worth commenting that rhododendrons seem to grow everywhere over here in the wild...very interesting to see lush rolling green hills and and a lavdender rhodie bush just sitting in the middle of it. The tour of the house itself was interesting, but a little long...My current nature kick is apparently only able to take so much touring the insides of things...Incidently one of the expenses of these manor houses is keeping the deer populations under control. The Irish wolves were hunted to extinction leaving man as the only predator to keep the deer population in check - go man!

We had lunch at the Skellig Experience, which chronologs the life of some early Christian monks who went to the Skellig islands 8 miles off the Irish coast and built a monastery on the larger of the two. It's hard to describe in words, especially without pictorial support, how barren these islands were, but the monks not only built dwellings and a monastery that is still standing today, but they also built "real" steps leading up 200 meteres (~600+ ft). We're talking stone steps built from other rocks and/or carved into the cliffside that have lasted 1400 years (the monks arrived in 600AD). All pretty impressive when you consider that as they were building these steps and dwellings, they were probably either continually crossing a small section of the Atlantic or were living on barren rock 8 miles from any chance of resupply or help.

Before dinner, I snagged a short swim - it's been a long time since I went swimming...and it was all the odder for me not having goggles and needing to wear a swim cap - the oddities of "fancy" hotels...

After dinner, we caught an amazing show in Killarney by Liam O'Connor, formerly of Riverdance, and his band. Liam plays an electric accordion and wow...I had no idea accordions could sound like that. The supporting band was also good and his wife, Lisa Aherne, provided a few breaks from the semi-folk music that was pumping up the crowd with some amazing vocal solos...I could have taken or left the songs she choose, but her voice was really impressive. Oh and when I say pumping up the crowd, I do mean that I could watch old men and women practically dancing in their chairs in tune with the music - our CIE tourguide called the show electrifying and I think that's a good choice of words...wow. Mom and I bought a CD. They're starting a US tour in November, I hope it hits Boston.

We've also managed to have incredibly amazing weather! Only a few drops of rain today and they were over and done while we were still on the bus, which is a major step up from the weather experienced both by the tour group before we joined and by the Ring of Kerry area itself...so thanks to whoever's being nice with the weather machine.

CEI Day 1: Adare and Killarney

So we're doing this CIE Irish Fling tour starting today...

We began the tour at 1:45, so after sleeping in we still had time to wander town the street to Bunratty Castle and Bunratty Folk Village - in which they rebuilt a bunch of old-style buildings from across Ireland to provide some flavor of how those who didn't live in castles lived. The castle was spectacularly awesome at least from the outside. They had opened up most of the rooms, so it was interesting to see the internal layout of the rooms - they even had the controls for the drawbridge in place! Anyhow, so that was reasonably interesting. The folk village was also pretty neat, but was a little less my thing. I did snag a few cool pics - including one of a bed that folds out from a box cabinet and the small little church that they had moved "stone by stone" into the center of the "village". My brief tour of the gift shop also enabled me to snag my first souvenior Ireland leather bookmarks...mmmm souvenior bookmarks...

Once we boarded the tour, we headed to the little village of Adare where we had a whomping 25 minutes to wander about in the giftshop. I came across a few cool things, but ended up sticking to postcards for now...that whole "budgeting" thing you know. I was informed politely that "McCraw" is a bastardization of McGraw, so Kim, if you wand any sort of family seal stuff, then you're stuck with that classical misspelling...Speaking of, anyone of Irish ancestry want a clan seal in either keychain, shot glass, paper, or alternative form - I'm happy to buy things for people who want them, but I was drawing a blank on which among you has Irish last names...

After a bit more on the bus, we arrived at Killarney where we'll be spending two nights on our tour. We had about 45 minutes before our "welcome drink", so I set out to find a swimsuit - we're staying in really nice hotels for this whole tour thing, so may as well be able to take advantage of the free services, no? Snagged one of those and located the internet cafe that I've been using since I got into town. Our welcome drink was fun, Mmm...Bailey's on the rocks...I'm the youngest person the tour; the next closest is a girl traveling with her soon-to-be mother-in-law who is probably ~5 years older...the vaste majority of the people on the tour are elderly couples with a few siblings and singles along for the ride. There's about 20 of us, we're all from the US except for two Canadian sisters (one of whom now lives in the US), we've got Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Texas, California, Oregon, Pennsylvannia, and...I think at least one other state that I'm forgetting...Largest contingent is the Texans, I think we've got about 5-6 of them. The man from Nebraska sounds exactly like James Garner, so it's interesting to hear him talk.
Dinner was really good (or rather the ends of each were good), I had:
Savory Tartlet filled with leak fondue and strips of smoked salmon (spectacular)
Saute Strips of Turkey cooked in Indonesian Curry cream on a bed of wild Basmati rice (meh...take or leave)
A fresh strawberry mousse (dessert - very good)

After dinner, Mom and I wandered around town for about an hour. We came upon the Killarney Cathedral, which is celebrating its 150 year anniversary - the building's quite nice and next to the edge of town, which appears to be bordered on all sides by a huge wooded park.

In other news, I'm reading "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and, much to my surprise, would strongly recommend it. I think you need to be in the right mindset to listen to what it has to say, but it fits well with the introspective character that I've adopted over the past months - Sorry Chris, sometimes there are advantages to thinking a lot ;-).

So that's day one of the tour.

Travelling "fun" with easyJet

Well our flight ended up leaving Edinburgh at 12:20pm (instead of 8:30am), so we arrived in at London's Gatwick airport just in time to miss our connecting flight to Shannon, Ireland. EasyJet, for those of you who are ignorant Americans like us, is a point-to-point airline, so therefore they don't offer any "connection services" per se, they only promise to get us to our destination at some point (not necessarily quickly). Uncle Michael described them as the Amtrak of the air ;-). Anyhow, they basically said their next flight was the next night and that they couldn't help us work with another airline to get to Shannon before their flight more than 24 hours later.

This didn't work so well for us since we were due to start a tour at 2pm today...so after much bustling about at Gatwick, we were able to get a flight on RyanAir for 10pm that evening that left London's Stansted airport. So a 3 hour busride later and we were all ready to get on a new flight at a new airline...the result was that a journey which began at 6am ended at around midnight...but we did get to Shannon..and on the same day, so I was relatively content. Nerves were pretty short by the end of the day though. Discussions of simply abandoning our trip to Ireland cropped up during the hour+ that we were shopping for a flight to Shannon - our backup if this flight hadn't existed would have been to fly to Dublin in the morning and hope that a taxi could move us 120 miles to Shannon before the tour left...wasn't promising.

Oh and one other thing...some excitement happened in Edinburgh when two Scottish police officers armed with machine guns (or sub-machine guns) went into the gate that our flight was theoretically leaving from about 10 minutes before the plane arrived...interestingly they switched the gates, so apparently they weren't after someone on the plane - I guess they were just checking the gate? Anyhow, very odd.

We started the tour today, I'll write about that tomorrow.

Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh + go go gadget easyJet

Well thanks to a three hour delay with my airline, I've got a little bit of free net time on my laptop (which hopefully means that one of these patches that I'm downloading will do something to fix the poor thing - we're at 20min+ boot times right now and programs like to crash if more than one is running, especially office). so yah...here's hoping that I can find the problem...

Hmm...nothing much to report other than we spent the afternoon in Edinburgh wandering through the Royal Botanical Gardens. These are definitely worth a visit if any of you happen to be in the area. As is customary with such visits late in the day, I was forcibly removed from both the green houses (which closed an hour before the gardens) and the gardens themselves...unfortunately, my adult compatriots ended up stuck in the cold rain for about an hour because the on-site souvenior shop closed an hour before the park and they were unable to locate me in the middle of my wanderings. So lots of pretty pictures and a good time was unfortunately traded for any "points" that I'd accumulated by carrying luggage, finding Cawdor castle, and any other assorted good deeds...

In other news, I seem to be on a nature kick (plants, animals, and landscapes) that is very evident in both my photos and how I'm spending my time over here. 1278 photos so far. And in a piece that doesn't come as breaking news to any of you: Chris you're right, I think too much.

And now onward to Ireland...hopefully...

This is only a Test

Hello World and welcome to blogger.

Trip along the coast...

First things first, who wrote this?
'Silly Will, are you going to get any of the pictures you take developed? It might be better if you only took 75 and actually got them developed. If I ever get rich, which could only happen by accident, I will help pay for you to get your pictures developed (especially if I can have some of the ones from partner year ;-)'

Yes yes...I know I take too many pictures, that's why I've got a digital camera now! I can take pics forever and not need to worry about developing them ;-). Point taken though that I still don't have those 40+ rolls from Partner Year handled yet...

Alright, I'm getting a semi-clear message (e.g. from two people) that I should switch to blogger instead. I'll try to do that once I get stateside, but I'm not going to bother for the next week. I hope you can all put up with livejournal for a little longer.

Umm...so yah, I'm in Edinburgh now and since I've already seen the Art Gallery, where the others are now, I'm doing this whole net thing in the interim...

First let me just complain about the keyboard for a moment because it conveniently has an "off" switch right next to the return button and under the delete key...brilliant interface design courtesy of www.geniusnet.com.tw.

Anyhow, yesterday we took an all-day bus tour up towards John O'Groats, the most "north easterly" point in the main UK landmass...they were recently blasted by the Lonely Planet guide series for having their role as a tourist destination based on the falsehood that they were in fact the most northerly point on the island...but I digress...

The trip was reasonably nice and included some lovely views of the sea. Unfortunately without pictures, I don't have much specifically to say. We stopped by the ruins of an ancience hill fort and some cairns (burial mounds) that were still in one piece. The engineering involved in this cairns is astounding. They use no adhesives, cement or otherwise, and are simly built from stacks of stones and yet they lasted for 1000s of years...truly mind-boggling how they could build such things so long ago...take that technology!

Anyhow, other highlights...we wandered along the cliffs near John O'Groats (yes I know this is probably spelled wrong) in search of a puffin sighting and though we came up empty, we did see a large collection of other birds (mostly razor beaks and something else whose name escapes me - they look kinda like penguins). It was pretty neat to see so many of them nesting in the cliffs; however the really cool part was watching them using the gusting ocean winds to fly around...one would fly towards us into the wind, slow to a crawl and them suddenly turn around and shoot off like a rocket - yes, I know it's mundane, but I enjoyed it.

The other amusing highlight of the evening was my uncle getting cholocate ice cream for dessert and asking for whipped cream...the waitress brought him some heavy cream (like what you might put in coffee)...after much word-smashing we determined that whip cream is actually "squishy cream" in Inverness...or at least for this one waitress...anyhow, I suspect it's not particularly amusing to any of you, but I was intrigued.

Oh and Cadbury hot chocolate is really good.

That is all.

Cawdor "Castle" and Gardens...

Replying to comments (or rather to Chris):
Yes, Chris, sadly I'm using Livejournal. It's not so bad and it has the added bonus of actually logging out properly unlike that other blog which just allowed anyone to use my admin stuff after I did and didn't clear cookies properly...so yah...I'm open to alternative suggetions if people have them...this was simplier than trying to debug the old system from a pay-for-surf station, however I'm not wedded to it by any means...

Anyhow, onward to postland:

We went to Cawdor Castle today. I had been the one pushing for us to go there for no intellible reason that I could recall I thought it would be good...anyhow, I got a "gold star" for my choice. I never actually made it into the castle (in which the duchess of Cawdor still lives), but I did wander about the gardens for a long time. There were three: a "flower" garden, a "wild" garden, and a maze garden. All were reasonably nice, but the wild garden was spectacular. It was like wandering through a forest except there was more variety in the flora and fauna than you would find in a natural forest - there were even bamboo shoots for pete's sake. Anyhow, we all had a nice time and I'd definitely like to go back there and wander around the nature trails if I'm ever this way again.

Indian food for lunch and a brief trip to the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery concluded the day...The exhibits were okay, especially for such a small museum, but nothing in particular to write home about.

The plan for the next few days is...
Tomorrow: a trip along the upper North East coast that will last basically from dawn until dusk.
Friday: travel back to Inverness where ideally I'll post something about the day before and wander around the capital a little while
Saturday: we're traveling to Ireland for a 4 day tour - no clue how feasible net access will be during this time, so there may be a lull in postings before we end our trip in Dublin...

Culloden Battlefield + Loch Ness

Today was a surprisingly busy day, we took two several hour trips to Loch Ness and Culloden respectively.

On the way to Culloden, we stopped at the Clava Cairns for a few moments. The Cairns are a set of Pictish-era burial chambers (three large and one small) made from stone. Apparently they were built from a large variety of stones, so that if the roof is closed (currently all the roofs are absent), then the sunlight causes an impressive array of colors to appear in the central chamber of the cairn. Culloden is the site where the last major battle on UK soil was fought in 1745 - it was the final battle in Prince Bonnie Charlie’s attempt to retake the English throne for his father, the heir of the Stewart dynasty that was expelled from power some 60+ years previously because the Protestant people of the UK were not fans of James II (Bonnie Charlie’s grandfather’s) Catholic faith. Bonnie Charlie raised an army of Scottish Jacobites (supporters of the Stewart’s claim to the throne) and marched southward until a lack of support from English Jacobites forced him to retreat northward. His last battle was on the muddy field of Culloden where his largely Scottish force armed with swords and shields was ill-matched for a Red Coat army with significant artillery support and equipped primarily with muskets. The poor terrain hindered Bonnie Charlie’s ability to use the infamous Highland charge against his enemies and his already outnumbered force was beaten within an hour. Bonnie Charlie escaped and ultimately snuck away to France. So yah…I guess I’ve soaked up a little Scottish history today? ;-)

After a brief lunch, we hopped on another tour bus to go to Castle Urquhart and Loch Ness. We enjoyed a 30 minute cruise along the Loch before arriving at the Castle to wander around for about an hour. There was an interesting video on the castle’s history, but I was the only one of us four who managed to catch it and I barely made it to the bus “on time” as a result. Interesting fact of the day (though I think it must be full of baloney) is that Loch Ness is large enough to fit the world’s population within it (I want to say I heard “three times”) and still have leftover space. It is much much bigger than I was expecting, the Loch is 23 miles long and an average of a mile wide (widest = 1.5 miles); in an amusing contrast, the Ness river is only 7 miles long…It is the largest body of free water

The Loch Ness tour also included a trip through a small Scottish town on the shores of Loch Ness that built its tourism industry out of the infamous Loch Ness Monster. We stopped at Nessie’s museum and went though a multi-staged multimedia tour of the history of the myth and many subsequent debunkings of portions of it…it was actually pretty interesting even though it was a little sad how much they stretched the ends of each little mini segment to claim…“but there’s still room for a few mysteries in Loch Ness’ depths”…

Mom and I went to a brief choral vesper performance at the Inverness Cathedral. The Cathedral is interesting because it doesn’t actually have steeples (the tall pointy towers) because they ran out of money when it was being built - instead they just have the towers begin and then be capped by a flat top - it looks pretty interesting. The performance was attended by about 4 parishioners and a few tourists, which is a pity because it was quite good.

For dinner, we went to a nice little restaurant on the river Ness that we’d been to for lunch before. For dinner, I had an interesting variation on haggis. It was a “haggis-filled supreme of chicken with Whiskey and Arran Mustard gravy” - I was quite impressed, it was very good and the heavy pepper flavoring of the haggis went really well with the gravy. For dessert, I had a really good vanilla cheesecake with raspberries and raspberry sauce - I need to make one of those cheesecakes that Randy taught me over the summer at some point…

Tour to the Isle of Skye

We took an all-day tour to the Isle of Skye today.

We stopped by the ruins of Eilean Donan Castle. It was moderately interesting, but not spectacular…A good camera shot from the outside, but inside it just seemed really cramped and like a glorified townhouse.

On Skye, we stopped by the Donald Clan Center which includes some castle ruins and a pretty interesting historical museum that covers much of the history of the North Western lands.

We took a ferry to get back to the “mainland” of Scotland, it was pretty interesting from an engineering perspective because the cargo/transport area was on some sort of bearing so that it could be rotated by hand - it’s pretty hard to explain without a photo, but it was pretty neat. The ferry owners had a cute black dog, so we got to pet him during our crossing. I think we saw an otter and *might* have snagged a picture of it.

My mom told me an interesting theory of what happens when I come home after a semester at Olin, I basically collapse and sleep 12 hours per day for the first 3-4 days, but am still in a comatose state, then for the next 3-4 days I’m slightly more alert but still suffering from a lack of the adrenalin and energy that comes from being at Olin…That plus the cold that I’m trying to fight off right now, might explain my general lack of energy at the present time - I slept during most of the bus riding today and still could barely stay awake during dinner. I hope I become conscious soon…

I managed to check my e-mail for 10 minutes this morning and another 20 tonight, so I got a message out to Joles saying that I got here okay and was able to wade through the 48 e-mails that I’d received in the past 72 hours ( ::slightly curses mailing lists:: ).

When I wasn’t asleep on the bus, I was able to get a ton of great views of Scotland’s rolling hills, lochs, and glens. It really is a lovely country; we had a mixed blessing with the weather because though it was generally continuously overcast with a mild drizzle, we managed to avoid any downpours during the trip and though the hills were shrouded in mist, we could still see them and (more importantly) get photographs. I’ve taken a few more than 100 pics so far; Uncle Michael was commenting that the 75 shots he can take with his digital camera is more than he could possibly use - an attitude I find impossible to comprehend.

I finished “Hope in the Dark” and started reading the next book in the Pendragon Cycle (Merlin); not sure if I’m sold on it right now, but it appears that I’m stuck with either this or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People since all my other books were mailed to DC direct…though it just occurs to me that mom’s got a hardback version of Friedman’s new “The World is Flat” so I need to swipe that from her…

Tomorrow is more time in Inverness where our activities are dependent on the whether. Oh and it’s still freezing here; even when it’s not raining. Scotland, it’s like Oregon except colder.

Travelling to Inverness

We arrived in Inverness today around 1pm today after a ~4 hour train ride…After dropping our bags off at the B&B we wandered into the city for lunch and to see what could be seen. I had a delicious gammon (ham) steak for lunch with some okay brushetta-like bread stuff as an appetizer. I really do think that I’m a brushetta snob these days; Randy should never have taught me how to make the stuff.

We wandered around for a little bit, but generally didn’t find much to do; it being a Sunday afternoon most places were closed, or closing by the time we got into town. Case in point the laundermat that doubles as an Internet café that closed at 4pm…so my e-mailing back home was delayed yet another day.

We’re doing an 8 hour bus tour up to the Isle of Sky tomorrow, so I think I’ll be heading to bed shortly. I’ve been reading “Hope in the Dark” by Rebecca Solnit; I think I’m going to suggest that all the OSA members interested in activism read it over the summer - it’s short (only 150 pages), but very poignant.

That’s me for now.

Traveling to Scotland

I left Olin at 3pm; Joles gave Kate B. and I rides to Logan. On the flight to Amsterdam, I watched Ray and The Phantom of the Opera, so I only ended up getting about 2 hours of sleep during the trip…(the previous night’s sleep was 2 x 3 hour blocks of time). This made staying awake in Amsterdam a bit of a chore since I had a 4 hour layover, but you live you learn. I finished Taliesin by Stephen Lawhead right before getting on the plane to Edinburgh.

I got to our B&B in Edinburgh at around noon and mom, Barb, and Michael were all asleep…Michael finally answered a door after much banging and I wandering into the room and collapsed in a heap for a couple of hours. Around 3 we left and went into the city. I did a little art-centered meandering on my own while they soaked up local culture stuff.

The surprise of the day was that I ran into Henriette, the Dutch girl who I met at RGU, while I was walking down Princes Street. We talked for a few minutes; she finished her classes about 1.5 weeks ago and is now on vacation with her mom and dad - everyone had to move out of the dorms by today, so I don’t know if any of my flatmates got my e-mailed warning from yesterday that I’d be in the country for a while…on the positive side, our Irish tour includes stuff in County Claire which is were Paula is from, so maybe she’ll be able to swing by during that leg of the trip.

In a sharp contrast to my time in Scotland last semester, the sun didn’t set until after 9pm and the sky was still light at 10, so that was a little odd. Everyone else went to sleep a few hours ago, but I’ve been typing random things like a maniac for a while and figured I should start writing this whole travel journal thing too. Anyhow, tomorrow it’s off to Inverness.

Post-Publication Introduction

Hello all,

Per the request of Kate and Joles and my own moderate interest, I'm restarting this whole travel blogging thing...I will attempt to update every few days, but no promises. At the very least, I will write entries on my laptop and update the net stuff when I have a chance. I decided to switch from my personal page because this will be easier to update securely from a computer that is not my own.

Apologies for the poor appearance of the page, I don't really have the spare net time to play with the stylesheet right now.

Happy reading, or not, as you like.