Ireland, Saturday Sep 26, 2009

   We left Philadelphia for Ireland on Friday night to visit my wife Mary’s family home in Donegal, Northwest Ireland. Mary’s first cousin, Ann Baiada rented a cottage in the village of Kilmacrenan about 5 miles north of the Town of Letterkenny (population 12,000). The cottage is big enough to comfortably put up Mary and I as well as the rest of our travel group; Mary’s sister Rose, her sons Sean and Mark and Sean’s 11 year old daughter Brigid.
   Ann is staying for 6 full weeks and graciously invited us to spend a week with her to meet with Irish family and figure out the connections that sometimes seem complicated on the American side.                  
   Kilmacrenan is close to Mary’s mother’s (Brigid) childhood home (Screen) before immigrating to America at age 19 to live the adult part of her long life.
   Our flight was direct to Dublin and was an easy 7 hour ride; we landed at 9AM and rented two cars for the 3 1/2 hour drive to Kilmacrenan. Sean and I both drove and had the chance to brush up on our left side driving skills (driver’s seat on the right while using the left hand to shift the manual 5 speed stick). Mark watched over the GPS in the lead car, with Mary & me following in our Toyota.
   The car rental seemed like a reasonable deal at less than 300 Euros for unlimited mileage for Mary & my 16 day stay, but the fees and mandatory insurance more than doubled the cost. The ride from the airport was pretty straight forward and even the roundabouts didn’t seem as hard to manage as I remembered from the last time I was driving in Scotland.
   We made it to the cottage at around 2:30 after a brief stop for food along the way. We met with Ann when we got in; she had the room assignments figured out from managing her own family’s comings and goings from the US during her long stay. At around 5 we all went to our rooms for naps so we could go out to a local pub later where some cousins were playing on Saturday night. I never have much luck sleeping on planes so when it was time to wake up and go to the pub, I didn’t make it, Mary and the rest of the group walked (about 3 blocks) to the place around 10:15 and had a great time singing with the crowd. Sean and Mark were the last ones home close to 2 am when we tried to figure out how to lock the front door for around 20 minutes before Mary came downstairs and knew the trick on how to do it.
   Ann goes into Kilmacrenan daily to a community center with an internet connection so she can check her mail. It looks like I’ll be downloading posts to my travel blog from there for my first week; the second week will be on the road so later posts may get spotty later depending on connections. I’ll pick up my travel blog where I left off in Norway and try to keep the same format of a few pics and a couple of paragraphs each time I post. It’s now almost 4 am so I’ll try to catch another couple of hours of sleep before morning.

   Regards to all, John