Open Road

Wanna go to Paris?

I'm going. Even tho i probably shouldn't. Not enough money. I'm really busy. I'll miss my dog. And my mom is getting on in years and she may need me to rush over to Long Island for something or other.

So I convinced myself that I better go now. Cause next time I'm desperate to immerse myself in art and beauty and whatever happens when i walk down along the Seine, there won't be any "probably" about it. I won't be able to.

So I'm outta here. Next missive will be from across la mer.* Follow along. 

A bientot!

* the sea

A Gaelic-style Giverny

I know it's got its own claims to fame, but one of the first things I thought wandering into the Strokestown  gardens was that I was walking into a Monet garden: dabbles of pink and violet, splashes of yellow and neon orange, painting a floral sea bobbing swelling and ebbing in the chill gray wind; there's even a pond full of lilypads -- though the flowers weren't in bloom.
 The gardens took 10 years to restore. We heard a lot about the "herbaceous border," which isn't made of mint and tarragon and thyme, but a litany of perennials, covering the full spectrum of colors and listed in the Guinness Book of  Records as the  longest in Britain and Ireland (who knew there was even a special category for these things?).
"You should have been here ..." our guide began, about to tell me when the gardens might really knock your eyes out with color. But I stopped him midway. Even on a cloudy day, the overall impact of the gardens at Strokestown was, well,  Monet-esque.

2 quirky 2 b 4gotten

Before we go on to the garden at Strokestown House Park, let's spend a little more time in the main house. It's just too interesting (and a little weird) to run through in one post... .

  

 

        In the playroom, toys -- creepy dolls and colonial-era board games -- provide a snapshot of the times.

                                                                                                           
It wasn't just wigs the men wore in the old days. To make their facial hair match, they also sported fake sideburns, our guide revealed. The bedroom, where the man of the house kept his 'burns, also was home to  the dog bed, right. (Must have been a big dog.)

 

From feast to famine

You could spend a day at  the Strokestown Park House in Strokestown, where Irish life -- many, many aspects of it -- and history (ditto) come to life. 
To life with its dings and dents, its peeled paint and its inhabitants, who manifested the best and the worst and the all-in-between of the human spirit; people who lived through heydays and others who went through hell.
 The estate in County Roscommon  includes an 18th-century  mansion built by the Mahon family,  who lived there  in grand fashion until  they fell on hard times, and 1979, sold the place to a local garage owner.
Who, while going through the house and making some repairs, discovered a whole trove of documents and papers that he soon realized were an important archive of the Irish "potato famine."  Yes, potato famine in quotes, because through the Famine Museum, which house owner Jim Callery created from those archives, visitors are disabused of some fundamental and widely held misconceptions about that tragedy. 
But first the house -- which Callery bought from the family but in which the last survivor, Olive, lived until her death  in 1982. Five years later, the place was opened to the public, a house museum sans velvet ropes or Do Not Touch signs, with wallpaper curling at the edges and sofas  frayed at the seams. A grand old house going the way of its once-influential family, moldering in an atmosphere thick with detail and drama.

 By the end of the Mahon reign in
Strokestown, Olive was selling off
family treasures including artwork; the empty frame
in the dining room attests eloquently to that time. 

Hawk walk

Thumbs up: the way to orient your hand in its leather glove, so you can 1. hold the tether that keeps your hawk from flying away and 2 later lets your bird return to feast on the snack (reddish raw meat of some sort) in your fisted palm.
Thumbs up: finishing a falconry lesson at Ashford Castle without me losing one of their still-in-training young Harris hawks to the forest canopy.
Seeing these fierce and powerful animals fly is exhilarating -- watching and feeling them launch from your hand, they sort of take part of your heart up with them into the tall forest trees.  When you hold out your fist, indicating snacks within, and they return, whooshing toward you with thick wide wings outstretched, then curving downward for an almost chopper-like drop-landing feeling their airy bodies alight and their sure talons clutch your thumb, you (I, at least) knew, they might have returned, but were keeping part  of your heart forever.

Falconer Aurelie with an owl, an
even more powerful hunter
than the Harris hawk, above left.

 

Let them eat brack

I am ensconced at Ashford Castle, somewhere in the green hills of Eire. Wait, let me exert myself a moment here and pull out a piece of stationery .... That somewhere is Cong, Co. (that's county) Mayo.
There is easy-listening classical music on the wide-screen TV/radio, which is affixed to the wall beside the botanical -n-butterflies prints.  Outside is... well, hang on a minute...
                                  

                                    Here's what's
outside....

... Here's the window
in the bathroom, over
the bathtub.

Since the Travel Writer Olympics continue (I may just win 'cause I'm older and know how to pace myself)  I have to run now -- off to my falconry lesson.

T.T.F.N.

 

What were they thinking?

  Think Stonehenge-meets-Machu Picchu. Thousands of years old, well-positioned rocks, too big for the average Neolith  to haul around by him- or herself, organized into some precise formation that -- it goes without saying -- takes into account the precise moment of the solstice (winter, in this case). That is Newgrange, an unusual, eerie and mindblowiing site of a large mound/burial site (archaeologists think) in County Meath in Ireland -- a place 500 years older than Stonehenge, actually.
 Our guide, a woman tiny enough to wend her way through a tunnel into the main chamber -- a tunnel so narrow  that in some places is so skinny you have to turn sideways and you need to hang your camera bag down low by your knees -- says it's probably a burial place of some sort. But not many bones were found here. Who was buried, how many, why are all mysteries. Then again, no one may have been actually interred here. Possibly it was a site of ritual, and bodies were taken out, and the few bones discovered were random.
Possibly.
A craic (fun) word. But a slightly unsatisfying one. Keeps you coming back. Wondering about those aliens. Or at least what those early earthbound folks were up to.  

I knew this would happen

James Joyce and Bono and Molly Malone. Guinness and Liffey and Michael Collins. Any city with so many names creating ripples of so many stories has got to make your head spin and your tour guide -- if he's a good one, and ours, Will,  seems to be the best -- a Historical Facts Superhero.
A spin of the south part of Dublin, followed by a half-hour near-run through the city's art museum and its original Caravaggio plus a really good collection of Impressionists and Flemish paintings, left me wrung out and wanting more days in Dublin. I fell asleep just a few pages into Joyce's "Dubliners."

Dubliners for just one day

So we gather and walk to Trinity College which has just started its new term and it's actually a sunny, warm and blue-sky day in Dublin and the kids are all making the most of it, gathered on the squares and sitting on the low stone walls with their mates and debating and flirting and, well, maybe mostly flirting. And the gray-ponytailed and thick-bespectacled professors stand in small islands of cigarette smoke and earnest low tones, with their battered briefcases bulging by their sides.
We are here walking through an atmosphere, OK, an aura,  thick with history. Walking in the wake of sparks of great minds, imaginations, creativity. .We are on our way to see the Book of Kells, a venerable religious volume scribed by teenage monks hundreds of years ago. Young men patiently illuminating the words sent down by heaven, artistically elaborated with details of life all around them, in rich thick ink colors (colours, I guess) so dazzling they might have been created by otherworldly entities (ie, angels) to effectively convey spiritual meaning to the masses, in general illiterate at the time.
And if the Book of Kells (divided into four books, for conservation purposes, in the 1950s) weren't enough to tingle your spirit back to life, the next stop on the tour certainly would: the long room, a two-tiered, barrel-ceilinged very long room containing 200,000 of the oldest of Trinity's some 4.5 million books. I wish I could show it to you. I wish i could convey the scent, the ponderous aroma of long-undisturbed leather, of pressed vellum and book dust warmed by the air of scholars, of creaky floorboards and echoing footsteps.
No photos, though. No images, but the ones left imprinted on the visitor's mind.
Thus began our mad only-day in Dublin.

Euro-vision

Europe. European. Euro-style. You're in a new aesthetic, a way of living, a way of relating to the world.  I'm in Ireland. In Dublin, specifically. But abroad, more universally. Across the Pond and on the continent (well, almost).
Your eyes have to shift to a new vantage point, a new reference -- of really old. Like "A.D." is actually a useful detail where time is concerned. Historical events on this soil changed boundaries. Religions. Cultures.
I'd almost forgotten how much I love walking on a bustling, gray-day street, exploring a musty museum, working out the meanings of signs and posters with slightly different methods of delivering their methods.
I'd forgotten the part of me that wakes up again with exhilaration, Euro-style.