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adventures / Ireland / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
6
Apr 26

Flowers and Easter

There’s a certain sequence to spring. Sequences, perhaps. There’s the macro and the micro. And now we can look at some of the smaller parts of it. Different things burst into life at different times. And we dutifully trudge out to see them all, pretending that we understand how we can improve something that is so vibrant unto itself.

You may know, I often do not.

In the backyard we have this taller-than-a-shrub, shorter-than-a-tree exhibition. It looks great when you step back and view the whole, but it’s rather chaotic up close.

Across the yard is this guy, which is one of my favorites. I like the delicacy of the florets. They’ll soon be everywhere and get into everything, but that’s the price you pay. That, and being barely able to photograph them.

And then these beautiful specimens, which never appear with quite the right tone on the screen. Any screen. But they bloom and persist. Long-term show offs.

We went to my godparents in-law (just go with it) for Easter. It rained. The kids in their family did an Easter egg hunt in the basement. They broke them down by age groups, so the hunts went on for some time.

They put out the plastic eggs, and each kid is looking for a specific color egg. Each egg has some change or a few bucks in it. And someone creates a map recording where all of the eggs are hidden. For recall and recovery, I suppose.

I stayed out of the way, watching other kids playing hide-and-seek, wondering if they hid eggs in different places for each age group, or recycled the hiding spots. Probably they should.

A 5-year-old and a 6-year-old spent the afternoon hiding from one another. The boy would count, and the girl would hide. He couldn’t find her, so she talked him in. “When you hear the sound of my voice, that’s me.” Eventually, he’d track her down by ear. And then the girl would count and the boy would hide. I was telling her where to look for him. They’re adorable.

They did not share with me their Easter money.

Got a lovely lunch and wonderful company out of the deal, though.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

This is Old St. Dympna’s Church.

adventures / cycling / Ireland / memories / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
31
Mar 26

Some days you get a lot of little in

In Rituals and Traditions we had a group work day today. At the end of the semester the groups will be delivering big presentations and I’m trying to give them some built-in time to work on their projects. They are presenting ideas to the university’s athletic department. Rituals, traditions, game day atmosphere, and so on. Today I overheard of the few ideas that are percolating. Some of them are going to shape up nicely.

In Criticism, we talked about two basketball stories that the class selected. First, we had this one, which gave us a nice modern and historical parallel.

It’s been 75 years since college basketball’s first major gambling scandal. Not all that much has changed:

Odds are, there won’t be any ads about it over the next three weeks of the NCAA Tournament, but college basketball is celebrating an anniversary this year.

It was 75 years ago that the New York district attorney announced the arrests of 32 college basketball players as part of a sweeping sting operation into point-shaving that eventually included 86 games, 17 states and $72,000 in bribes – more than $900,000 in today’s money.

[…]

Time is, in fact, a flat circle.

Three-quarters of a century later, coaches remain aggrieved that their players are equal parts coddled and entitled, and the sport is in the throes of yet another point-shaving scandal. Twenty people are alleged to have hatched a game-fixing scheme that affected 17 teams, 29 games and at least 39 players.

When these stories come up I realize I need to learn more about gambling. “Gambling: bad” only gets you so far. Also, the thing that seems obvious to me is less an issue for others. But we talked about framing and the like, which led nicely into this next story they selected.

Maryland coach Brenda Frese went viral for yelling at Oluchi Okananwa. There’s more to the story. The “more” was a delightful conversation of the function and structure of clickbait, and also curated writing.

Just yesterday we had our first outdoor ride of the season. We made it off campus in good order today and that allowed us another nice treat, an after-work ride. The days are getting longer; it’s about time.

So we pedaled by the winery, where we will soon return to eat pizza. We cruised through the pastures, where I see my horsey friends, and then turned left to go down the asphalt shoot which is some of the best roadwork around here. We went up to the park, passing empty sheep pastures, and hooked a lovely left uphill into the backside of town. We took the biggest hill around, huffing and puffing in the still-warm sun, and turned onto the road that I rode so incredibly well one time that I turned it into three Strava segments — I have never ridden it well again. Then we breezed by haunted house, down the hill, up the other side, and home.

It was a lovely, windy, 12-mile stretch of the legs.

This is Dumhach Bheag.

adventures / Ireland / Monday / photo — Comments Off
23
Mar 26

We made it back

We are back in the United States. What you’ve missed since last I wrote. I drove us the 180 or so miles from Malin Head, the northernmost point in Ireland, back to Dublin, which is situated in the southwestern part of the country. Our GPS sent us through Northern Ireland, which was fine but for the detour, the rush hour gridlock and the slower speed zones. When we finally got back into the countryside the roads opened up, and so did the speed limits. Somehow I kept losing time to the GPS, and I’m still not sure how that was happening, but there I was, driving that rental like I stole it, in the dark, in a car I don’t know all that well, on roads I knew not at all, and driving on the left. I drove that car hard because we had a deadline for returning the car.

We just made it to the airport hotel in time, but had difficulty getting there and getting in. We dumped the luggage and then had to get the car to the airport. The Irishman talking about American politics in the elevator thought I was getting agitated with him, but I was twitchy because of the clock. And if the parking lot in the hotel was tough, the drop off at the airport was worse. We were 15 minutes late. It was nothing.

We took an Uber back to hotel, had dinner at the closing restaurant off the lobby and then went upstairs for the evening. I had the sleep that didn’t feel like it, and then it was a shuttle to the airport. The Dublin airport is large, but the process works efficiently there — which is more than you can say in some American airports at the moment.

A funny thing happened at the airport, though. Just as I passed through security I tore a great big hole in my jeans. Just moments before I had submitted all of my clothes in my checked bag. So now I have two planes, three airports and the best part of a full day in three different countries trying to not cause a scene, shall we say.

We flew into the Amsterdam airport, which is the size of a medium city. Some 71 million passengers go through Schiphol a year. They say 67,000 people work there. Almost 500 alone work on snow clearing in the wintertime. We dined in an underwhelming, but crowded, lounge. We walked and shuttled several miles to our next plane and flew back to New York. And there’s nothing that just moans “Welcome to the USA” like the JFK airport. And nothing says “Get out of here!” like the inherent structural inability to physically get out of there. This was complicated by our pickup driver’s complete inability to find us. So we walked to two or three different spots, dodging the cars and the rain and the hundreds or thousands of people also desperate to be there no longer. Finally we linked up with the old man, who was kind and courtesy and apologetic and praising God for every little thing, and driving like he was intent on meeting him that night. Getting out of that car, at my in-laws an hour later was a great relief that is difficult to describe.

Look who was excited to see us.

We have a little bed at my in-laws, and the kitties were intent on dominating it. And here they are, doing the same thing, freaking me out.

We drove home today. Classes tomorrow. Back to the grind, making up time and picking up speed in the back half of the semester. It’ll be a hugely busy two-plus months.

Despite having published 178 photos and a handful of video montages from the trip there’s still a lot to show off. So I’ll be doing that here for the next however long. I’ll put them at the end of the posts, with the Wild Atlantic Way logo. It’ll be a lot of fun. Here’s a panorama, the ninth one I shot. This is from Malin Head, where we looked north of Ireland. If you could somehow see just 700 miles into the distance you could look into the Arctic Circle.

But if you can’t do that, just click to open the image in another browser window. And keep coming back for more of the scenic videos.

adventures / Ireland / maps / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
21
Mar 26

Northernmost Ireland

This is still at Malin Head, and this was our last visit before pointing south, to Dublin. There’s a place tomorrow morning with our name on it … well, two seats … metaphorically speaking. Unless Delta has started seat embroidery in these last few days. Anyway, that’s tomorrow. There’s a long drive this evening, but, first, this.

When you come to Malin Head you go to Hells Hole about 450 meters in one direction, and to this spot some 215 meters the other way. And, up here, you are at the northernmost point of Ireland. If you could see about 109 miles into the sea you’d see an island off the west coast of Scotland. If you could see another 700 miles beyond that, it’s the Arctic Circle.

And that’s our trip. It’s been an incredible one.

If you want to reproduce it, and obviously you should, the route looks roughly something like this.

Slán go fóill.

adventures / Ireland / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
21
Mar 26

Malin Head

This was our last stop before heading back to Dublin. And so, of course, I’m going to turn this into two posts. And, of course, I’ll stretch this trip out into the days or weeks ahead with extra material. When you allow a place as beautiful as this into your thoughts, your thoughts never leave the place. People probably say that more eloquently. You go home and always return to your dreams. You always come back to the place you never leave.

Or something.

We’ve come to Malin Head for our last stop. It was a great choice.

The waters here are treacherous. It’s a graveyard for shipping, U-boats prowled these waters, there are mermaids — at least legends about them — and giant, beautiful, basking sharks. It was here that people lit bonfires as one last farewell to people sailing for North America. And here the Titanic exchanged signals with the wireless station during sea trials in 1912. Both of them wonders of their time. (Marconi sent the first ever wireless communication over the open sea just 15 years earlier.)

Imagine sailing by here, seeing this.

Photos, of course, can’t do something such as this justice. Here’s a two-minute video that also doesn’t do it justice.

Beauty comes in a lot of forms, of course, and there’s no sense in arguing subjectivity, but if I could build a back porch anywhere I wanted, this is on the short list for a place to put two comfortable chairs.

We stood there for more than hour, and then we dragged ourselves away.

I spent my time there trying to catch the best crashing waves, watching her watch the waves, and inching a little bit closer, to see more of the dramatic action.

My lovely bride planned another great trip, and it’s a shame it has to come to an end.

The places you love you never leave; they never leave you.