Ireland

After three trips to the Emerald Isle, we felt that we had absorbed much and had stories to tell for years. Like touring the area around Dingle Town in a gale force storm with Rick Steves who we had just met in a pub the night before. Hanging with the local musicians as they played in a different pub every night until we got fish and chips together with them on our last night. They sent us a cassette a few years later when they actually had a recording (as I had urged them to do). And years later, when we walked back into the same pub, they were playing and casually said “How long has it been?” like it was last week. Walking full speed into a pole in Dublin won me a trip to the hospital where they stitched up my forehead for free. The surgeon wanted to emigrate to the US because that is where they had all the best gunshot wounds. But the next day the innkeeper at the Aran Islands greeted us with a very suspicious, “What happend to you?” as I clearly looked like trouble.

The smell of burning peat, fresh salmon every day, the whiskey and Guinness at the sessions and the lovely people who really did want to chat with you all day are the best memories. The flat tire in the rain, the rain and more rain were not, but they were real and gave us marvelous skies.

These photos are all 35mm slides that were transferred to digital format 20 years ago and revisited and re-edited for this page. Our last trip was in the early 1990’s, but looking at these again with fresh eyes makes me want to drive on the wrong side of the road for another 800 miles or so.