Onward To Tralee

After a slow start on Saturday, following our busy Friday on the Aran Isles, we moved on south from Salthill in County Galway to Tralee in County Kerry.

We should note that we got an email from a Jem Casey who has a very interesting web site of her photography and journal at the web site:

http://aran-isles.com/

You'll see a lot more information on the Aran Isles there. 

In addition, there are topical issues such as the struggle the Corrib area in northern County Mayo has had with the "Shell Oil" juggernaut. The locals have been fighting the piping in of offshore natural gas by the Shell Oil Company where the gas will be processed in their community instead of off shore as it has always been done at other sites in the past for a safer and more environmentally stable approach.  

There is an article on "Maura Harrington" who is on the fifth day of a hunger strike in opposition to Shell Oil. Earlier in the week, we were reading in the newspaper about one of the few ships in the Irish Navy attempting to keep out a fisherman who has fishing rights to the waters off of Corrib.

We hope you will consider "boycotting" Shell Oil back in the USA like we've been doing since we first learned about the situation last year. ("Boycotting" is another lovely Irish tradition that you can now easily take part in.)

More information about the efforts of the Corrib residents can be found at the web site:

http://www.corribsos.com/

Also on the web site is information on other islands in Ireland. Even quicker, if you google "Dursey Island, Ireland," you'll get to a tiny island in southwest Ireland that is reached by cable car and has a population of six. Holiday accommodations are being created by the residents if you'd like to vacation on a tiny island in the Atlantic.

But now we're off to County Kerry for our third week's holiday. It was a long drive and took us past the city of Limerick, but that's about all we saw of the city in the photo below since the bypass takes us on just the outskirts of Limerick and avoids a long trip through the city centre.

We made our usual, half-way rest stop in our Cousin Maripat's favorite town of Adare.

They've kept the town looking beautifully "ancient" with many thatched houses and shops and a lovely park with massive trees in the center of town.

We got to our hotel in Tralee in good time and even had time to grab another 4-Star Pizza before checking in. (Can you tell we found the 4-Star Pizza web site on the internet and "mapped" their locations throughout Ireland?)

We also had time to look for a couple of churches for a Saturday Mass, but only got lost a couple of times in the town centre. Fortunately, Brian at the front desk of our hotel only had to point out the front doors of the hotel to where a 7:00 P.M. Mass would be held at Immaculate Conception Church just a couple of blocks away.

It's another well-maintained, old church. And we were reminded again that you should try to get to Mass a little early because the place fills up fast, and we got to sit in the front pew because we weren't early enough. You wouldn't think the place would have been so full since many people are heading to Lourdes for the 150th anniversary of the visitation of the Virgin Mary there. As we were getting dressed for breakfast this morning, there was a live program on the TV showing the pope's visit to Lourdes.

We toured Tralee today and found Tralee's famous rose garden that is the focal point of Tralee's summer festival that picks "The Rose of Tralee" (rose queen). They have garden bed after garden bed of roses, but they were "quite far along" as you can see in the photo below.

We didn't hear how the roses held up for the "Rose of Tralee Festival" at the end of August, but with the rainiest summer on record, the roses must have taken a beating, we'd guess.

Here and there we found a happy, healthy rose like the one below.

That extensive summer rain seemed to help the giant, rhubarb-looking "Gunera" plant to grow larger than we'd ever seen it.

And there were other types of flowers that appeared to be late-summer, early-fall types that were doing just fine.

And we are still amazed by the heavy planting of fushia as hedgerow shrubbery along the side of many roads. The plant we raise as an annual in hanging pots is a hardy shrub in this mild, moist climate of Ireland.

And, in closing, we would like to point out one of the challenges we face here in Ireland. Not only did we have to figure out that our "first floor" in buildings is called the "ground floor" over here, but we had to have faith enough that pushing the "0" on the elevator button would take us down to only the ground floor and not into some twilight zone.

Now we are faced with an even greater challenge in having the faith that pressing the "-1" would take us down to a lower level/basement parking area and not to some unknown area beneath the earth's surface.

[ We hope you will continue to wish us well as we travel---facing one challenge after another ;-). ]