Yeah, I actually sometimes wake up thinking this kind of thing.

Life is trivia but life is not trivial. There, how about that?

Can we reconcile this? First, let me note that I have no particular proof that life is not trivial, I'm not a philosopher, and on a universal scale, anything that happens on this little planet, even, oh I don't know, say the actual genuine son of an actual genuine god being tortured, killed, and ascending to something called heaven (I'm just making this up, of course), is pretty darned trivial.

That's beyond the scope of what I'm prepared to handle here (and in all likelihood ever), so we're left with a couple of issues to deal with. First, let's stipulate that life is not inherently trivial, because otherwise what is the point of writing this. Next, let's make sure everyone understands that with very few exceptions, real life is indeed trivial; it's mundane at its core. I know everyone has big events that happen, and sometimes even things like a math test or needing to go to the bathroom seem really really important, but they're not. Life is not a highlight reel.

It's also important to note that in the age of information, the sheer volume of stimuli that we encounter each day tends to make each individual one less significant and inherently more trivial. That's just math, and it makes it harder to find the meaningful stuff.

So the question facing us as human beings is, how, if you care to, do you construct a meaningful life out of trivia? In simpler times (which really existed by the way, I remember them) it was not as difficult to sort things out. There just wasn't as much noise to contend with.

Someone once said to me, I think it was my father, who heard it from someone else, "Spend a life." Spend your life. In other words, treat it the same way you would treat, for example, spending money. How are you going to spend each hour, minute, second of each day to have the kind of life you want to have?

I can't answer that for you. It really isn't even necessary to want to have some particular kind of life. Stuff will happen whether or not you do. I spent 40+ years that way, and though I had some fun and some good experiences, I can't say it was a particularly rich and rewarding way to live.

What I've learned since is that the important part of avoiding triviality is trying to avoid it by seeking meaning, whatever the hell that means. My current motto is "Be where you are, do what you're doing." Although the thought isn't original, I didn't take that line from anywhere. But it seems to me that that's what it's about. Don't be distracted by all the bullshit. Don't spend the day looking at what other people are doing any saying. It's fine to check in, but that's all. Don't be captive to everything going on around you, don't go FOMO, be present.

At the same time, and this may seem to completely contradict what I just said, look outside yourself. Being in your head all the time isn't a path to anywhere. How do you interact with the world around you? Do you take it in? Do you participate in it somehow? There are many things, sounds, messages, videos trying to catch your attention, but you can control where your attention goes. It isn't any more complicated than that.

I feel like I've been very lucky, because I've had good helpers in getting myself out of my head, and teaching has been the perfect antidote, because you have to be completely focused on the students. But that's just what works for me. Everyone has to find their own way. Just be where you are and do what you're doing.

Typing

I'm sure in the wake of the apparent hoaxical closing of the LA school system, there will be criticism for the disruption the closing caused to the many thousands whose children attend the school It's not fair to do that though unless you at a minimum weigh the whole Type I versus Type II error matrix.

A Type I error would be to close the schools because of a hoax and cause massive inconvenience (and I'm sure financial harm to some). In that that case the Type II error would be to let people go to school when there really were bombs there.

Which error would you rather make? To do this intelligently, you need to weight the probabilities involved, but when you make a binary choice like that (close or don't close are the only alternatives) you have to look at both sides and try to be smart.

I actually use this kind of decision-making all the time If I have a 50-50 choice and I can't decide between the right choices, I assume that I'm going to be wrong and decide which way I'd rather screw up. It's proved a good guide for me; it's one of the few actual life skills I learned in business school.

Catching up

I know, I already missed a day. Just by a few minutes though. And I did write both 20 report cards and a thesis statement for someone else's term paper. But still, I know I messed up.

It's not like I didn't have anything in my head to say. It's just that there was too much of other people's stuff in my head as well. That's kind of my issue.

I did get out for a 12 mile bike ride today. Only had 3 cars almost hit me. I should tell any of you who are inexperienced drivers of have children who are- stay off the road until after Christmas! People are crazy this time of year. It's really dangerous to be on the road, even in a car.

Seven more school days until break. Hope I make it. Actually, I'm fine. I hope all the nonsense around me subsides a bit, but I'm okay.

Today is the first day of the rest of my day.

I'm tired of writing about how I don't write in my blog anymore. So I am promising my self to write something every day, even if it's not significant, just to get my writing needs satisfied.

This week was the first chapter of the second volume of the Barrack School Year 2015-16 trilogy. I got a new class, with 16 students, almost none of whom I know. It's hard for a student to understand how exciting and terrifying that is for a teacher. I don't mean that I'm scared by it, but I get the kind of terror that actors describe getting before going on stage. Are they going to like me? Am I going to like me? Am I going to like them?

The last question isn't really a question. Even the most challenging class is stimulating and enjoyable for me. If you asked me for a preference between teaching middle versus upper school, I'd always say upper school. But I am hugely enjoying my 7th grade class, as I've enjoyed every 7 grade class I've taught.

Meanwhile, I need to write report cards. So the genesis of starting to blog again is procrastinating other writing. That's okay; whatever work.

GTWTAFUBAR

Most of what I write about is small and relatively unimportant. I think this is important, because we can't begin to solve a problem without understanding it. Everyone seems to bemoan how polarized things are, but nobody seems to understand why or how to fix it. This doesn't provide any fixes, but tries to show a clear view of the problems (or as my former professor Russell Ackoff would call it, the Formulation of the Mess- a mess defined as a system of interrelated problems).

This is a post about why people are acting so crazy now. About why our politics are so bitterly divided and why nobody seems to be able to agree on anything. The first 5 letters of the title stand for "Global theory why things are" and the rest you can look up if you don't know it.

I'm going to make a generalization here, for which I have no particular evidence. But this is an opinion piece, so I can say whatever I want without any evidence. OK, call me a Republican.

Here's what I think is happening: As a rule, people don't like change. This should not be surprising, because I'm not aware of any animals like change, and we are more or less animals. And at the risk of sounding ridiculous, change changes everything. It makes it difficult to know what to do when or how or where or whatever. It doesn't make it impossible, it just makes it more difficult, and people don't like things being more difficult.

And yet we live in a time where everything around us is changing rapidly. I would suggest that to many it feels as if things are constantly changing, that the world beneath their feet is not stable, making it scary and unpredictable. For year, people said "Everyone talks abut the weather, but nobody does anything about it." And now we have changed the weather, and do we like that?

I lived through the time when microwave ovens were introduced and I remember how wonderful and terrifying they were. "They cook with radiation? Like nuclear weapons radiation?" Imagine how those people, who are for the most part still alive, feel about what's going on today. It's gotta feel like the foundations on which their life is built are crumbling.

I've gotta admit, I like this stuff. For me, I was born at the perfect time. But I love new technology, and I've spent enough time with people other than myself to know that I shouldn't expect anyone else to react in even remotely fashion as I do.

Too much change makes people fearful and cranky, and fearful cranky people don't make thoughtful choices, because they're constantly in some state of fight or flight. They react from their amygdala, aka lizard brain. The part of your brain that does fight or flight really well and pretty much everything else really badly. It's purely reactive, and it leaves people ripe for the picking by demagogues and on a less extreme basis, by public figures who frame things in simplistic ways. Good versus bad, us versus them. Flee or defend yourself.

There's really no rational reason to fear change, but nothing about this is rational. If you react to change in an emotional way then you are at the mercy of people telling you to be fearful or angry about it, especially if there's nothing else to cling to. And so these upset, vulnerable, largely poor and not highly educated people are being rallied to recapture the past. To preserve what they already have and not give anything they have to anyone else, worthy or not.

Amazingly but not surprisingly, this self-preservation response even includes things that are not in their self-interest, because understanding self-interest requires a nuanced level of thought that the lizard brain does not do. A perfect example was Kentucky, where a population that is highly dependent on Medicaid expansion and the ACA voted for a governor who promised to take that all away. Because Obama. And because his opponent was a lousy candidate.

More than anything, what upsets me is the pessimism than underlies this behavior. I know that we're not living in the golden age or anything, but my goodness, life in the US is pretty good and I wish there was some collective will to make it better and not say, "we can't." Pay a few more dollars in taxes. Fix the roads and the schools, have a good public transportation system. Provide a safety net for those who need it. These are not lofty goals. They're basic.

I hope we can get past this stage, and I wish I was more hopeful about it.

In serviceable

So Friday was in service. In service is so mysterious that the school needed to send out an email explaining what it's about to parents. To students I can say it in a shorter form- it's team building, which when you're an adult you get to call team building professional development.

Let me go on briefly about team building. It's something that works really well with a group of people who have a common goal. One of the reasons ropes stuff is effective is that there's a discreet, clearly articulated goal that everyone understands and buys into.

The problem with doing in a professional development context is that everyone involved in most situations don't naturally have common goals. In a simple artificial construction you can simply dictate a goal. but when you're working within an organization that's a recipe for disaster. Consensus building requires its own set of team building activities. A goal imposed from above will feel arbitrary and won't achieve the buy-in necessary for success.

But here's the thing. It's pretty well known to most of my colleagues that I dislike the whole big meeting thing and that I find them useless. But I can't go on one day about how one should never be bored and then drone on about how bored I was during in service.

And I wasn't. That's the importance of being present. Whatever's going on, think about where you are and what you are doing. And be where you are and do what you're doing. Nobody at my table would have for a moment thought that I was disengaged in any way, because I wasn't. I discussed, I expressed opinions, offered suggestions, the whole deal. And yeah, I even complained about it. But all in the context of what we were doing. What's the point of being bored? Better to engage than sit there watching the clock.

What's alarming about this is how simple it is and yet how difficult it is for people. I need to think about this more.

It's all Jefferson's fault

I was just reading a depressing article about the state of the American family. People, especially educated, upper middle class people, are feeling very stretched and stressed out. They feel torn between job and home, especially when they have young kids. Of course they're torn. It's a binary choice.  You can't be at work and at home. You can't be hanging out with your baby and expecting to earn a significant income. You can't help feeling like you're missing out if you're not home with the baby and good luck trying to juggle them both.

It's all Jefferson's fault. Why did he have to put "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence? What did happiness have to do with anything? I had a cynical hippyish teacher in middle school, known in school circles as the guy who burned the dollar bill at the podium on Parents' Night ( it was the 60's) who said it should say "pursuit of property." But pursuing happiness is a relatively new and specifically American thing.

Let me start by saying that if you have to pursue happiness in the first place then something's out of order in your life. Happiness should be a state of being, not a pursuit. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm happy 24/7, but I sure don't go out looking for extra, and all-the-time happiness is an impossible standard anyway. If we've learned anything from pop culture this year, it's that happiness has to coexist with sadness in order to have a fulfilling life.

To my mind, the key is understanding what makes you happy, as differentiated from what gives you pleasure. That takes a level of self-examination that most people really aren't up for, especially the tired, stressed ones. Too bad, because they need it the most.

Part of the problem is the expectation of being amused and interested at all times. I'm tired of hearing how people are bored. Existence isn't boring. One of my favorite quotes from Car Talk was when Tom Magliozzi reacted to someone calling something as boring as watching paint dry. He said he'd painted something that weekend and watched it dry and that, you know, it wasn't that boring. Fun and entertainment aren't the same thing. Neither are amusement and happiness.

Everyone has choices. I'll be the first to admit that mine have been easier than most people's, but that doesn't change my inclination to take things as they come and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But if you make a choice and then continue to stress out about it, you haven't committed to the choice. It's FOMO for grown ups. There are lots of paths I could have taken but I took the one I'm on. And that's okay, whatever it is.

Some things I can tell you because I'm old

I love to give advice. I rarely do it, because most people don't actually want advice, they just want you to agree with them. But getting older makes it more acceptable to give advice, either because you're more experienced and hence wiser, or because you care less what other people think of you. Because you're old and what does it matter anyway.

So rather than impose myself on other people, I will offer it up my words of wisdom here. Some of it's actual advice; some of it is just observational.

1. Never run for a bus, but make sure that you'd able to if you really wanted. (The first part is a 2000 Year-Old Man quote, the second is because whenever I do a short sprint I think about this).

2. Baby carrots are not actually babies. They are regular carrots cut into small pieces. You should just know that. They don't even say baby carrots on the bags, they call them Baby Cut Carrots, which is a nonsense phrase.

3. Recognize that sometimes it just hurts to be alive. I think I'm a pretty happy, open, comfortable-with-myself kind of guy and I have a nice life, but I still have moments when being conscious hurts. I can't really tell you what's going on, but it's something existential. I feel it most days and fortunately it's fleeting. But it's not hard for me to imagine how hard it might be for someone with a less solid base than I have. On a related note,

4. Give yourself a break. From what I'm observed, most people are much harder on themselves than anyone else is. If for no other reason than that nobody thinks about you nearly as often as you do (or think they do).

4. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you spend too much time ruminating about the way things ought to be or focusing on how reality is not just like that, you'll make yourself unhappy and have less fun that you might. Speaking of which.

5. Have fun. Every day, have fun. One of my favorite movie lines is in "State and Main," a sadly underappreciated David Mamet film about a bunch of Hollywood types making a movie in a small town in Vermont. At one point, one of them says to a local woman, "I guess you have to make you're own fun around here." And she replies, "Everyone has to make their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it's not fun; it's entertainment." So don't just binge watch, do something.

6. I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that in general usage "random" does not mean anything even remotely like random. But I guess if "literally" can mean "figuratively," all bets are off.

7. And last night I saw an experienced public speaker refer to something as fruitional, which is definitely not a word, though one can argue that it should be. To make matters worse, she used it twice in a 5 minute introduction. Lazy lazy lazy. Easier to make something up that figure out how to use the actual words that are available to you.

I'm sure there's more to come.

You can't be older than dead

I have to credit the title to Bill James, who did not invent serious statistical analysis in baseball but who was the one who made it mainstream. He was discussing how extremely old a particular ballplayer was by listing all the old people he was even older than, but noted that he couldn't be older than one of them because that guy was dead.

I have to admit, after the great trip and birthday weekend that Ronnie gave me, that part of me was let down and thinking, well, "Fuck me, I'm 60. I'm done." But more of me is feeling okay. The cliché is "You're only as old as you feel." Honestly, that's both kind of bullshit and kind of true.

On one hand, you're old as you are is more accurate. At 60 I have some limitations and I don't recover from injuries as fast as I used to, but it's nothing I can't live with. Something always hurts when I get up in the morning. Normally it goes away as soon as I start moving around, but as you get older you start to lose confidence that something that hurts is ever going to get better. But I'm pretty thoughtful about the way I move and treat myself, so I don't often "insult" my musculoskeletal system, as the orthopedists say.

On the other hand, part of it is about how I feel and part of it about how I act. I've never acted my age. I was precocious as a kid, immature as a teen/young adult, and kind of youthful as an older adult. In fact, the best part of turning 60 (aside from the great trip) has been all the people who can't believe that I'm 60. The flip side of this, unfortunately, is that acting young is harder when you're not actually young. I don't think about it much when I'm busy, but there are moment that I suddenly, if briefly, hit a wall.

Aside from good genes, I think I have two things going for me. First, I have, and am truly grateful for, some little voice in my head that is always telling me to push ahead. "Take the stairs, pedal in a higher gear, walk to the supermarket," and all kinds of other exhortations. I try not to sit still. This voice helps keeps me in shape and my weight is the same as it was 25 years ago.

The other thing is more subtle and interesting, I think. I am, both by nature and design, open to as much as I can be, whether it be ideas or foods or people or whatever. I sometimes think the thing that ages you the fastest is closing yourself off to things, deciding "I don't like that" and not trying new stuff. I'm hardly what you'd call adventurous, but if I had to name my favorite characteristic, it would be open-mindedness.

Being open has all sorts of advantages, because it forces you to actually listen when you're conversing with someone, and to consider alternate viewpoints, even when you're pretty sure you have the right answer. I work really hard at taking everything at face value, not prejudging. Aside from everything else, life's just more interesting that way.

I probably have more words of wisdom lying around somewhere, but that's another post.

How can something so Wright seem so wrong?

I just finished the Wright Brothers biography by David McCullough on the plane back from Calgary (On a plane! How ironic. Or not). It was an excellent book but it left me confused and disappointed.

As a child, I had a Wright Brothers biography that I read multiple times. It was an inspirational tale of two industrious brothers, who came from humble beginnings and through hard work and determination created the first motorized flying machine. They were devoted to their family, especially their sister Kate, and triumphed over all adversity.

Of course, as an adult I assumed this was whitewashed, just like my biography of Mickey Mantle, All-American Boy and all-round upright citizen. It turns out that upright was not correct either figuratively or in many cases literally. Nobody could be that virtuous.

But when I read this book about Wilbur and Orville Wright, I was surprised to find that my old biography had actually understated the case. They weren't just hard-working and industrious; they were ingenious and resourceful and patient and scientific. They invented and constructed whatever they needed out of whatever materials were available to them. As for adversity, the obstacles they faced were far beyond what I'd read or imagined. Kitty Hawk was a nightmare of a place to work. Though it offered the perfect conditions for the flying part at times, everything else was just as easy as you can imagine building a high-tech workshop and living quarters on a barely inhabited, mosquito-infested sand bar would be.

And about their family? They were each others' support system. They took care of Kate and their father, and vice versa. They worked together almost perfectly. They were also crazy smart, honest, humble, forthright, unfailingly polite, virtuous in every sense of the word, and completely comfortable in their skins. They even had a sense of humor, for god's sake. They did it for neither the money nor the glory; all they wanted was to succeed where so many others had failed. And their triumph was thrilling and complete.

It's an amazing story. You'd never believe it if it were fiction.

The day in Banff

I was trying to remember if there was anything I missed. I mean, it was two days on the train, and I took around 500 pictures. But it seems like we did nothing but go through beautiful country and how much an you say about that, one if comes down to it. The beauty speaks for itself.

So we arrived in Banff 6-something and got shuttled to the Fairmont Hotel there, which is kind of like a castle. It’s absolutely huge and there’s actually more to it than just that main hotel; there’s a conference center and some other stuff that I didn’t explore.

View from our hotel window

Ronnie and I went out to dinner at a place called Park Distillery, which has a huge still from which they seem to sell nothing. Part of it’s licensing and part is just it’s new and they don’t have the stuff yet. Distilling takes time, I guess. In any event, the cocktails and beer were delicious and the food was very good.

Then to bed, before the one morning we didn’t need to get up any particular time. We woke up in Banff, which is a really beautiful place. The town is okay, not crazy upscale like Aspen, but pretty lively, featuring lots of gift shops and cafés to go with the bars and jewelry stores.

Our first trip was to Lake Louise, a glacial lake about 45 minutes away. The best way I can describe the lake is that it’s a jewel. It’s this almost unnatural greenish blue. It’s a glacial lake, and part of the glacier still remains, hanging over it in the distance. It’s quite a remarkable sight, as I guess I just remarked.

Ronnie and I walked along a train on the shoreline for a while, enjoying the quiet and the beauty. It was another beautiful day out- sunny and mid-60’s. You can rent canoes, but we were hungry and wanted to see other stuff, so we headed back to Banff.

After lunch and some coffee, we went for a hike through a very strange landscape. There’s a thermal spring on nearby Sulfur Mountain, and it feed a marsh area that thrives on the warm water that’s there year-round. It’s unlike anything I’d seen before, because you have these huge, sheer mountains all around, a river doing its river stuff, and then this marsh.

According to the signs, people were curious if the marsh would support tropical fish, and in fact it does to an extent. There are a lot of Black Mollies around, and some small fish that look like guppies but are called mosquito fish, named after their favorite food. I’m glad I’m not named after my favorite food.

The whole area was strange and beautiful in totally unexpected ways. I said at some point it looked like hand-colored black and white. Photos don’t quite do it justice, but they try.

After that, we headed up to the thermal springs themselves, about feet higher on the mountain. Unfortunately, you don’t get to see the spring itself (I’m guessing it might not look like anything except a bunch of leaking puddles), but there’s a pool where you can soak in the mineral water. It’s about hot tub temperature, which was very soothing and felt good along with the upper 50’s air. Aside from the soaking, the main event was the frequent plea of “Someone stole my towel!” It’s like at baggage claim, all those white towels look alike. Fortunately, I’d borrowed ours from the hotel and (a) didn’t really care and (b) had them in a plastic bag, where they couldn’t be confused with others.

Back in town, we walked the streets, lined with shops I had no desire to go inside of, so we stopped for a drink, returned the rental car, and caught the shuttle to the bus station for an evening ride to Calgary. We departed right around sunset.

I’d always wanted to see Banff and was not disappointed. It’s stunningly beautiful in many ways. I could have spent longer there, but this was a nice taste. This was a wonderful trip and I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present. Ronnie took care of everything and all I had to do was sit back and enjoy it, which I did, every moment of it.

From all accounts, there’s not much to do in Calgary, which was fine, because we got in at 9-something and had a 6 AM (!) flight the next morning. Maybe I didn’t enjoy the waking up at 3:10 AM moment, but the rest was great.

So Kamloops, and beyond.

Kamloops, tournament capital of the world,  is clearly very ice sports oriented, as they are hosting the 2016 Women's World Hockey Championship (hard to walk 10 feet without seeing some mention of it) and aside from the real arena they have another hockey rink and a curling club.

We arrived around 6:30, loaded onto Bus #5, which took us to the fabulous Hotel 540.Their name is their address! How clever! Our luggage was sitting in our room. The room had some other stuff in it, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you what. We pretty much immediately left and went for a walk.

The town has one very main street full of shops and restaurants, including a surprising number of bridal shops. So I guess it's the getting married capital too. The other streets were pretty dead so we headed to what was reputed to be a pretty good restaurant, called the Noble Pig. I give you the link in case you were thinking of visiting Kamloops at any point soon.

Although the Noble Pig menu didn’t look very good (talking about appearance only), they had a microbrewery, and as it turned out, the food was quite good. I had an interesting salad topped with grilled salmon, and Ronnie and I shared a charcuterie plate. I had their special, a Coffee Double Dubbel brew, with a high alcohol content and a bit of coffee "for an extra kick," as our cheerful server told us.

With that pleasant surprise literally under our belts, we headed back to the room and promptly crashed. For a bit anyway. We had to be up for a 6:15 AM pickup, so nobody from the train slept well. I got tired of waking up every hour and went for a walk around 5. It was a little spooky, but quiet and kind of pretty, in a dark sort of way. There was a nice full moon and you could hear the frogs jumping and croaking in the river.

Back at the hotel, we arrived downstairs along with everyone else at 6:10 and got back on bus #5, which delivered us back to the train.

The same staff greeted us, Frederico (memorable quote- "You should call out if you see an animal, but after you call out "Cow!" for the thirtieth time I'm going to have to come and talk to you") and Tiffany upstairs, Patrick and a woman whose name escapes me (who shared with us the Robert Service classic poem, The night I cremated Sam McGee) downstairs. Onto the train we climbed and by 7:00 we were on our way. Gotta say, Rocky Mountaineer runs a good shop. Everything was tight and on schedule to the extent they can control that running on tracks shared with freight trains. There are two seatings for each meal; yesterday we were first and today we were second. So the whole front of the car ate together, as did the back if the car. At breakfast time, to keep you busy while you wait for your seating, they give you fresh-baked scones and coffee. Very nice.

So there are a lot of differences between this kind of train trip and an Amtrak kind of train trip, of which I've done several. First of all, this train doesn't stop. You're on the train and moving all day long. Amtrak trains have stations, and sometimes they stop for 5-15 minutes, so you can get off and walk around. Although the food isn't nearly as good, they also don't have the same rigid kind of seatings. You do still sit communally in the dining room. There's also a lounge car, so you can change location on the train itself. On the other hand, this train has a bar open all day from about 10:30 AM until you pull into the station. And it's all included, and you have the opportunity to stand outside, which was really amazing. One of the most fun things there is to see the train turning ahead of you.

The biggest difference, of course, is that the whole train stops for the night and you get to sleep in a hotel. The last train trip I took I had a roomette, which had two seats that slid down to make a kind of bed. I can't say I slept great on that ride, but probably as well as I did at Hotel 540.

So off we went. The sun was rising and there was a mist on the the river.

By the way, the weather on this trip has been the polar opposite of what we got in Ireland. It's been sunny with high of upper 60's throughout, which is extremely unseasonable. It's usually low 60's with showers, just like we got in Ireland. Not a bad trade. But anyway, the mist eventually enveloped the train, but burned off pretty soon, and we were out of the desert and into greener, and mountainer landscapes.

The scenery was one of the few things I've seen that actually merits the descriptor awesome. Mountains, canyons, rivers, bridges. Just incredible. All going by at a leisurely pace with no need to drive or pay attention.

 And the tunnels? Those were fun, especially from outside (if they weren't too long and smoke-filled).

We passed the place there the last spike was struck to complete the Canadian Pacific Railway, and then the Continental Divide. We saw bald eagles, a moose, a grizzly bear and some kayakers ("Humans on the left!") And eventually we pulled into Banff. What a day!

If there are any loose ends, I'll clear them up later, but I want to get this posted.

First day of the train trip (like trains, this is running behind).

We had to get up very early for our train trip. Fortunately, the Starbucks across the street opens even earlier, so we were coffeed by the time we boarded the bus. We never do this kind of tour, with large groups, and we both find the regimentation amusing. Fill up the bus, and off to the train station. Luggage? Don't worry, we'll take that and it'll be in your room when we get there.

Where is there? Some place called Kamloops. More about that later, but it turns out that this operation, Rocky Mountaineer, has outgrown using the regular train station and has its own terminal (there’s a difference, BTW) on a spur track.

We have what they call Gold Leaf Service, which means our train car has an upper level for sitting, with wraparound dome windows, and a lower level for dining. The windows are spotless, as is the whole train, actually.

We boarded the train, listened to the safety announcement, then the train backed up to the main track, and we headed east. There’s a platform outside the train car, referred to as the vestibule, where there’s nothing but a gate between you and the outside. This is wonderful on a number of levels. First of all, you have no sense while you’re sitting on a train how loud it is outside. We went over a metal bridge and the clanging was deafening. I also loved that you can just look down and see the track whizzing by, and the tunnels? Wow.

I hadn’t really thought about it before, but one of the reasons I love these long train trips is that train tracks almost invariably follow rivers. I guess because towns grow up around rivers and rivers tend to be flat, except there they're waterfalls. And rivers are cool. There's always something going on by a river, even if it's just the river.

The first river we followed was called the Fraser, which approaches Vancouver through a lush valley. That made it smell like cow dung on the vestibule, but so what, I was like a dog in a car with the window open. I was just sticking my head out and watching.

Then suddenly it was arid and almost desert-like, except with a river flowing through it, so patches of green here and there. Meanwhile, inside the car, there were about a half dozen attendants seeing to our every need. Breakfast was tasty and massive, and shortly thereafter they announced that the bar was open, to great applause.

The people on the train were all really nice. We didn't have extended conversations with too many of them, but those of us who hung out in the vestibule chatted quite a bit. That's another attraction of trains. The people are almost invariably nice (Northeast Corridor excluded). We eat at tables of 4, which means 2 couples who don't know each other. Met two women from Australia (lots of Aussies) and a couple from Toronto.

Eventually, we approached Kanloops, a surprising large town for in the middle of nowhere. It's the tournament capital of the world, whatever that means.

Gotta go now. More later. 

Of course, I had to start my first morning with a walk. Since we are staying on Eastern time, that meant getting up around 5. So when I went out, it was dark and everything was closed. The city is glutted with Starbucks; the closest one, across the street, didn't open until 5:30, so I walked around the block and passed another Starbucks and another coffee shop that was open.

After coffee, I walked down to the water. Guess I should be more specific, because it would be hard to walk for more than a few minutes in any direction without hitting water. But I walked north, I guess, down toward the convention center, which is next to both high-end marinas and industrial ports. I could see the sky brightening on the horizon.

I turned west and followed the coast for quite a way, until I reached a beach with the amazing full moon reflecting off the bay, then came inland and headed back through a nice neighborhood.

What really strikes me is that Vancouver has the feel of a real city, not just a tourist attraction that has people living in it. After Dublin and Bruges and Amsterdam that's a nice change. Not that there's anything wrong with any of those places, they're all lovely, but I was always very aware that their prime as real cities is in the past and that the present is significantly dependent on trading on that past. Italy is probably the most extreme version of it, but a lot of European cities have that feel.

But this place has a vibrancy to it that you don't see elsewhere. Even at 6:00 AM there's an energy that's unmistakeable. I can't imagine that it's not growing quickly.

As the day progressed, it became even clearer why it must be growing. It's absolutely beautiful here. Water and mountains everywhere, cool neighborhood, good mass transit, great parks.

We had breakfast and went to the most famous of the parks, Stanley Park. Perched on a peninsula (oh god, did I really just write that?) it features paths (one for walking, one for biking and blading) that wrap around between the water. Gotta say, they rent bikes to anyone, but beware if you're not a good cyclist, because the path is often narrow, and even though they're one-way, if you're not solid, you're likely to get clipped.

But the scenery is drop dead gorgeous. You're right on the harbor and bay, between ancient trees and mussel beds. Just beautiful.

So we made it around, returned the bikes, and headed for an enclave called Granville Island.

Aside from the true bodies of water surrounding Vancouver, there is also something called False Creek, which I assume is called that because it isn’t actually a creek. I’m not sure, I didn’t really check. So in False Creek is this little island, which appears to have originally been mostly and industrial site, but is now a kind of arts center/tourist attraction.

We walked around the island for a while. There was some great public art at the concrete plant, a whole bunch of theaters, art supply stores, and an art and design college.

There are also various crafty type shops and eating places. Also a small distillery,where we stopped to a tasting of their vodka, whiskey (clean, unaged) and gin. The whiskey was kind of sharp, but we liked the others enough to buy a couple of small bottles.

There’s also a large public market, not unlike Reading Terminal, for you Philly folks, where we had lunch. After a stop at the hotel, we visited an area called Gastown, named after the owner of the local pub who was a noted talker, raconteur, and all-round gasbag.

It’s one of those transitional neighborhoods where there are hipsters and homeless in close proximity. Cool shops and pubs. We then walked over to the Vancouver Overlook, which is a 550 high observation tower with a revolving restaurant (which we didn’t visit).

Back to the hotel, where I had a nice swim, and then Ronnie told me what we were doing for the remainder of the trip. Taking a train through the Canadian Rockies! A longtime dream of mine. Then out to dinner in an area called Yaletown, where we ate in a place called Rodney’s Oyster House. That was great. Fantastic oysters. Sat at the bar and drank and ate shellfish. Loud but not unpleasantly rowdy. Properly stuffed, we walked around the neighborhood.

Then early to bed because we had to board our bus to the train station at 6:30 AM. Yes, you heard that right. More to come.

"I just got back from Majorca"

"From Majorca? Where's that?"

"I don't know, we flew."

That's an old borscht belt joke. It is on a Myron Cohen album, right after the joke about the Klopman Diamond. ("That's a huge diamond on your ring. Yes, it's the Klopman Diamond. It's cursed, you know. Really? What's the curse? Mister Klopman).

So yesterday, we flew. Ronnie has a surprise trip planned for me for my 60th birthday. She didn't spill anything, and I went out of my way to not learn what or where it was. So while the Pope was on his way to give Mass on the Parkway, we headed to the airport. At first, Ronnie didn't even want me to know where we were flying from Philly, which was kind of funny, because that flight went to Dallas/Ft. Worth, which I was pretty confident Dallas was not our final destination (though it is sort of hell-like).

Since DFW is one of the busiest hubs in the country, being there was no clue at all, but eventually we got on a plane for Vancouver, BC, and the secret was out. Lots of flying on full planes, but surprisingly not unpleasant.

We got off at the very attractive airport here, cleared customs, which was 4 dudes just hanging out near the exit checking passports, walked out to the taxi stand and there was this moon fragment in the sky. I'd kind of forgotten about the eclipse because we'd been flying, but it was right after the moon had begun to reappear. By the time we got to the hotel it was about halfway back.

So here we are. I've always wanted to visit Vancouver and am looking forward to seeing it in daylight. Or at least full moonlight.

Say hello to the goo

It's a little bit hard to make sense of what's going on. After slowly building on a theme that's been present all summer, the theme of all-out busyness, we're peaking here in Boston as August draws to a close (Let me note that referring to a period of time 'drawing to a close' is probably the last thing I'd expect to hear in my brain, but it seems to have come to that). This is going to lead to a pretty non-linear post here and probably some related posts that I'll eventually link together, but follow along if you choose.

We're here to move our daughter into her new apartment. We have a minivan full of stuff and a shopping list of furniture to buy after we've dumped all of said stuff into said premises. Moving, of course, is among the busiest busy's you can have, especially Boston at the beginning of everyone's school year, so things would be a bit out of hand in any event. But that's just the tip of the iceberg (oh god, there I go again).

We came here from a weekend on Cape Cod for an informal reunion of Ronnie's high school (give or take) friends. It's a group of people I've gotten to know pretty well over the years; I like them all and enjoy hanging out with them. It was fun and as relaxing as would be possible for me under the circumstances, which are complicated circumstances.

Let's start with the visiting old friends thing. It resonates with me on a particularly deep level because one of the busy's this summer has been scanning all of my parents' old photo albums to create my own life album. There's no way doing this kind of project from scratch can have any result other than leaving your emotional self as a puddle of goo on the floor. It hasn't been exactly chronological (I'm just taking binders out of boxes in no particular order) but the pattern is clear. Every bit of family baggage I've been carrying is on 600 DPI display as I pull photos of myself, my immediate family and relatives, close 'family' friends (i.e., my parents' friends), my own friends, places we've been, most but not all of which I remember.

You can probably see how that could be overwhelming, especially since my father took multiple shots of every pose and my mom did no editing when she put them in albums. I'm not able to do too much of it at once, so it's been pretty omnipresent in my life all summer. So ending the summer by hanging out with the outcomes of someone else's childhood, much as I may love them, is emotionally jarring. A natural result of seeing all the pictures is to make me intensely miss a lot of people and that's only increased by the synergy with a different group of old friends.

Let's add to this the virtual certainty that I will be turning 60 in October. Much as I wish this were a typographical mistake (not in the blog, in the Book of Life perhaps), I've been feeling age creeping in on me here and there, both in my internal processes and what people say to me. Sixty is not old (actually it is old, but it's not death), but it ain't young either, and though I've never gotten too caught up in the round number thing, this is a milestone that I can't escape. I'm guessing I will write more about aging at some other time (senior discounts!), so I'll move on.

The part of this that I absolutely brought on myself is that I've been reading Infinite Jest this summer. IJ is an 1100 page monster of a book by the late David Foster Wallace, (the movie, The End of the Tour is about the book tour for this book). Reading this book is a life-changing experience in ways I don't even know yet. Every page has something that stirs me up and it's hard to understand what the cumulative effect will be. I've got fewer (not less- that's a book reference FYI) than 100 pages to go and it's like rolling down a hill that gets steeper and steeper. It's funny and insightful and weird and impossibly complicated and deeply affecting, at least in some part because you read it knowing that Wallace ultimately committed suicide and you can get a glimmer of insight as to what might have been going on in his head that eventually led to that.

We also went to Ireland, of course, and I've done a fair amount of biking, though not as much as I'd like, and school is starting soon, and I'm in the midst of an IRS audit for some gut-wrenching medical expenses. And now I'm in Boston. Moving day is tomorrow and then school starts the next day. So if you see a strangely familiar-looking puddle of goo somewhere, make sure to say "Hi."

Waxing and washing

So the time has come to wax. I guess you can wax in many ways but I try to make a point of only waxing reflectively. So I’ve told you lots about my trip, but how was the trip? What’s it like driving around Ireland for 2 weeks? What’s Ireland like? What have you learned from the trip?

Before any of that, I want to give myself a major pat on the back for planning and executing a two week trip abroad, with 7 different hotel stops, without screwing anything major up. We never arrived anywhere to find ourselves without a reserved room and none of the hotels were bad. In fact several were quite good. So there’s that, but since I’m not interested in planning anyone else’s trip for them, I’ll move on.

Though I never saw anything that used the phrase “Emerald Isle” or even the word emerald during our trip, Ireland is indeed very green. Not the city streets, of course, but the countryside is relentlessly green.

Speaking of the city streets, by the way, I should just note that compared to the Dutch and Belgians, the Irish are absolute wizards in the laying and maintenance of cobblestones. While in Bruges, we could see a new cobblestoned sidewalk being laid and it appeared as if there might be just a hint or design work going on to minimize its comfort level for walking. Irish cobblestones, on the other hand, are nearly flawless.

Of course, there are no potholes in Ireland either, since potholes come from the freeze-thaw cycle, and it never freezes in Ireland and at least in the weeks we were there, it barely thaws as well. You could store wine outside.

I know I’ve gone on about the driving, but the back roads thing becomes enervating after a while. I didn’t put a scratch on our car (aside from that one momentary bottom-out in the Black Valley) or anyone else’s car. But the concentration required to keep the car in the right place, which usually consisted of between a white line in the center (except when there wasn’t one) and a hedgerow on the side took a little too much out of me.

I did learn to use the side view mirror to see how close I was to the center line as a way of avoiding the vegetation or rocks on the other side. And I only screwed up a couple of times and never at a high speed or in a way that could have caused us bodily harm. I was able to park pretty well and gained a great appreciation for roundabouts, which are not really difficult and convey lots of information about where all the converging roads are headed. The two things I never got used to were putting on a seatbelt from the right and looking to my left to see the rearview mirror.

Really, though. It was too much driving. Too much distance to travel for the amount of time. Too much time in the car. It wasn’t extreme for the most part, but it got progressively wearing. One needs either more time or a less ambitious itinerary.

The other thing, and this is what you have to go in knowing, is that there isn’t a lot too do in Ireland. With a few exceptions, it’s not a place you go to do things. It’s a place you got to be and experience. Honestly, that’s not everyone’s cup of tea (oh, and by the way, forget about tea, the Irish are coffee mad. It’s hard to be in a good sized town and not be spitting distance from a café). If you want activities, you absolutely must plan them.

That said, it’s a lovely place to be. The people are just as wonderful as you hear. Some of our favorite moments were in taxicabs.

Enough for now. More in a couple of days.

On the way home

Wow wow wow. Just took my seat on the plane back to Philadelphia. The airport experience here in Dublin was remarkably arduous, even in the context of arduous airport experiences. It’s just a good thing nothing went wrong, or we never would have made the flight.

Once we got the shuttle bus from the hotel, we arrived at the airport at 9:35 for our 11:35 flight and then waited in line for:

1.  Initial passport check
2. Check in and baggage check. This from probably the least personable person I’ve encountered in the past two weeks. The one good thing is that the process was slow enough that I was able to offload about 10 excess pounds from my bag. My carry-on roller bag is by far the heaviest bag we have.
3. General Ireland security clearance, which meant belts off and computers out, but shoes on through the metal detector. After that we headed to what is called US Customs Preclearance, and to be honest the order of things is getting a little fuzzy for me (this happened within the past hour of writing this)
4. Another passport check
5. TSA Security clearance, which meant belts off again, shoes off this time but no need to empty pockets. Here I dealt with the rudest TSA person I’ve ever seen, not giving any instructions, answering questions in a clipped and abrupt manner, telling me to do this and that, and then fussing at me for not moving up because there were people waiting behind me. Oh really? There are other people on line behind me? I’m shocked. In Security Clearanceland, everyone knows that the person behind you is irrelevant. You need to get your stuff checked and you have no reason to dawdle. 
6. Passport kiosk land, where you scan your passport, answer questions about whether you were in contact with livestock, and leave with a slip.
7. Passport control. where our passports were checked again and our slips were taken.

At this point, I mentioned to Ronnie that we were done with Pre-clearance and wondered when Clearance on Post-Clearance would be like. She was not amused. And as we exited that last line, they announced boarding for our flight, so we queued up for that next, an finally got to our seats.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the screaming baby 3 rows behind us, but at least we don’t have to queue up to hear him. He has excellent screaming volume and stamina, even for a baby.

From Cork to Kilkenny

It was time to leave Cork, so we headed north toward Kilkenny. We stopped at a ruined ancient castle called the Rock of Cashel. Supposedly, St. Patrick, when he wasn't busy driving the snakes out of Ireland, also drove Satan out as well. The epic battle caused a large rock to land at this spot, though it's not there to test for Satan's DNA or anything.

Pretty cool looking castle though, though lacking in any kind of informational signs, and we weren't of a mind to take guided tour. So we headed out. Ended up on back roads and detours again, which was frustrating and made the trip take a little too long for comfort. Sigh. It's been an unfortunate theme. Tomorrow is all motorway, so that should be the end of it though.

Kilkenny, as we learned just before we headed this way, is having an arts festival for the next two weeks. We were a little trepeditious about crowds, but we (accidentally, I'll admit) cruised right up to our hotel, which is located just at the junction of all the main streets. Fortunately, our room faced none of them and was pretty quiet. The town is known for having a pretty and well preserved castle, which it certainly does.

The town was absolutely hopping and we walked around, fearing that it would be tacky like Killarney, but in fact it was pretty and tasteful for the most part. The mall kind of area was easy to avoid. We had lunch at a very nice little cafe which was unfortunately under siege by bees, which caused us to exit quickly.

The festival seems very popular and features all kinds of arts, from music to theater to painting to crafts. A lot of it was pretty mainstream (yes, we know that Ireland has pretty landscapes) but some of it was pretty interesting.

I'm guessing most of the people in town were Irish, but there were definitely a lot of British and Europeans as well. Overall, it was a nice vibe and the shopping was good. Ronnie found some very pretty earrings that she bought in a pop up store shared by a few local artists. It was kind of fun because the woman who made them had good advice as to which would look best on her. Suddenly she realized she'd left her purse somewhere and realized it was probably from our bee-induced (not a phrase I've used before) hasty exit from the cafe. Fortunately, it was safely put away and ready for me to pick up.

We had dinner in a tapas place near the hotel. Again, very busy and upbeat vibe throughout. The food was good, though there was really too much in each of the small plates to make it workable as tapas. If a restaurant suggests ordering 3 tapas as a serving and we both struggled to finish 2, you know the portion sizing is off.

As we hung out in the room after dinner, we periodically heard music and applause from the events outside. A bunch of guitarists and other players were jamming in the hotel bar. I listened a little bit. Nothing special, but still nice.

Gotta say, having nice weather makes a huge difference. After all of the cold and grey, having some sunshine lifted our mood significantly. As one of our taxi drivers said a couple of days later, Ireland is a nice place when it's sunny, but when it rains in can be pretty miserable.

Second day in Cork

Well since the first day in Cork was kind of a bust at best (when I told my dad we were here, his reaction was, "Oh god."), I thought we could do better today. I went out for a walk early and got a bit more of a sense of the place. It has potential; what I'm not sure it has is enough money to make all the good stuff happen.

There was no rain forecast today, and out we went. In the morning we went to the Cork City Gaol, a state of the art 19th century prison that is quite beautiful architecturally and as old prisons go, didn't seem quite that bad. It was actually a mixed gender prison and the conditions were surprisingly good, except when they threw a bunch of Republican rebels (in the 1920's, not after the debates) in there and jammed as many as they could in a cell. Some of their graffiti is still visible.

Part of the fun of the place was that they had cheesy wax (or something) figures depicting various goings on.

Aside from whipping, the favorite punishment was to put the prisoners on a treadmill to pump water or grind grain.

Looking for something more uplifting, we then went to the St. Anne's Church of Shandon, at the top of a hill near our hotel. We had heard from the owner of the B&B we stayed at in Kilmare that you could actually ring the bells of the church. Sounded good to me, so up the hill we went. Sure enough, you can ring the bells by pulling on cables. I chose that Irish churchbell standard, "Don't Cry For Me Argentina." You can then climb a narrow spiral staircase  up and look at the bells, but you have to wear those kind of headsets that they ground controller wear at airports, because it's pretty deafening when someone down below is playing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow."

No, I don't have a mohawk, that's the frame

Very loud when you're standing next to it

There's a nice view of the city from the top.

From there we went to, what else, the Butter Museum, tracing the rise and fall of the Cork County butter industry. I will say, the butter here is very good.

Ronnie is excited to visit the Butter Museum

I think our favorite touch was the recorded churning noises you hear as you walk up the stairs. It was actually interesting, in an obviously limited sort of way. And we weren't likely to get such an opportunity again.

We then had a nice lunch at a café near the hotel and then rested in the room for a while, and then decided that we would drive down to a nearby seaside town called Kinsale for dinner. Kinsale is known, at least in Kinsale, for being the gourmet capital of Ireland. Honestly, the food's been pretty good here in general. Too much, mostly, but good, Anyway, I called a few places and got one someplace we weren't crazy about, so we went to our first choice, a wine bar called Black Pig, to see if we could squeeze our way in. It was completely full when we got there. All that was available were two stools by a teeny platform on a column, but then we got to move to two chairs with a kind of box table, and eventually to the bar itself. It was a great meal (especially good butter), and the people in the place just couldn't have been nicer to us and to everyone we saw them interact with.

It really is genuinely friendly here. At the pub the night before, I overheard a guy say he was a bookstore manager in Dublin. Later on, I was standing at the bar near him, and struck up conversation. It was really easy and natural. We talked about the book business and he asked my name and it was really quite nice. There's no agenda. People just want to chat.

That was our experience in Kinsale as well, with everyone we talked to. After the meal, I struggled to drive back to Cork, partly because I got lost, and, not coincidentally, because the headlights on our car are awful. The brights were almost as strong as the regular lights on my car at home, so I had no visibility at any point. It was very hard. All the driving is hard, but this was particularly bad being at night.

But we made it back safely. Tomorrow we're off to Kilkenny.

Just a note on what happened between the Ring of Kerry and Cork

I realized I skipped a little bit. We got back from our drive pretty unhappy. I went out for a walk and checked out the restaurant where we were supposed to eat that evening. I asked the woman in charge where we could see an actual Irish music session in town and she suggested a couple of the less touristy pubs. I checked them out and they were both very small but one was having a session that evening.

So after my walk though this very pleasant town, I went back and we got ready for dinner. We're kind of restauranted out at this point, but this place, The Mews, was very nice. Good food and low key atmosphere.

Then we went down the street to Crowley's Bar and watched 4 women, 2 fiddlers, a flutist and banjo/mandolin/fiddler, eventually joined by a guy who was also a fiddler.

Traditional Irish music is not the most varied stuff you'll see, but I find it very soulful and enjoyed it a lot. It made the day end on a better note, so to speak.

Face down in Cork City

We're in Cork. Cork City, I guess they say- the county is quite large. It's an old city that's clearly had lots of ups and downs and seems to be in the middle of one of those up or down periods. Soe hopeful looking signs, but shabby and poor in a lot of others. It does have a big university and some high tech so there's hope, but it's old and beat too, so you can either do something good with it or not. The place appears to be trying, with mixed success, to reinvent itself as a modern city, within the limits of the geography and infrastructure.

The geography is difficult because it's all hills and marshland. The name Cork comes from some Gaelic phrase meaning marsh. And then there are hills. It's Ireland's second-biggest city, with a population of around 120,000, and has that kind of second city inferiority complex that you see everywhere.

It was a trading town, and the largest exporter of butter in the world at one point (not sure how much competition there was for that at the time). It was fiercely nationalist during the original revolution, which earned it the distinction of being burnt to the ground, so most of the medieval aspects of it are gone.

After spending a pleasant hour walking around Kinsale, we got here on yet another grey, dreary day and decided, for lack of any other direction, to walk through the main shopping area. This was part of an urban renewal project, of which there have been many though the years, most recently in the 1990's. As befits those times, it looks like a mall. It was a great fresh food market, called the English Market,

one nice department store and a couple of decent one, but the rest was kind of trashy (GameStop, H&M, etc.). After wandering got depressing we came back to the River Lee Hotel, which is very spiffy and modern. We kind of crashed for a while, after which I went to work out.

The hotel is attached to a spa and to a very busy upscale gym, with a very loud class consisting of someone yelling and everyone else punching things. Outside the room, a spinning instructor was waiting with a pallet of spin bikes. I went into the main gym, which is the kind of urban gym I tend to go out of my way to avoid. Loud, pulsing music, rows of machines, free weights and mats crammed into a corner. It was so loud that I could hear their music over what I had on my headphones. I held on for 25 minutes and then gave up.

We then had dinner in the bar downstairs. It's a pleasant enough bar and the servers were great (our favorite line, the waiter gives Ronnie a bit of her wine to taste and she said, "Oh it's okay, I trust you." And he replied, "Are you sure? I wouldn't."). But the place is infested by fruit flies. They like wine and they like Guinness as well, from the look of things. I've been drinking almost entirely Guinness since we arrive. I know there's a thriving Irish microbrew scene, but I didn't come here for that, and I've made a point of not buying stuff to keep in the fridge, preferring to force myself go to the bar downstairs for a draft if I want something.

I've also tried Beamish Stout, which was recommended by the bartender in Kinsale and the bartender here said he kind of alternates it. It's a bit toastier and less smooth, but good. That was it for the day. Hopefully it'll be more fun tomorrow.

The tipping point

Let's face it, I just screwed up. I was already to skip the Ring of Kerry, with all of its magnificent scenery and hordes of tour bus, but everyone said, "oh, you have to see the Ring of Kerry," and the only day we could do it was today (Tuesday, I think), so we set out to see an abbreviated version of it.

Gotta say, I get why it's a big deal. There just aren't a lot of great mountain/ocean combos to be seen. We left relatively early and went the opposite way of the tours, deciding to do an abbreviated version. Saw some very wonderful things, but the abbreviated version was still too much, considering how much car time we'd had the day before.

Yes, it's quite grand!

On the way back, I figured we might as well take a peek at Killarney, the main tourist stop in the area. I stupidly assumed there had to be some reason everyone went there. More on that later. Getting there was the real adventure.

So rather than go the regular main scenic route along the mountainside, I decided to take the local road down through the valley. For the first 20 km or so, it was really beautiful, and even though it was slow, at least for me the views and the sheep, which were mostly uncontained and wandering on the roadside were worth it.

Unfortunately, we hit a weird kind of tourist jam-up. Suddenly we started seeing more and more people walking along the side of the road. Then a bunch or horse-drawn carts. For the longest time, we couldn't figure out where they were coming from. We were literally in the middle of nothing.

The road was very narrow, though there were occasional turnouts. Sometimes the horsecarts would let us through, sometimes not. It took what was already kind of long and made it seemingly endless. I even bottomed out the car once, with one wheel going off the pavement and making a nasty scraping sound. No obvious damage though (and hooray for $0 deductible!). We finally got past horsecart central (there actually was such a place, not that it was called that) and were able to drive as normally as is possible under the circumstances. That brought us into the snarl that is Killarney.

I'm not just referring to our facial expressions by the time we left, but the traffic. It's so crowded that you could hardly walk and it was trashy touristy stuff for the most part (not that there aren't some nicer shops). Ugh. That put a really bad taste in our mouth, and the hour or so it took us to get back only made it worse.

I'd have to say that was our low point. Too much car time. Too much Killarney. Fortunately, the town where we chose to stay, Kinsale, is a much smaller place and quite nice. So I'll pick it up there next.

Time for a spin in the countryside.

In the back of my mind, I have this little nagging voice that says, "don't ruin the trip to Ireland by spending too much time in the car." These were the couple of days where we kind of overdid it. The first one was necessary if we were going to do our lap; it's not a short distance from Galway to Kenmare, no matter how you dice it. But of course we couldn't just drive there, we had to check out the natural wonders on the way.

And they were, in fact, quite wonderful. I've not found that all so-called wonders are actually so, but that does not apply to either the Burren or the Cliffs of Moher. The Burren is most certainly not to everyone's taste, and to be honest, we experienced only a small part of it, which is conveniently located near a small megalithic tomb.

This is the small version of a megalithic tomb. Random tourist included for scale.

It's these weird "pavements," they call them, of limestone with grooves and ruts and layers and all kinds of shapes, and part of what's cool is that they're all filled with plants. Hundreds of flowers and different kinds of foliage. Really quite remarkable looking. There are lots of things here that make me wish I knew more about geology.

So once we were through the Burren, we headed for the cliffs. Not surprisingly, there was a long, narrow raod headed up toward the cliffs, which we could see was ending in a snarl at the parking lot. Fortunately, I had seen a sign for another car park a bit earlier, so we turned around and went that way.

From either parking lot, the cliffs are a hike. I guess it wouldn't do to let people just park up there. The place where we landed was a mere 800 meters from the cliffs. That doesn't sound that bad, does it? Of course it was all uphill and with what must have been a steady 25mph wind. So it was quite a grind getting up there, and then you had to deal with the windiness on the tops of the cliffs themselves. Fortunately, the direction was onshore, so no danger of being blown over. And really, the spots I took these pictures from had another level about 8-10 feet down, so if I'd fallen I guess I could have hurt my knee or something, but it wasn't dangerous.

It was, however, very hard to stand still and take pictures, but here's what I got.

Not too bad, for a bunch of cliffs. And, of course, since human beings are what they are, what do they need to do when they get to the very top of something?

Of course, build a tower. Why? Really, I mean it. You needed to be 40 feet higher on top of these 400 foot-high cliffs? Was the view that much better?

So back down the 800 meters in the wind and finally we were on our way to Kilmare. On the way, we got stuck in a bad traffic jam around the noted tourist town of Killarney, which should have been a warning to us. Finally got there close to 7. Looks like a nice town.

To be continued.