Our Fourth of July tradition involves going to Dreamland, which we visited in Montgomery this evening, enjoying some ribs and pudding and then settling in for an evening of fireworks.
Of course it has rained all day, canceling the fireworks. It has also been the coolest Fourth in memory, which has prompted many remarks, but no complaints. The Yankee wore a sweater for a few pictures today.
Anyway, below is a running collage of wonderful summer memories, reading left to right, top to bottom:
Happy Fourth of July. Hope yours is as good as mine.
Room service for breakfast, and then the last packing of our things, this time for airline inconvenience. Funny how that little detail means everything must change.
We settled up at the hotel — Adam and Jessica had their flowers preserved from their engagement, the local photographer he hired had already produced a DVD with all of their photographs, so they came home with everything. People here are so incredibly accommodating — and went down the hill into Enniskerry for lunch.
We finally settled on eating at the same little pub were we dined before starting our trek across the country. And as a last meal here I had the fish and chips. And it was the best fish I’ve had in all of our adventures in London and Ireland. So light and crispy:
So we ventured on out to the airport, dropped off our trusty rental car at the lot far removed from any airport activity. They shuttled us over to the terminal, which looks a lot different than I remember from the other day. Because we are in a different place.
We’re standing in line and a lady comes up and asks us if we’d like to catch a later flight. They incentivize that, you know. We bantered some numbers, checked our mental calendars and finally got to a deal that everyone liked. We were demoted to standby. And we might make this flight, or we might be taking a different plane tomorrow.
There was a long period of “will we or won’t we?” Adam and Jessica left because they had a tighter schedule than we did.
We did not make the flight The airline put us up in a business traveler’s hotel, shuttled us there and comped us some hotel meals. The hotel was fine for what it was, high ceilings, weird lights, post modern design. The food was reasonable. There was nothing around except light industry, so we stayed in the room all evening, watched television and calculated our Delta dollars.
So we have one last day in Ireland. In a hotel that offers not much to do. There are worse ways to make travel money.
You order the full Irish breakfast, you get the full Irish breakfast. Throw in some museli and then proclaim this the best bed and breakfast ever. And maybe it is. Irish sausage, also, is better than anything we have at home.
You see a lot of old stone buildings just sitting roadside here. Some of them are important, some are just old structures. Most of them don’t even have signs or notations on a map. They just are. That’s how old the place is, a few hundred years is nothing, and it could just be the place an old angry person lived for all you know.
Today we visited the Rock of Cashel. This was where the kings of Munster ruled for 600 years, from the 4th century to 1101, when it was given to the church. This is the view as you drive up:
Inside you see St. Patrick’s Cross, built in the 12th century in the Latin style. One side has a carving meant to depict the crucifixion, the other side has an abbot, possibly St. Patrick himself. The base of the cross is hollow and is believed to have been a storage and hiding place for valuables:
Here are a few of the artifacts they’ve discovered at the Rock, and dated back to the 12th century:
There is a cemetery at the Rock, still active. The local authorities tried to close it in the early 20th century, but the community decided to have a lottery and that allowed for a few more spaces for the residents and their children. Our tour guide said there are four or five people of that generation still living.
If you look off in the distance behind her you might just notice a chunk of rock missing from the mountain on the right. Local lore is that the devil was flying over Ireland, took a bite out of that mountain and dropped it here, forming the rock upon which the church sits.
This is the north transept, and, in the top left corner, the round tower. The north transept contains late medieval tombs and grave slabs.
Here’s The Yankee outside the north transept, with that round tower in the background:
A wider shot, looking from the west. There is scaffolding covering the east side as they slowly work to renovate the structure.
We heard cows mooing in the pastures down below us:
The weather changed from cold to windy to raining to sunny to warm all while we were at the Rock. Crazy weather.
See those holes in the walls? That’s how they built the building. They’d get to a certain level and then put a large piece of wood there and build around it. Then they’d cut the wood out and remove their middle aged scaffolding.
This is inside Cormac’s Chapel, a small Romanesque church that was was consecrated in 1134 and named for King Cormac. This is looking at the archway just in front of the altar:
The frescoes in Cormac’s Chapel, such as they are, are the oldest Romanesque wall paintings in Ireland. The earliest are dated to around the church’s building, so circa 1134, and have a simple masonry pattern. The later paintings, thought to date back to between 1160-70, are narrative scenes, including the Nativity. Scholars believe outside artists, perhaps from England or France, were brought in for the work. They were covered with whitewash during the 16th century Reformation and remained hidden until the 1980s. The lime used in the whitewash wiped out the rest.
That red patina comes from only one place in the world: Afghanistan. The church was spending some money to get the ingredients shipped all the way to Ireland.
This is standing under the altar’s archway and looking back into the church. It is a small facility, thought to have been used by Benedictine monks:
Looking into the altar itself, you can’t quite make out the apse vault. But you can see more of those heads carved into the arch. The thought is that they were used to ward off evil spirits from invading the altar.
The interior and exterior views of that transept:
I like to get artsy with doorways sometimes:
Two of the markers in the cemetery:
This is a view from the east side. I’ve cropped out all of the aluminium scaffolding, which is off the left margin. The Rock of Cashel is on a rocky plateau that rises 300 feet above the surrounding plain known as the Golden Vale of Tipperary.
Just off the plateau you can see the Hore Abbey, a Cistercian monastery. This dates back to the mid-13th century:
Changing it up a bit here. I took a lot of shots in the car as we drove around today. Here are two of them. After that, you’ll see a little video montage of the rest of more.
We had dinner at Foley’s Restaurant. The live music in the video above is from the performers we heard tonight. If you’re interested in our route today, it looked something like this:
It took me a long time to come around to the idea that the anchors were still on the air as they completely lost their composure over what has to be the dumbest interview they’ve done in a while.
And then we watched the first episode of this guy’s show the other night. Surely, I thought to myself, there are more interesting Olympians. Smarter Olympians. But the existence of this show suggests otherwise.
It is a good thing, I’ve told people who brought this show up, that he swims really fast.
We had dinner with a large group of people here:
It is one of those places where the door handle is an elaborate set of antlers. Same with the lighting, which is full of antler-pronged ornamentation. The food is all local. The tables and the bar are all hewn from felled local timber and … oh the bountiful quantities of bacon on the menu.
I had the turkey avocado sandwich with bacon and a Caesar salad. Somehow there was no bacon on the salad, but that’s about the only exception on the menu. They do a bacon-drizzled popcorn, which is better than you’d imagine.
The Hound is pretty intense like that. They are casual in their intensity. Or is it intense in their casualness? Who can say. Look at that menu.
I sent a picture of the menu to a friend, an aficionado of bacon. He said “You had me at Big Fat Steak.”
The flames were fueled by raw gasoline, which was stored on the partially emptied barges as they were docked for cleaning at Oil Recovery Co. of Alabama’s Marine Gas Free Facility.
Three people were cleaning the ship when a fire apparently broke out, catching the gasoline and causing the explosions.
They were transported to USAMC Wednesday night, where they remain in critical condition as of 9:15 a.m., according to USAMC spokesman Bob Lowery.
They were the only people on the barges at the time of the explosions, according to Lt. Mike Clausen of the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Triumph, that now infamous hard-luck Carnival vessel? It is taking on repairs just across the water:
“It literally sounded like bombs going off around. The sky just lit up in orange and red,” he said, “We could smell something in the air, we didn’t know if it was gas or smoke.” Waugh said he could feel the heat from the explosion and when he came back inside, his partner noticed he had what appeared to be black soot on his face.
A Franklin County woman was arrested after police said her 2-year-old grandson tested positive for cocaine …
Deanna Leigh Fretwell, 38, is charged with chemical endangerment of a child. She was arrested after Russellville police said they received a tip from the Department of Human Resources, the report said.
The most recent Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) statistics of the number of households receiving food stamps shows that 23,087,886 households participated in January 2013 – an increase of 889,154 families from January 2012 when the number of households totaled 22,188,732.
The most recent statistics from the United States Census Bureau– from December 2012– puts the number of households in the United States at 115,310,000. If you divide 115,310,000 by 23,087,866, that equals one out of every five households now receiving food stamps.
So this isn’t a recovery so much as a series of selectively moving around numbers.
At times like these we must ask ourselves: What would Ryan Lochte do?
We have half the grapes that we started the day with. And one less navel orange. Also, the leftover spaghetti from last night disappeared. And then I was full for about an hour. But white grapes only last so long and I had to talk myself out of an extra lunch. Miles on the bike speed up the metabolism, or so I tell myself, and I want to eat everything.
Strange since my energy was all over the place yesterday. I chased The Yankee around town, counting my second, third and fourth wind. These things should be more predictable, but yesterday I was left amazed at how I couldn’t find my legs to get over this hill, but soft-pedaled over the next one, with my legs feeling bored with it all. The body is an amazing thing, and a body on a bicycle is a curious miracle, all balance and whirring and swaying and moving forward. I’m not a good cyclist. Usually I do well just to stay upright. Balance and whirring and all that. At my best moments I’m either trying to make nice little circles with my feet or, if I’ve given up on that, I just try to make it all look casual. That’s also impossible.
But, 30 more miles yesterday, and I really need to start putting more miles back in. We got home just as the wind picked up. She’d forecast the afternoon perfectly. Meteorologists call her for input, or they should.
And now back to work today, the cold week of spring break is over, replaced by a cold regular week.
In class today we talked about films, which means a lot of clips of special effects. One of the students found a five minute EXPLOSIONGANZA of CGI that just melted everyone’s brains. Oh, for a few scenes of expository. Or even a Stallone quote.
When they talk about film they also talk about awards, which everyone loves except me, apparently. I’m fine with it. I did enjoy the Oscars poster someone showed off. It had the statue in the foreground surrounded by floating lines from memorable award winners. I saw this famous line and thought about adding in some running commentary — we’d recently talked about civil rights, the 50th anniversary of various events in Birmingham and across the south, how critical a time that was and how there is such a great museum just over the mountain — so bringing up In the Heat of the Night would have been perfect.
I decided against it. I’m not sure kids born in the 1990s would understand 1960s Mississippi and why all of this was so important. Even the television show was off the air by the time my oldest student was born. Sidney Poitier, though, he just gives you more every time you watch that quiet moment.
Everyone always remembers this, perhaps a cinematic first:
They filmed most of In the Heat of the Night in Illinois because of conditions in Mississippi. The country’s come a long way in those two generations.
I call that Tumblr page “Extra stuff in an extra place.” That is, perhaps, the most apt thing I’ve ever written.
And, finally, I’ve watched this twice now. It will be the best five minutes of your day on the web.
If you’ve never read the Wikipedia entry on Ode to Joy, you should.
Back to work for me, have a lovely evening you. See you tomorrow, when there will be more on Tumblr, more here, always more on Twitter, another Glomerata and who knows what else we can find.
