Here is a highlight reel of the second half of our trip back in August, 2009.
We walked the Western Way on the shore of Lough Corrib.
Betty's dog Sweeney had eight puppies. (This was Summer's favorite part of our vacation.)
We cheered on the homemade rafts at the Pirates of the "Corribean" charity race.
We visited Achill Island, where there is an abandoned village that people used to use for summer cattle grazing before the famine drained County Mayo.
Achill has spectacular sea cliffs. I liked this combo of the cliffs, the sketchy carnival, and the sheep.
There we also saw the umptieth castle supposedly held by pirate queen Grace O'Malley (Granuille). I decided that "Grace O'Malley's castle" is the Irish equivalent of "George Washington slept here."
Now for the best part. A few months before our trip, a guy called Fergal phoned G.G.'s house in Wellesley. She was listed as the next of kin on a 1980's death certificate of an aunt of hers in Appleton, Wisconsin. Fergal, who now lives in London, was tracing the part of his family who'd emigrated from Ireland and the trail led to G.G. He was overwhelmed to have found a real live relative on the other side. We happened to be at G.G.'s when Fergal called, and we told him we'd call him when we came to Ireland. He said he'd fly over to Dublin since his sister lives there anyway.
Well. We're really big jerks. We never told Fergal we were coming until Alissa was pulling up in our driveway to take us to the airport. I sent him an email--"Hi, we're coming... NOW!"--but obviously it was too late for him to fly over. Still, he hooked us up with his brother Brian, who lives next to the old family homestead. We called Brian from Betty's house in Oughterard and asked if we could come take some pictures for G.G. He told us to meet him at Ballintubber Abbey at 6:00. We had no idea what to expect--he could have been 100 years old, or just plain weird. But there at Balintubber Abbey at 6:00 was a 38-year-old guy in a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt with two little girls and a dog. "It's not Jeffrey, is it?" he lilted at us.
(That big black dog is unrelated.)
Brian took two days off of work to show us around. He insisted we stay at the homestead. He cooked us Guinness stew. Not to give you too much information, but I felt myself coming down with a UTI, and Brian bought me gallons (or should I say "litres") of cranberry juice to drink and gave me these weird little chewy cranberry "pastilles" that he got in France when he had a UTI at EuroDisney because apparently they don't sell cranberry juice in France. I have never experienced such overwhelming openness and kindness from a total stranger before. Within hours it seemed we were friends for life. (And my UTI was gone.)
One of the craziest parts of all of this is that Fergal does not speak to Brian. Brian inherited the homestead and Fergal stopped speaking to him. "That's Ireland," quipped Betty when we told her all about it.
Ballintubber Abbey is the most beautiful church I have ever been inside. Of course it does not have the grandeur of a Notre Dame. But the oak ceiling and whitewashed walls are somehow both humble and glorious. It is said to be the oldest continuously used church in Ireland, having been founded in the 1200s by an Irish king and survived the Reformation.
In the Abbey, Brian's two-year-old, Sadhbh (pronounced Sive) sucked her fingers. I crouched down on the slate floor. "Do you know who else sucks her fingers?" I asked. I pointed at Summer. "I do not," Summer said in the voice of a mortified teenager. But a few hours later Summer was tucked in bed with eight-year-old Honoria, sucking her fingers and clutching her blankie while Honoria held her stuffed animal and sucked her thumb. Brian tries to scare Honoria by telling her she'll have "Billy Bob teeth" if she doesn't stop; I felt like Brian's family was our mirror family across the sea.
This is a picture of a gnarly tree growing out of a grave at the abbey. Legend holds that a "priest hunter" named Sean--a bounty hunter who exposed priests during the Reformation--was buried there, and this hideous thing grew out of his grave, so the villagers dug him up and threw him in the swamp.
This is Honoria's school bus on the first day of third grade. I asked Honoria if she knew who her teacher would be. The answer was yes: first, second, and third grade is 21 kids all in one room, so she's quite familiar with the teacher.
We left Ballintubber days later than we'd planned, so much richer for the experience of spending time with a real family in another country, trying to piece together the relations but also just laughing about all the little things that are different, or the same, about our daily lives with kids. Like toys all over the floor, for example.
We finished up our business in Oughterard. Padraig had been sick in bed when we left for Achill Island; he was up having tea when we returned.
Sadly, Padraig passed away shortly after we returned to America. We will always be glad that baby Oscar got to meet his great-great-uncle in Ireland, even though he won't remember it.
Strangely, we have an identical picture of Summer at nearly the same age in the same outfit with great-great-aunt Catherine in Ireland, weeks before SHE died. Is this some kind of deadly nine-month one-piece Osh Kosh outfit? Or do we just have really old Irish relatives.
We recreated an old favorite family picture in a park in Oughterard, a tradition since Summer was 10 months old.
And this time, we treated our whole family to my most favorite activity anywhere on Earth ever: Ireland's School of Falconry at Ashford Castle. We flew Wexford with a new teacher (also named Fiona), but our friends James and Aurelie were still there and we were so happy to see them and all the hawks and owls.
We drove home the other way around the lake and found this crazy old lighthouse.
On our last night we watched our cousins Matthew and Conrad play Gaelic football, which is loads more interesting than soccer and I don't have any idea why we don't play it here.
And that's the end! But for us and Brian, Fiona, Honoria, and Sadhbh, it was only the beginning. Because they came to stay with us for a whole week in October.
They saw the American flag waving outside our front door as a sign of welcome. "Is that a turtle?" they asked when they saw Rainbow in his tank. There are no turtles in Ireland. Imagine being almost 40 and never seeing a turtle!
Honoria went to school with Summer. Brian went to the dump and Sam's Club with Jeff. Fiona fell in love with Orchard House. Everyone enjoyed dinner at Redbones. And I was able to repay Brian's kindness to me when he came down with a cold and I supplied him with all the Dayquil gel tabs he could swallow.
Here are Honoria and Summer going to spook the neighbors with Halloween treats:
And all the kids at the Old North Bridge:
Look at Oscar and Sabhdh. Couldn't they be siblings?
And the reunited long-lost connection: Brian with G.G.
We have always loved visiting our Ireland family. We mourn the passing of lovely, sweet Padraig. We celebrate our "new" cousins. We'll see them back in Ireland in 2011!
