Bon Voy-eggie!*

Hello, and welcome to The Right People Travel.  Noel Coward fans may get the reference to his arch number, "Why Do The Wrong People Travel (When the Right People Stay at Home)?" from the musical Sail Away (1961).  The fabulous Elaine Stritch ("Stritchie" to Coward) performed this originally, and did a great version in her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, and you should listen to it here.  If I can ever find the lyrics online, I'll post them.

Now this song is pretty dated (Rolleiflexes and suntan oil?  And who is Yvonne di Carlo anyway?), and frankly I don't entirely see what is wrong with having a dry martini on the isles of Greece, although I suppose Coward does have a point.  But I like to think that if Noel and Stritchie hung out with us Laskins, they might change their tune.

A few years ago, I thought that if I made some notes about the highlights of our family adventures, that would help with those endless phone conversations with the grandparents after we returned, in which we tried to recount each and every funny story, only to never quite capture the essence of the vacation.  Because of course, every trip has a theme, you just have to be patient and it will emerge.  But if you don't write it down, it gets lost and all those funny stories become transparent threads in your family tapestry.

I was also inspired by the travel journals of my husband's uncle, Thomas B. Lemann, of New Orleans, who is a world-class travel journaler.  My scribblings cannot hope to compare to his in the erudition department, although I do believe that you will find most of the words I use in a dictionary.  And of course, Uncle Thomas does not have small fry to influence his ramblings.  While I believe he shares my interest in a good meal, for example, I expect that his journals do not feature, say, as many hot dogs consumed by eight-year-olds, as mine do.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these reports on our travels from recent years.  Read up from the bottom if you want the full chronological experience from MV 2009 on.

*Did you get the Bugs Bunny reference here?

MV 2013 - Happily the Same Old Same Old

8/17

Those inspirational-poster-with-pictures-of-mountains types who say that it is not about the destination it is about the journey probably took the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard.  Because in this particular case, for this particular trip, it is totally about the journey.  The ferry may be the high point of a MV vacation for me.  It is all ahead, everything is possible, the weather is usually brilliant, and you spend the whole time gazing on to the island and thinking about places and things you might do and seeing what is different as you drift into Vineyard Haven.  You might also imagine how lovely it would feel if you lived here and had to use the ferry regularly and always had that delicious feeling of coming home and leaving all the yucky stuff behind. 

I should note that the Governor, while seaworthy, has seen better days, and her engine sounded distinctly laboring and there was  a brief moment when I wondered what exactly we would do if the engines failed.  Isn’t that always the beginning of the end in tales of nautical disaster?  The engines fail, and your vessel is left to drift on the swells, taking on water, and eventually slapped by a rogue wave or runs aground or is dashed on some terrible rocks, with attendant loss of life.  Not that any of that would likely have happened had the Governor lost her power yesterday, since the day was fair, the sea had only a light chop and there were about a million other boats buzzing around the Sound.  But you know, it added a frisson of terror to the trip which was just a little exciting. 

No armed Coast Guard escort yesterday although Bill did see sniffer dogs going around all the cars in the staging area.  Yes, the POTUSes are in town, although we think they may leave this weekend.

We’ve upgraded our standard lunch-after-arrival to the Net Result in Vineyard Haven, where you can get a grilled swordfish sandwich, or a lobster roll, or fried fish, or, if you are Isabel, a hot dog.  This is a considerable improvement over the Black Dog outpost on State Road. 

This year’s house is new, because the one we had the past two visits, which we loved, was, shockingly ALREADY BOOKED when we started planning.  So we approached with some trepidation, quickly erased.  It’s another very nice house way way way up Longview, in a little holler in the woods.  Other than the inexplicable absences of a teapot (and even a tea kettle!) and a lobster pot, the kitchen is well-stocked.  The furniture is comfortable and it was all clearly re-done very recently.  I don’t think it will permanently replace ROSES, but it is a worthy substitute. 

Although apparently it is a house for giants.  The wineglasses are on shelves about eight feet high, and the bathroom mirrors are set so high that I can barely see my eyes in them, and that’s only if I stand up really straight.  Bill thinks they work fine.

We were not particularly impressed with our rental agency, Tea Lane Associates, or our agent, Bob Righter, during the rental process.  But Bob redeemed himself rather spectacularly by adding a full pound of Chilmark Chocolates to the stack of info from the realtor.

In a Vineyard first, I did NOT do the initial stock-up run to Cronig’s, leaving that to the boys. 

We took our Scottish Bakehouse takeout dinner down to Lambert’s Cove beach where the sunset was not promising to be anything special and then turned into the most spectacular pink and lavender and magenta sky ever.  EVER.  Looking back from the path to the car, it seemed as if the Cove was on fire.  Too bad Bill didn’t really get it.

I had a little moment on Lambert’s Cove beach.  On past visits to the Island, I’d always wanted to tell my dad all about it, because I thought he would really like it here, so I tried to tell him all the details and now he will never come here and see it which makes me sad. 

One particularly nice thing about this house is the big deck off of the master bedroom.  You are up in the trees, and it is very pleasant to sit here in the early morning and listen to them all tweeting away, including some rooster nearby who is determined to make sure that we all know it is now morning.  Last night I heard a foghorn. 

I’ll finish with the book report.  Bill has started Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, at my recommendation (you can read my review here:  http://crimepayslisa.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-ministry-of-fear_22.html).  Isabel is thoroughly enjoying getting to know that cheery family of kiddie lit, the Moffats.  But she likes to mispronounce their name, so she is reading, according to her, The Moe-fat Museum.  Peter has a massive stack with him, not sure what he’s started but he may have been distracted by The Jaws Chronicle, an insider look at the filming of that Vineyard classic.  I’m finishing up Marilyn McGrath’s The Long Exile which is about the forced removal of Inuit from their southern Hudson Bay home to Ellesmere Island, in the 1950s.  It is beautifully written, although a bit tiresome at times, and pretty damn depressing. 

8/18

If you try to make Peter Laskin put on sunscreen he will get very mad at you and tell you that you are NO FUN.  To which his father might respond, that’s right, we are no fun, we are fun-free.  In fact, this is the fun-free fake-cation, so get used to it.

Lambert’s Cove beach today was made more perfect by news that our fantasy football team got first pick in the draft, which means we get Aaron Rodgers.  Go Packers. 

We visited the Ag Fair this afternoon, which everyone here on the Island loves but is kind of small potatoes compared to the Sandwich Fair.  Still, they have the requisite carny rides and games (Peter did his best not to smile while accompanying Isabel on the Swinging Chairs, but ultimately failed), quilt and baking and art and fruit and veg competitions (green mint jelly, pffft), racing pigs, draft horses, and so on.  And, they’ve been doing this for 152 years, which is not bad, and they always have a nice poster and good food.  In our opinion, the highlights this year were:

- Finding Ting at the Jamaican food truck.

- A scale model of the Saturn V rocket, which they were going to launch during the fair but apparently were not permitted by the FAA because MV is a no-fly zone during the Obama’s visit and all flights over 800 feet have to be cleared in advance.  Damn it.

- We missed the oyster shucking contest, which is always pretty fun. 

- The now-famous sow from Nip-‘n’-Tuck Farm with her ten TEN piglets, born last Thursday (yes, that is three days ago).  They looked like cartoon pigs – little pink noses and curly tails.

- The women’s skillet toss.  This is what it sounds like:  women compete to see who can throw a no. 8 steel skillet (about three lbs.) the farthest.  There are age groups.  The oldest competitor, Eileen Baxter, was 95 YEARS OLD.  She tossed it a respectable nine feet, six inches and of course received a huge cheer from the crowd.  The winner in her age group (65+) threw for 31 feet.  But the real excitement is in the younger groups:  we saw the winner of the 46-64 group throw 38 feet, and Bill saw someone in the 35-45 group throw for 50!  There are a lot of locals in this competition, although off-Islanders do well too.  You clearly have to practice.  It is immediately apparently that while you might think a running start would help, it is too complicated to get the momentum of your legs and your arm and the skillet all going in the same direction at the same time.  Height helps, but it is really all about the windup. 

8/19

Man, if you miss a day of this, you really start to lose control of your recollections.  I think this was Monday, and I think we went to the Wavy Beach a.k.a. Long Point.  I do know that this is where Izzy found her wave-jumping groove.  The waves were not too big today, and guided by her adored big bro she was soon leaping and diving like a fish.  Peter, being extremely conscientious, would yell IZZY every time he popped up from a wave, to make sure she’d come up too.  He trained her so well that now she yells IZZY every time she bobs to the surface. 

I should note that I have finished The Long Exile (it ends well for the Inuit, but is a hard-fought battle to get there), and have started and been racing through Eye of the Needle, the Ken Follett classic spy thriller about a crack German spy who might just scuttle D-Day.  Tons o’ fun.

It got a little overcast and windy so we piled sandily back in the car and headed down to the bustling scene at Menemsha to get some fish for dinner. 

It is all a little confusing what precisely we’ve done because I’ve been taking a lot of naps. 

8/20

This date at least is fixed in my mind because it is the day we planned to spend with Peter’s friend Harry.  We whisked him off with us to South Beach, which is kind of the eastern end of the beach we were on the day before, and he and Peter entertained each other mightly shouting Olde Englishe at each other and the sea:  I shall smite these waves!  I say you have been smited by them!  and so on.  They were also kind enough to include Isabel in most of their fun, which generated the ultimate compliment from her:  I like Harry!

This is where I am in my life right now:  that all I can think of to report (other than that picture-perfect sun, sand, surf, and a fluffernutter sandwich all combine to make a perfectly glorious and marvelously forgettable vacation day) is that the deception holds and Operation Overlord can proceed, with its leaders safe in the knowledge that this spy, at least, lies smashed at the bottom of a cliff on a remote Scottish island.  Yes, I finished Eye of the Needle.  Izzy is inspired by all of our war-time reading to take up her own version, an American Girl mystery set in Molly’s era, WWII.  She’s also got a Dear America book going, a captive diary of a Quaker girl captured by Lenape Indians in 1760s Pennsylvania, and The Moe-fat Museum.  She likes to keep a few books going at a time.

Peter ended up spending the night with Harry so we three had a nice dinner in Oak Bluffs and drove home under the rising Sturgeon Moon. 

8/21

I don’t think I’ve mentioned that Bill has become a bicycle-riding fiend, and has already completed two 20-mile rides, one to Menemsha, and one through interior Chilmark.  He heads off early in the morning and returns a couple of hours later, sweaty and satisfied. 

Izzy accompanied me to the West Tisbury Farmer’s Market this morning while Bill rode, and we dropped an awful lot of clams buying admittedly lovely produce for our dinner party later this week.  Not all the vendors come to the Wednesday version of the market, but there are enough for us to pick up vast quantities of cherry tomatoes, nice fingerling potatoes from the Grumpy Potato Man (who is different from the Fancy Potato Lady – she’ll come on Saturday), some corn, some feta and a mango lassi from Mermaid Farm, some mushrooms, and finally an egg roll for Peter, with whom we rendezvous-ed. 

And then it is off to ANOTHER beach, this time towards the western end of that stretch that includes South Beach and Long Point.  Izzy’s bestie Eliza and her parents have rented a rather classic ramshackle vacation cottage right on Chilmark Pond, across which you can paddle to get to the ocean beach, and they’ve invited us to join them for the day.  It’s a beautiful spot, and we clamber in to a rowboat and canoe to make our way across.  The beach is more of the same although wilder and less crowded than either of the previous two versions.  The water is clear and warm-ish and while the waves aren’t huge they are enough to keep Izzy and Eliza and eventually Peter happy for hours.  We see a fellow catch a striper that is THIS BIG (Bill’s arms held about two feet apart) no this big (mine held about a foot apart) but he has to throw it back because he has no cooler to keep it in.  What a great spot.

Everyone else is sticking with their books, but I’ve moved on to another classic of the spy/crime fiction genre, Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal.  This story revolves around an attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, and you have to know something about mid-century France to really get it so Forsyth has to do a bit of historical background into the aftermath of the Algerian conflict which is pretty complicated.  I think the pace will pick up.

Tonight is Family Night at the London’s main house.  I suppose it is always family night for them, but we are delighted to be absorbed into their milieu, and very happy to eat John Tokeshi’s tasty surf and turf of steak and shrimp skewers.  But in a shocking departure from tradition, there is CAKE for dessert instead of pie.  What is going on over there??  Steak and cake?  I think the wheels are coming off. 

8/22

After much hemming and hawing on this cloudy-ish morning, we finally settle upon a plan. Check out the Vineyard Artisan’s Fair, collect lunch and Harry, and head over to Menemsha Pond for some kayaking.  All on board?  For the moment. 

The first part turned out brilliantly anyway.  Serendipity stepped in and led to us finding our dear former preschool teacher Kathy Poehler, at the Artisan’s Festival.  (You may recall hearing about Teacher Kathy, who took us on our clamming adventure a few years ago.)  But what do preschool teachers do when they retire from working with children?  Become purveyors of fine weed, of course!  Kathy makes art, and nice stuff too, with seaweed, and her tent at the fair bears the moniker “Purveyor of Fine Weed” which is designed to get people into the tent so she can explain what it is all about.   Ever the science teacher, she describes to us how the various seaweeds – and there are many – have their own sort of adhesive, so you just kind of stick them on the paper and there they stay.  She has all kinds of images, some abstract, some kind of realistic – trees and mermaids and Vineyard stone walls and so on – using all different shapes and sizes and colors of weed.  They are really quite beautiful.  We hem and haw and purchase a lovely delicate tree image, and a charming ornament for our Christmas tree, of a teeny crab painted gold, and attached to a piece of driftwood.

Kathy is a kind of Goldfinger in the shellfish world. 

We also ran into Eliza and family, and directed them to Kathy’s tent.  And I supported my other favorite Vineyard artisans, the pressed clay pottery guy and the jewelry lady. 

Kayaking on Menemsha Pond was marginally less successful, although Bill and I liked it.  Izzy had REALLY wanted to go, and REALLY wanted to have her own kayak but it was REALLY not a good idea since the paddle was about twice as tall as her.  So we doubled up in a girl-powered craft, Peter and Harry betook themselves out together hooting and hollering, and Bill paddled off serenely on his own.  Fortunately he decided to switch with me as Isabel’s enthusiasm waned about ten minutes into our two-hour paddle. 

It was really peaceful and pretty along the shore, although windy and gray.  Bill and Izzy ventured all the way into Quitsa Pond, where they were part of a dramatic open water rescue!  Apparently another kayaker was hit by a sailboat (we’re not quite sure how this could actually happen but it did), and Bill and Izzy helped collect her paddle and boat, and get her on to the sailboat.  She was fine, they were apologetic, and towed her in.  Meanwhile, we had to fight our way back across the pond in some fairly stiff wind, which resulted in a lot of splashing and grumbling from the boy set.  Honestly. 

8/23

Tonight is Londons-for-dinner-at-our-house night, so I made a blueberry pie this morning.  It is rather beautiful 

Peter was feeling particularly grumpy about going to Lambert’s Cove this morning and it was pretty windy so Bill and I took a lovely long walk up to the Split Rock and left those whiners to each other.  Eventually some Londons came down and we had a jolly time, leaving Isabel with them while we three returned to prepare the feast.  (Well, I prepared the feast, Bill supplied the feast, and Peter napped.) 

Everyone came!  There were 16 of them and four of us, and we managed to feed all 20.  Here’s what we had:

            Tuna tartare

            Smoked bluefish

            Grilled shrimp with miso butter

            Grilled halibut with either a sorrel pesto or an olive salad

            Fingerling potatoes with seedy mustard dressing

            Cherry tomatoes and corn and feta salad

            Pound cake

            Blueberry pie

            Ice cream

And pasta for thems that don’t eat that stuff.  Which turned out to not be very many as we had only a little dessert and a lot of beer left so I think everyone liked it.  “I think I just ate a grape,” said Tom.  “Is that possible?”  Theoretically of course, anything is possible, but practically speaking, those were just incredibly sweet tomatoes.

We’ve started a 1000-piece puzzle which provided much entertainment for the masses this evening.  Isabel was spotted curled up in the crook of Julia’s arm, and Peter was walking around laughing and burping outrageously as he single-handedly finished off about a gallon of root beer.  It was really really nice to have everyone here and we all wish they weren’t leaving this weekend. 

8/24

This is shaping up to be a pretty boring vacation journal.  I’m leaving out all the teeth-gnashing over email from work (which I am scrupulously avoiding answering in a raging bout of passive-aggressiveness) and arguing with children about just getting out the door and stop touching each other and yes we do need smoked paprika do you think they have it at Cronig’s? 

Dropped another bundle of cash at the West Tis Farmer’s Market.

A shocking discovery today:  sometimes there are NO WAVES AT THE WAVY BEACH.  Peter was sorely disappointed.   

Had the remnants of the Londons over tonight, for clams and corn (“This is what the Wampanoag ate!” Tom reminds us) and some locally-made bratwurst.  Bill Murray loves these, the farmer who made them told me, after I said that that my husband is from Wisconsin and knows from bratwurst.  Bill is from Chicago you know.  Which as far as I understand it is a hot dog not bratwurst town, and is not even in Wisconsin, so what are you talking about, man?  While small, the sausages in question were, in fact, excellent.  We had yet another delightful evening, listening to tales of the London’s year in Holland, now about 40 years ago.    

8/24

And now we are on our own.  We waved at Kathy’s car heading to Vineyard Haven this morning, as we were off to the beach.  Eliza’s family leaves today, Harry’s tomorrow.  The Obamas are a distant memory.

We get over it by heading to Moshup Beach, which is becoming one of my favorites on the Island.  It has nice sand, no painful pebbly bits at the break, clear clear water, and is nice and flat for walking.  If you walk to the left, you would eventually get to Chilmark Beach, where we went with Eliza, and then Long Point and then South Beach where we went with Harry.  But that would take you a very long time as it is several miles. 

If you walk to the right, you get to view the gorgeous cliffs up close.  The legend is that the giant Moshup (who created the island) used to grab whales out of the sea and bash them to death on the cliffs before roasting and eating them, and that is why the cliffs are red – with ancient whale blood.  It is really just clay but we like to think about Moshup, who, other than his treatment of whales, which were plentiful then anyway, was really quite a benign giant. 

If you walk to the right, you also pass the nudie portion of the beach.  And it turns out that walking on a nude beach (clothed) is a great way to boost your own body image, since there are actually very few people who look really great naked, and even fewer of them on this beach.  This is the old Vineyard, right here. 

Bill, of course, rode his bike here.  He is a cycling maniac. 

We spent a lovely long day at Moshup, and I hope we go back.  Izzy finished a Nancy Drew mystery, Bill finished The Ministry of Fear, and I am deep into the plot in The Day of the Jackal.  Peter occasionally enlightens us with tidbits from Operation Mincemeat, such as the fact that the submarine delivering the body was small and the crew was large, so some had to sleep in shifts in the torpedo racks, next to William Martin (real name Glyndwr Michael), who was the corpse. 

I am reminded that I did not include note of our scientific find of the day.  If you’ve followed our pictures on Instagram or Facebook, you’ve seen it:  a plastic bottle with two sets of clam/barnacle-like creatures attached to it.  They look a bit like small-ish clams (maybe an inch plus in length), but when removed from the water, little purple feeler-like things emerge and grasp desperately at the air.  Limited online research suggests that they might be gooseneck barnacles, although I couldn’t see the necks.  Maybe juveniles?  In any case, nothing we’ve seen before, and quite remarkable.  We had a family debate about returning their home to the sea (Bill was opposed, as it was a plastic bottle), and then couldn’t figure out how to do it so that they didn’t wash right up again.  Peter ended up filling the bottle with water and sinking it behind a boulder.  UPDATE:  taking blatant advantage of a professional relationship, I sent our picture to a marine biologist whom I know.  He confirms:  gooseneck barnacles, neckless likely due to stress.

Something new alert!  Checked out the Artcliff Diner truck for dinner tonight.  The Diner is revered for breakfast and lunch, but always has a long line in which we never feel like waiting.  The truck is a surprisingly sophisticated and tasty substitute, and it is good to have a burger once in a while during this fishy diet.

Cronigs in Vineyard Haven is to the Up-Island Cronigs as the Fresh Pond Whole Foods is to the Dark Star on Beacon Street, a veritable Harrods Food Halls of groceries. 

Izzy has indulged in one of her favorite Island pastimes, which is watching Esther Williams movies.  Today we finished Neptune’s Daughter, in which Esther is romanced by Ricardo Montalban, who, amazingly, swims in the big production number at the end.  It is a rather frothy story, but Red Skelton is pretty funny, and Keenan Wynn is in it (he of the hoods who sing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in Kiss Me Kate), and Mel Blanc (yes, of Bugs Bunny fame) plays one of the grooms with the “South American” (they don’t even get a country!) polo team, in a so-badly-stereotyped-it-is-funny bit.  But Izzy chortles delightedly during an extended sequence of trying to get Red Skelton on to a horse. 

8/26

Today being overcast and windy, and threatening some rain, we opt for a bike ride around the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest.  This is a (we thought) pretty flat area in the middle of the island, which envelops the airport on three sides.  Turns out that the area along South Road is actually a bit hilly, which disturbed the smallest member of our party more than the others.  I must note here that Isabel reached a great rung on the ladder to adulthood today, by riding her OWN bike on this trek, rather than the trail-a-bike of past years.  She was a great trooper, carrying on despite a skinned knee, and making it around all ten miles of the loop. 

The most interesting thing about the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest (named for a long-serving superintendent) is that it was actually established in 1908 as a reserve for the increasingly rare Heath Hen, a kind of grouse.  These birds were plentiful along the Eastern seaboard until the late 1800s, when only a few hundred remained in the world, and only on Martha’s Vineyard, no thanks to hunting and loss of habitat.  The birds rebounded for a few years after the establishment of the preserve in 1908, but fires in the forest and disease and “increased predation” took their toll.  By the late 1920s, there was just one Heath Hen known to still exist.  He showed up for three years in the spring, calling for mates, and acquiring the name Booming Ben.  In 1932, Ben didn’t boom . . . thus endeth the existence of the Heath Hen on our planet.  We all took momentary pause at the fact that there were probably still people on the island who’d heard of this, first hand.  Like that lady from the skillet-throwing competition.

You pass a monumental Heath Hen memorial sculpture on the bike path, and a placard upon which you can read more about this tragedy.  The sculpture is by a guy named Todd McGrain, who makes sculptures of extinct North American birds.  You can read more about him here:  http://www.toddmcgrain.com/

Lunch at The Bite, in Menemsha, offered enormous and tasty fried clams for the growns, and chicken fingers and fried fish for the smalls.  (Note:  Peter is no longer so small, being officially as tall as me now.  But he still doesn’t like clams in any form other than chowder.)

Cloudy afternoon activity:  Star Trek.  Say no more.

8/27

I believe that I have neglected to mention that our house is called “SEAS THE DAY.”

Today we all awoke, late, to a pouring, drenching rain.  The kind of rain that does not let up when The Weather Channel says it will, and the kind of rain that gets your kayak tour cancelled.  So we visit our favorite rainy day destination, the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Edgartown.  I think they’ve got a savvy development staff because this is clearly not a museum that stagnates.  The core exhibit, the Cook house, remains the same but they have a new feature of little listening devices that talk about features in the house.   Even better, when you get out to the lighthouse, and the stuff in the barn like the whaleboat, the recorded bits are all old Vineyarders talking about their experiences.  So, the son of the last keeper of the Gay Head Light talks about living with the Light, and people talk about whaling boats and swordfishing and the Aquinnah tribe’s fight for recognition and all kinds of stuff.  Adding that kind of feature, upgrading existing exhibits with new info, and hosting temporary smaller exhibits all germane to the Island, all takes hardworking staff and money, and it is great that this small museum is able to do all of this. 

In the shop and “new” galleries building, there was also a charming room wherein each of the six or seven summer interns displayed their project, which involved selecting an item from the museum’s collection, doing some research and preservation work, and then writing up a little note about it.  Such good historians!  And clearly getting a great and unique opportunity to work directly with objects.  I wonder if they take 47 year- olds? 

Finally, there was a new-ish exhibit, with just a few objects representing periods in the Island’s history.  So, there was a tea brick about the foreign trade, and pearlized beads made out of herring scales, and a map from a reprint of J. Hector St. John de Crevecour’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) showing the island with its southern shores called “the great beach against which the sea continually beats.”  (More on that tomorrow.)

Our favorite piece in this last room was the flag from the 1977 secession movement.  Yes!   That year, a redistricting bill proposed to remove the representative who served MV, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands, and roll them all in with a bunch of towns on the Cape.  Needless to say, this didn’t sit well with the locals, although it seems that they were indeed proportionately over-represented in the state legislature.  The movement was just about seceding from Massachusetts (they realized pretty quickly that seceding from the US was a bad idea) and apparently the Islands were courted by various other states – Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii – about joining them.  Then-Governor Michael Dukakis threatened to veto the secession bill if it came to his desk.  It was a little bit serious and a lot in jest, but it appears that the Islanders had an awful lot of fun with the whole idea.   You can read a good article about it here:  http://www.mvmagazine.com/2007/september-october/secession.php

Once the rain cleared, people came out like cockroaches and Edgartown got rather crowded.  We ran into Patty, the assistant teacher in Peter’s fifth grade classroom, which was fun, and then took a glorious walk on a windy but warm and super-wavy South Beach.  It is so wavy that there is only one intrepid wave rider, an adult, but he is having an awesome time riding those curls on a boogie board, no less.  We watch transfixed, for about half an hour.  Dinner at our fave Red Cat Kitchen (steak, tuna, calamari, and mashed potatoes for Isabel) and Back Door Donuts (chocolate supreme, jelly, apple fritter) topped off what turned out to be a pretty good rainy day.

We sang along with James Taylor on our foggy drive home.  The Wampanoag say that fog is the smoke from Moshup’s pipe, and that he is smoking because he is satisfied with his people.   So, fog is good. 

Bill has finished The Ministry of Fear and has moved on, at my suggestion, to Eric Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy.  I think he’ll like it, it is very Greene-esque.  Peter is about to start Dracula!  And Isabel has a couple going, the beloved Freddy and the Bean Home News which involves talking animals on a farm, and a Nancy Drew mystery. 

8/27

We had planned to take a kayak tour at Long Point yesterday afternoon, but rain and fog intervened.  Fortunately, today the clouds are clearing and it is promising to be a pretty great day, so we wind our way down a very long dirt road to the off-season parking for the Long Point Wildlife Preserve, and spend the morning toodling about Tisbury Great Pond with a nice young guide named Isobel.  (“My name’s Isobel” she says to us.  “Oh,” say we, “this is an Isabel too.”  “How do you spell it?” asks our guide, in what is apparently the standard greeting between all Isabels in the world.)

Here’s what we learned.  The pond and its environs are apparently a sand plain grassland, a.k.a. coastal sand barrens of which there are only eight square miles in the world, and an eighth of it is right here on Martha’s Vineyard.  The rest are in small locations down the east coast toward New York.  What is a sand plain grassland, you might ask?  Well, it is a salt pond and seashore environment that is influenced by humans.  In this case, for centuries the Wampanoag would create a cut in the late summer, between the ocean and the pond, allowing the fresh sea water into the pond which is good for the sea creatures, particularly shellfish.  Long Point is no longer on Wampanoag land but the locals have continued the tradition, and every year in late August, they bring a digger in to create a channel, which will close up naturally in about six weeks. 

This was supposed to be a wildlife tour, but once the cut is opened, the pond drains several feet and the places where the wildlife gather are just mudflats now.  So, we mostly just paddle around.  We also learn, talking with Isobel, about storm damage from last winter, that the dunes backing the great beach against which the sea continually beats, actually move backwards between five and ten feet every year.  But lately, the ocean is encroaching faster than the dunes are moving, so the dunes themselves are threatened.  It is a natural process, but one can’t help think about rising seas and the human factor in that.  We won’t live to see the beach disappear, but will our children, or theirs? 

Maybe you figured it out by now but the cut, known by its other name of the TIDE RIDE is also dear to the hearts of Laskins, and several members of our party are delighted that it is back.  They spend two hours riding the incoming tide into the pond.  Speaking of the tide, it is high today at the Wavy Beach, and with the shore break here the waves are really pounding which thrills Peter and now Isabel no end.  I get tossed by one up on to the beach and have to spend an awkward five minutes removing sand from various parts of my bathing suit.   

Perhaps you thought we’d had enough fun for one day, but not us Laskins.  Time for another Something New Alert!  Tonight we went to the Community Sing at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs.  It is like walking on to the set of The Music Man – the charming wee cottages gently lit with lanterns and fairy lights surround the venerable old structure, folks are sitting on their porches talking quietly, and a big American flag hangs over the main aisle as you are handed a songbook ca. 1985.  A nice-looking lady sits at a Steinway and entertains until the main event which is when Bob Cleasby, who runs the show, takes the stage in red pants and a belt with a buckle shaped like the Island.  Everyone is asked to stand and sing the national anthem, which we do, lustily (no silently listening to the celebrity singer here!).  Then we sing a song about Martha’s Vineyard, to the tune of America the Beautiful, and another one that we don’t know the tune but which is also about the Island.  Things really take off with some goofy rounds (“Little Tommy Tinker,” “My Hat It Has Three Corners”), some old-fashioned tunes (“The Ash Grove,” “The Vesper Hymn”, “Loch Lomond”), a religious tune (“Amazing Grace”), and the apparently most-requested song ever:  “The Swiss Navy.”  Get a Laskin kid to sing it for you if you want to know how it goes, it is pretty funny.  Bob offers patter in between the songs, wishing happy birthday to folks, telling us what is for sale at the Camp Meeting Association museum store, explaining about the history of the sing, and so on.  It is about as wholesome, and gosh darn entertaining as you can get, and did I mention that it is free?

We end, as this is the last sing of the summer, with “Auld Lang Syne” and “Sing Your Way Home,” which we are asked to keep singing as we depart the Tabernacle.  People are still humming it over at Back Door Donuts. 

Peter, on the way out:  “OK you were RIGHT” which means that he rather enjoyed it after all.

8/29

Oh dear oh dear our time is running short.  I have been for the past several days engaged in my annual activity of trying to figure out how to stay permanently.  No luck yet in persuading Bill that he can run PG Calc from here, but I persevere.

More clouds – this has not been the most stellar weather week ever – so another bike ride.  This time we cruise along State Beach and into the traffic hell that is Edgartown on a cloudy day, for lunch overlooking the harbor and watching the Chappy Ferry.  Then it starts to drizzle so our ride back is a little damp.  But the birds in the marshy shoulders of Sengekontacket Pond are great – sanderlings and sandpipers and stilts and willets and an egret or two.  Isabel has clocked another nine mile ride, and is feeling pretty chuffed about her bicycle prowess. 

About every fourth car here is a Subaru Outback.  Many are green.  But none have the pinstrip that sets ours apart.

Damp and chilly, we stop off in Oak Bluffs, to track down a copy of the songbook from the Community Sing last night.  Success at the Camp Meeting Association Museum, which is a cottage filled with stuff from the past 180-some-odd years of camp meetings in the grove.  It is charming, and we admire the old quilts and toys and clothes, and think about living in these very teeny cottages truly cheek-by-jowl with your neighbors.  They are so close and small because they were originally tents, and one year everyone thought hey, let’s use our tent poles to make cottages on our tent plots instead, and we can stay longer!  So that’s how the wee small cottages came about. 

We also learn that the Illumination used to be known as the Grand Illumination, and involved strings of lanterns from the Tabernacle out to the cottages, all manned by Boy Scouts to watch the live flames.  Well, in 1967 the Steamship Authority got the bright idea to advertise the Illumination on the mainland, and boats full of people showed up – but no plan had been made for boats back that night so they stayed all night, goofing around, playing catch with the lanterns (which sent the Fire Marshal into a tizzy given all the wooden cottages so close together), likely stoned, and definitely sleeping everywhere.  The Marshal said no mas! to future Grand Illuminations.  Eventually, the CMA and the Marshal reached an agreement on how to run it, and now it is back.  It sounds beautiful, but very very crowded and we’re never here for it anyway. 

Here’s a sight you don’t see everywhere:  a young man playing the harp on Circuit Ave., clad in his Martha’s Vineyard football uniform.  Donations benefit the team.  He’s pretty cute, and an admiring (and dollar-donating) crowd quickly gathers. 

Our cloudy-day activities are not done, however, as we have one very important stop to make:  Chilmark Chocolates is back after their August vacation!  We arrive at 5, thinking, who would be there in the last half-hour that they are open.  Only about a few dozen people ahead of us, that’s who.  Finally, at about 5:40, we get in the building.  Here’s how it works:  you tell the lady what size box you want, and then point out which chocolates you want in it.  You have to have someone counting because they say 30-35 pieces fit in a pound box, and you don’t want to load up too heavily from the first end of the cabinet, lest you not have room for the big toffees at the other end.  On the other hand, you don’t want to be too abstemious up front and not get enough of the good stuff like Squibnuggets (cashews in chocolate) and Moshup Macs (macadamia nuts in chocolate) and Menemsha Sunset (apricot and nuts in chocolate).  Pre-packed boxes are fine for office gifts, but you want to fill your own box just so.  In our case, that means almost everything in the dark chocolate version (as opposed to the milk), and since we have room and I’m feeling magnanimous, a couple of coconut clusters for the boys.  The lady will helpfully tell you when your box is halfway full, and when you are within about eight or so of filling it.  We end up squeezing more than 40 treats into ours, and leave, like all customers, triumphantly out the back door with our big bag of goodies.  It’s a bit of an ordeal, although like all MV ordeals, mellow and congenial, and totally worth it. 

Hoping to see a sunset, we continue out the South Road to Aquinnah, but the clouds are clearly going to thwart that plan.  Some fish tacos from Faith’s, and various chowders, eaten in the lee of a building since it is pretty windy, make up for the lack of sun.  (Izzy has yet another hot dog.  She is tired of hot dogs, and makes quite a fuss about them.  But since she refuses to eat anything else, she is stuck with them.)  At Faith’s they sell an Aquinnah clam chowder, in addition to the regular creamy kind.  This is a clear soup, kind of like Rhode Island chowder, and I like it a lot.  But I do think they boost the brew with some chicken broth, and tonight it tastes as chickeny as it does clammy. 

Even without a sunset the view from the clifftops here is still spectacular, and we think about the precarious position of the Gay Head Light, which is to be moved about 150 feet back from the edge of the cliff sometime in the next year or two.  We purchase t-shirts to support the effort, since the town has to do this itself – the Coast Guard has relinquished any responsibility for maintaining the building.  They do want a light there, but they could just put one up on a stick, they don’t need a historic brick tower to house it. So the town has taken over, and I bet they will raise the money.

We were home early enough to play that beloved-by-children but excruciatingly endless card game Uno. 

Have I mentioned that Blofeld is in town, once again?  His yacht, complete with carefully wrapped helicopter is here, anyway.  He too must be a last-ten-days-of-August kind of guy.

8/30

Another good old Vineyard day.  Another long morning ride for Bill.  Another Lambert’s Cove beach excursion although it took a very very long time for those clouds to dissipate.  Still, you know it is the end of the summer when the LC guards pull in the “SWIM AREA – NO WAKE” buoys in the afternoon. 

I am thrilled to report that this year both kids have now discovered the peaceful contentment of reading on the beach.  Some days find us all four lined up, completely lost in whatever we are reading, and then discussing all the plots over our next meal.  I can also report that le jour du chacal est finis, and just in time, too – it is amazing that De Gaulle lives after all that.  The Day of the Jackal shall remain forever in my memory related, in a completely incongruous way, with tranquil Lambert’s cove. 

Grace Church lobster rolls for dinner which Peter says are like skiing in Telluride – they completely spoil you for a lobster roll anywhere else.  If you ask for them to go, they will give you a little tub loaded with the good stuff, and your roll on the side, so the roll doesn’t get soggy while you take it home or to the beach.  Our dinner conversation that night is mostly contemplating how do they do it:  there is almost a half-pound of lobster meat here, all good, with just mayo and S&P – not too much mayo, and no annoying add-ins like celery.  For $17, you get the lobster roll, chips, and a drink (admittedly, Country Time lemonade or weak iced tea, but still).  I’ve said it in previous journals, but it bears repeating that you’d pay upwards of $25 for the equivalent in a fancy resto.  Grace Church lobster rolls:  they really ARE all that and a bag of chips. 

Alerted by Teacher Kathy, we search the play yard at the Church’s preschool to find another old friend from HYCCC days, Mrs. Dinosaur!  Looking rather skeletal, it must be noted.  Kathy donated the frame to a friend who runs the preschool there, but we remember the time Isabel wore her Dr. Isabel costume to preschool, to fix the (papier-mache-peeling) Mrs.  We mostly think about how nice it is that we still know our kids’ preschool teachers.  Hat-tip to high-quality early childhood education!

We also check out the last gasp of the Vineyard Artisan’s Fair (alas, no weed), drop a few more clams on some deserving folks (Peter’s fave woodcut and doggerel artist, Daniel Waters in particular), and finally head home for the traditional last-night-on-the-Vineyard showing of Jaws.  This year, Peter watches, and is not particularly scared except for the part where the fisherman’s severed head floats into the porthole. 

8/30

So our island idyll comes to an end.  With – heavily – loaded car, we stop at the West Tis Farmer’s Market for one last breakfast of champions (egg roll and mango lassi) and some treats for the ferry ride.  Also picked up one last jar of Ethel’s jam.   I don’t think Ethel is actually selling it anymore, I heard this spring that she was ill.  But I think she is still making it.  I ask about rhubarb and am told that they’ll make that in the fall, when things have calmed down a bit.  We’ll have to wait until next year, I reply.  Oh well, have a nice winter says the nice lady selling it!  (Note that Ethel does not make beach plum for sale.  We get ours from the flaky lady at The Good Earth.)  I am buoyed by the fact that Ethel’s jam lists Sure-Jell as an ingredient, as the pectin v. non-pectin wars rage in an online discussion I follow about preserving.  If it is good enough for Ethel, it is good enough for me. 

We cruise somewhat aimlessly around Vineyard Haven while waiting for our ferry.  The outbound ferries aren’t quite full – we could have gotten on an earlier one – nor are those inbound, must be the end of summer.  Once onboard, we eat our snacks topside, in a raging wind, just to experience it all a little longer, even while telling ourselves that it wouldn’t have been a very good beach day anyway:   too windy, too cloudy, too cold. 

But to paraphrase my friend Dan Hamilton, going to the beach on MV is like pizza:  even when it is bad, it is good.  So, we don’t quite convince ourselves that it wouldn’t be better to have stayed.

Here are the things we did not do:

- sail anywhere

- play tennis

- swim in Seth’s Pond (it was kind of murky this year, and not entirely enticing)

- eat Murdick’s Fudge (I never thought of this before, but it is true:  http://gawker.com/why-do-tourists-love-fudge-1173001409)

- eat at State Road (apparently I should reserve now for next year) or the Beach Plum Inn

- hike anywhere

- eat lobster

- convince Bill that he could run PG Calc from MV.

But as Peter points out, we should not cry because it is over, we should smile because it happened.  He read this on a plaque at the Artisan’s Fair.  And as you can tell, we did do a lot, mostly we had a really good time.

We know we are back in the big city as we drive up Cambridge Street with its heavy traffic (although, no worse than Edgartown on a rainy day, Bill points out, and here you have actual sidewalks and bike lanes, and enough room for everyone).  I don’t think I’ve mentioned that our neighbor’s house had a terrible fire while we were away, and while it is structurally sound, the interior is completely destroyed.  So it is all boarded up, and the preschool nearby is starting to be torn down.  It’s going to be a construction zone around here for a while.

SKI magazine and lots of school forms are waiting in the mountain of mail that came while we were away, a sure sign of the year’s passing.  We head out for Taiwanese for dinner, to a restaurant populated entirely by glamorous young Asians and MIT students, and Bill is really nice to all the other drivers on our way there.  “I’m still on the Vineyard” he says.  Summer ends there too, of course, the population drops dramatically next week, and lots of regular summer events have ended.  But we have brought home many souvenirs, and perhaps when we are feeling low we shall pull out our 150^th Anniversary Edition of the Tabernacle Song Book (1835-1985) and sing “Ode to the Vineyard” (to the tune of “America the Beautiful”):

O gleaming sand and silver seas,

O glowing sun above,

That shines of Gayhead’s colored cliffs

On all this Isle we love;

We love Menemsha’s myriad masts

Katama’s crashing seas

The billowing sails at Edgartown

Each strong refreshing breeze.

We love you more each passing year

Your lore our hearts enshrine,

Your spray-spumed sands we’ll not forget,

Your trails of plum and vine.

O keep this place a haven free

As once in days of yore,

When hardy Norsemen braved wild seas

To reach this vineclad shore.

Don’t you just love that?  I do.  Although for the record:  if Norsemen came here, no one is talking about it.

Eire 2013 - Our Celtic Family Sojourn (incl. some magically delicious meals)

This has been a difficult week to be away, and it feels somehow insensitive, writing up our usual jolly travel journal in the aftermath of fear and tragedy in our hometown.  Not that the Irish are unfamiliar with fear and tragedy.  Indeed, these are just two of the many dark threads that make up the weave of Irish history.  Still, the events of last week are a somber backdrop to our adventures, even in a country depressingly familiar with terror. 

But, to our journey.

Here are some ways to prepare for a family trip to Ireland:

1.      Make and eat shepherd’s pie or American-Irish soda bread or just eat a lot of butter.  It’s all magically delicious!

2.      Borrow “The Secret of Roan Inish” from your friend Fiona (aye, Fiona O’Loughlin she is!) and watch it.

3.      Speak to everyone in the family with an Irish accent.  “Will you be having another cookie then, love?”  “I’ll be after getting you to put your backpack away.”  “Aye and its blowin’ fit to smite a leprechaun out there today.”   This is particularly annoying to children. 

4.      Watch Irish Spring commercials on the Youtube.  “Manly yes, but I like it too!”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQk-imB1m2k  The amazing thing is that someone thought this would actually sell something. 

Our faux Irish accents drive the children mad, which of course pushes us to further heights o’ blarney.  As we board our Aer Lingus flight (a small-ish looking plane, but as Bill explains, it’s for the leprechauns), we overhear a flight attendant or someone remarking about "tirty-four-tousand feet in t'air" and we smile secretly at one another.  "He sounds just like me!" says Bill.

I'd like to read my book, Malachy McCourt's History of Ireland but I daren't turn on my light in case it wakes up the wee lass at my side.  He's a teller of tales, is our Malachy, one of the famous Irish McCourt brothers, and clearly enjoying his own thoroughly unscholarly but highly entertaining great-man take on Irish history.  “You should all know by now” he says on p. 151, “that a thing is verifiable or not, the fact that it’s a great story is all that matters.”

The shamrock on the wingtip glows green in the morning sun as we descend toward Dublin, having had to circle for almost an hour while the low fog burns off.  Amazingly, the sun stays out for about three hours.  And then it rains, and gets cold and windy, which is more or less what the pattern will be for the next week.

I would say that the drive in from the airport is via a less-than-salubrious route, but it does include 1) a view of a Cadbury's factory (promising), 2) signs about ramps which momentarily confuse me because I wonder if they are a spring delicacy here as they are in parts of the US before I realize they are referring to a traffic-calming feature, and 3) the realization that, all signs being in both English and Gaelic, the latter is pretty much impossible to pronounce.  Ireland, we conclude, is like Canada, where all the signs are in French and English.

After dropping our bags at the hotel, our first stop is Bewley's Oriental Cafe, a Dublin institution since 1927.  That's the date of the present marvelous structure, but Edgar Bewley Esq. has been serving the city since the mid-19th c. when he broke the East India Company's tea monopoly by having forty tons shipped directly to Dublin.  Anyone who does anything to tweak the Brits is much beloved here.  Bewley's Oriental Cafe is splendidly art deco, and features some beautiful stained glass windows that we attempted to capture on film.  It also features a Full Irish Breakfast. 

Now, this is important, because I believe it will be an integral element of our time in Ireland.  The Full Irish always has:

An egg

Irish bacon, which is kind of like fried ham

Toast

Sausage

Black and white pudding (or puddin'), which is like Irish goetta, grains and innards are involved, and the black is, well, blood.  It's actually tasty, esp. if you have some relish or ketchup.

A broiled mushroom

A broiled tomahto

And may also include baked beans.

Fortunately for Isabel, Bewley's also has bagels.  But there is really nothing like a Full Irish Breakfast to set you up in the morning.

After breakfast, we all put on a good face and stroll about St. Stephen's Green, even though some of us really just want to go to sleep.  We check out monuments to famous Irish people of yore (James Joyce and Wolfe Tone), and their Famine memorial which reminds me of the Partisans sculpture on Boston Common, except even bleaker.  Isabel is quite taken with the Yeats Memorial, which is hidden up a little stairway and features lots of faux-ruin rocks upon which one can clamber about.  She is also fond of a great swan, sailing arrogantly as swans do, down the little lake.  We do have swans in Boston, we just make boats out of them.  But she is enchanted nonetheless.

Undaunted by exhaustion, and emboldened by the relative compactness of the city, we march through the cold and damp to Trinity College.  A spectacular bookshop on the way, called Hodges Figgis, supplies an Irish dictionary with phonetic spellings so we can actually pronounce things, a detailed map of the South of Ireland for the next part of our trip, and the latest by Eoin (pronounced Owen, see what I mean) Colfer, a favorite author of Peter's set.  So I can say I read it before anyone else, he says with satisfaction.

Trinity College has the same kind of tourist problem that Harvard does, except that unlike Harvard, Trinity actually displays its treasures for all the world to see (for a price).  The big draw here is, of course, the Book of Kells, the 9th c. illuminated book of gospels that you learn about in Art 100.  Waiting to see the Book of Kells is not quite like waiting in line at the Uffizi, but it is not far off, and it is colder and rainier here than it undoubtedly is in Florence today.  Once you are in, you mostly go through an exhibit that provides some historical context, as well as the really more interesting stuff about how these extraordinary creations were made.  There are a lot of huge blow-ups of detail from the Kells and other similar manuscripts, which are all kind of amber and red at this point.  Peter discovers a marvelous poem penned by a Swiss contemporary of

Team Kells , in which this particular monk compares his command of his craft to that of his cat's ability to catch mice.  You can see it in our pix.  Kells itself was probably created by monks on the isle of Iona, moved to the Abbey of Kells in Co. Meath in the 11th c. after the Island was attacked by Vikings, and then to Dublin in the 17^th c. when that devil Cromwell, wrought havoc in Ireland.  (As our guide McCourt says, Cromwell “left a mark of which all good men of feeling and justice should be ashamed . . . .”)  (147)

Anyway, on to the Book.   You enter a darkened room . . .  and there, in a steel case that says Chubb, like the locks, with another manuscript that people only look at while they are waiting to get to the four pages of Kells that you can see, is the book itself.  It is pretty extraordinary, and you can surely find better sources than I to describe it, but let's leave it with no surprise that there is a Book of Kells coloring book in the gift shop, and that the youngest member of our party spent a fair amount of time at dinner illuminating it.

Your admission also gets you into the Long Library, which is the most beautiful library room I've ever seen, and I've seen some nice libraries.  It is a huge, barrel-vaulted room with double-story bays of books on either side, stretching seemingly into infinity.  There is ALSO an exhibit of Irish illustration here, and the oldest harp in Ireland, and so one really does not know where to look first.  In the illustration exhibit I am quite taken by a memorial book listing the names of the Irish soldiers who died in the First World War.  Each page of names and information about them is surrounded with a beautifully penned border of vegetation and silhouettes of men in WW1 combat.  There are eight volumes, and the one on display is open to a page of Boylans - many of them.

The Long Library is a working collection, and it is so beautiful that it makes you want to take up a topic that would require research there.

Dublin was originally a Viking settlement, from the mid-800s, and as it turns out, they are still here!  Marauding about as usual, only this time from the backs of those WW2 landing craft that they use for the Boston duck tours.  But instead of the comparatively sedate quack-quack of the duck tours, everyone on a Viking Splash tour wears a goofy plastic Viking hat (yes, with the horns) and shouts something unintelligible at passersby, under the direction of their loud, microphoned leader.  If you try to take their picture, he'll holler something about the paparazzi and they'll all shake their fists and ROAAARGH at you.  It sounds dreadful but is actually kind of funny.  They drive regularly by our hotel, and we know this because we can hear the ROAAARGH through our windows.  I think they are howling in some primordial Viking protest at representative democracy, because the Dail Eireann (don't ask me how to pronounce it) aka the Irish Parliament is right across the street.

Buswells is about as perfectly located as you can get.  It is three Georgian townhouses put together in one hotel, and while perhaps a tad quirky (read: pipes that sound like freight trains when you run the shower, small rooms, oddly shaped), it works perfectly as a central Dublin base for us.  In less than ten minutes, you can be at Bewley's, the Book of Kells (for which you have to wait more than ten minutes), St. Stephen's Green, Grafton Street, Merrion Square, and more. 

Is it Irish or is it Gaelic? (which I should note my autocorrect wishes to change to Garlic.).  At the Harvard Summer School, we offer Modern Irish, and at the bookstore we visit, it is all about Irish, including our dictionary, so that is what we buy and that is what we shall say.  Regardless of what you call it, it is pretty much impossible to pronounce. 

Buswells is also just around the corner from The Pig's Ear, one of the temples of New Irish cooking.  Which is pretty gosh darn good.  Here was my eating plan for Ireland, pre-departure:  fish and shellfish, butter and cheese and dairy products generally, potatoes, and anything you can't get where we come from like samphire and carageenan pudding.  Here's my plan, post-arrival:  all of the above, and more so.  That smoked salmon that Bill had was best-evah, and I am including Russ and Daughters.  Peter has a perfectly perfect little personal shepherd's pie in a charming wee small cast iron pot. Isabel has an upside down cheesecake in a jar with berry jam and homemade hobnob crust, while I enjoy a buttermilk custard with elderflower and rhubarb and ginger jelly.  You can make silk out of a pig’s ear! proclaims Isabel, and we all agree.

Peter spends a certain part of dinner coming up with anagrams for The Pig's Ear:  get hip, sear!  Peg:  sit, hear.  And so on.  From that we naturally progress to creating a new game:  Irish Fictionary, in which you make up definitions AND pronunciations for imaginary Irish words.  Examples:

gariepehts = pron:  gar-EEP-echts; a pig's ear

pgcalc = pron: p'gh-al-ch; small software company from across the sea

And so on.  He will eventually be stumped in his anagramming by Ballymaloe House, which is harder to work with than you might think.

4/14

One out of two taxi drivers in Ireland is the charming talkative cabbie that you might expect to encounter in Ireland.  We get him this morning, although I was a little worried when he pointed out two tarty looking girls noting, "there go a couple of walks-o-shame."  How to explain that one?

Now, a word about that accent.  It is completely charming, and makes everyone you talk to sound like the friendliest person on the planet (which most people in Ireland are, as it turns out).  It also sounds just like it does in the movies (except less of the f-bomb), and when the lady at Buswells’ reception desk mutters “jesusmaryandjoseph” in exasperation, Bill is thrilled.  This becomes our slogan for the week, as we continue to refine our Irish lilt.  Peter, displaying a form of Stockholm Syndrome, moves from being appalled at his parents’ mangling of the accent, to attempting it himself. 

The warden most certainly did not throw a party at Kilmainham Gaol, although more than 200 films and television shows have been filmed there, as it is a particularly fine example of a Victorian-era prison.  But Elvis, never.

You could call this the Irish Alcatraz, but that comparison is really only apt from a touristic point of view, since Kilmainham is part of the Irish national fabric in a way that Alcatraz has never really been in the US.  In other words, if you want to learn a lot in a short time about modern Irish history, this is a pretty good place to visit.  Here were imprisoned great nationalists and fighters for Irish freedom, men like Emmett and Parnell and DeValera.  Here in earlier areas were imprisoned thousands of men and women and children – as young as five! – for crimes such as stealing bread during the Great Famine.  Here were held and executed the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising.  Aye, it's a cold, dank, and forbidding place, but with a fine museum that is nicely heated so you can both prepare and recover there from your tour.  And a tea room, of course.

Yet Kilmainham was built in response to the prison reform movements of the late 18^th c. (Jeremy Bentham and John Howard, if you’re keeping track), so for its time, it was considered quite modern.  Individual cells replaced open rooms, corrupt practices of paying off the jailers for better treatment were abolished, light (windows) and fresh air (no glass in the windows) and exercise (more cold air) and a standard but no-frills diet were incorporated into the ideas about rehabilitation of criminals. 

But Kilmainham is really all about 1916, because the leaders of that event – which was doomed from the start, due to some poor planning and some clashing egos and some events beyond the rebels’ control – were imprisoned and executed here.  Their names are above the cells they occupied while here, and in the grim stonecutting yard where the executions took place, a single black cross marks the spot where the condemned stood.  An Irish flag whips in the wind here, the only color against the high dark stone walls.  It is hugely dramatic, esp. when told in the rich accent of our tour guide.  Over the course of the tour we have learned the personal stories of many of the condemned (along with other heart-rending tales of children imprisoned for stealing food, and women executed for crimes of passion).  There is James Plunkett, who married his beloved in the prison chapel just a few hours before he was shot, and John MacBride, former husband of Maude Gonne (the muse of Yeats, and a great nationalist agitator in her own right), who took off his blindfold saying that he’d faced British soldiers shooting at him before so there was nothing different about this.  (OK, that one I got from McCourt, but he would have offered just as good a tour as our guide.)  There is Padraig Pearse the leader, and Willie his younger brother who was probably only executed because of his name . . . and so on.  According to our guide, more than 70 people were condemned to death in the aftermath of the Rising, and public sentiment was generally not with the rebels because the destruction they wrought in Dublin and elsewhere, and a general lack of public support for revolution.   But the British took their time getting to the executions, and as they did this, and the personal stories of the men came out, and in particular the shocking death of James Connolly – strapped to a chair to be shot because his wounds from the fighting had turned gangrenous and he could not stand – all served to turn public opinion around.  Ultimately, the others’ sentences were commuted as the British realized that to execute more would simply make more martyrs.  While the Easter Rising failed, it was the beginning of the end for the British, sort of their Lexington and Concord, says Bill.

In the museum, there is a little area off to one side called “Last Words.”  Here, in a darkened hallway, you can peer at memorabilia of the martyrs, each with a shelf or two of his own (the only woman condemned was ultimately not executed on account of her being a woman), labeled with a card bearing his name, a cross, and the date of his death.  There are photographs, locks of hair, and poignant last letters, even Mrs. Plunkett’s wedding ring.  When you turn the corner at the end of this, you are faced with a life-size black and white photograph of the stonecutting yard, taken from the perspective of the condemned, the black memorial cross stark in the foreground.  It is a wildly effective piece of political theater – now you too are part of the Rising, standing beside the martyrs in their final moments. 

It is hard to comprehend the history of Ireland, filled as it is with failed attempts to throw off the British yoke.  We Americans are used to a trajectory of triumphant nationalism:  once you show those lobsterbacks that you mean business with this democracy stuff, off they go and you are on your own.  Why couldn’t the Irish get their act together before the 20^th c.?  It is not for lack of trying.  McCourt’s book is basically a collection of stories about great Irish nationalists who did their best from about the 16th c. on, but who mostly failed, albeit terribly dramatically and romantically.  But I guess enough people were doing quite well with the British in place, and the rest were so downtrodden that they couldn’t get or be organized, and maybe because they kept trying to get the French to help (who were sympathetic but not particularly interested in invading), or there is that RELIGION question (they’re not all Catholic, and the Church isn’t particularly interested in nationalist movements anyway), or perhaps just because they just couldn’t agree on a shared definition of Irish nationalism . . . well, it is complicated.  People spend careers on this and I am not one of them so I’ll take my stories from McCourt and leave it at that.

It’s fitting to go to the Garden of Remembrance at Parnell Square after the gaol, as it is devoted to the Easter Rising.  And you can walk down O’Connell Street after that, spying the bullet holes in the Post Office (the rebels’ HQ) and viewing monuments to earlier patriots Parnell and O’Connell.  Of course, this walk may destroy your children, esp. if you haven’t had lunch yet, so proceed at your peril. 

Izzy so loves W.B. Yeats that she wants desperately to return to his place at St. Stephen’s Green.  Which we do, so she can run around, as she puts it.  The boys make their way to the National Archeology Museum where they view marvels of fine metalwork such as the Tara Brooch.

Dinner tonight is at The Winding Stair, another temple to modern Irish cooking, and just as good as last night’s.  Bill and I share a smoked fish plate which includes scallops with their roe (Peter is suspicious but after trying one scarfs them up), a couple of different kinds of smoked salmon, some smoked mackerel, and an addictive smoked oyster pate, and we are just getting started.  Izzy realizes that a local charcuterie platter will do her quite well, as will a rhubarb and clementine mess for dessert.  This new Irish cuisine is working out pretty well for us so far. 

4/15

I'm a bit of a white-knuckler as Bill drives us out of the city but he is soon dubbed Daddio Andretti by the back seat (once we tell them who Mario Andretti is and date ourselves by realizing that Mario Andretti’s SON has retired, and his grandson is now racing), and we are on our way into the countryside!

Destination first:  the Acropolis of Ireland, a great ruined cathedral high on an outcrop, known as the Rock of Cashel.  Once we finally figure out how to get into Cormac McCarthy’s chapel among the ruins, we are quite taken with the 12^th c. Romanesque structure (the oldest in Ireland) that contains its original carvings and even remnants of its apparently glorious frescoes.  Of equally great importance to the good people of Cashel is that QEII and Philip visited the Rock when they came to Ireland in 2011.  The register that she signed, and the pen used, are carefully displayed in a glass case.  Izzy seems a bit concerned that this trip is turning out to be boring, but after hearing a guide talk about the chapel concedes that it was a little interesting. 

We arrive Kenmare in a driving rain, and are happy to stay in for dinner at The Coachman’s, esp. as they have live music – a couple of fiddles and an accordion – which is a real treat for us all.  I happen to be checking the news and learn of the events in Boston this afternoon, which will hang on the horizon of our trip for the coming days. 

I really tried to buy a sweater in Kenmare, but just couldn’t get excited about much in Quill’s vast collection.  There are lovely poncho-like things, which I thought might have a very French Lieutenant’s Woman look, but then I decided that they would actually end up having about the same effect as a squash blossom necklace worn anywhere but the Southwest.  Which is to say, you wear it once and then, oh here comes Lisa in her Irish Lieutenant’s Woman poncho again.

Want to know how to get to Carnegie Hall?  You’ll find it on Shelbourne Street in Kenmare, Co. Kerry, Ireland.  NK:  http://www.carnegieartskenmare.ie/

4/16

What is this strange light?  Today is improbably sunny, and we drive up and up and then down and down through Macgillicuddy's Reeks, direction Killarney.  It is a very barren and dramatic landscape here among the highest peaks in Ireland, no tree is dumb enough to try and grow up here.  There are just rocks and sheep.  About eight million sheep.  Sometimes they look like rocks but then they move and that's how you know it is a sheep.  It is lambing season here, and I think we can all agree that there is not much cuter than a little lamb trotting about next to its mum.  From the back seat comes:  I see a little silhouette-a of a lamb and we all belt out the Bohemian Rhapsody as we barrel down from the Ladies View, a stunning vista apparently visited by Queen Victoria.   

We meet up with the lovely Kafka-Gibbons ladies - Patty and daughter Charlotte, who happen to also be touring in Ireland this week - at Muckross House, which is a beautifully situated pile in Killarney National Park.  The children enjoy romping in the gardens but think they'll find a house tour boring, and I'm not particularly interested in much that has to with reinforcing misguided ideas about the gentility and nobility of the landowning class (thanks, Malachy McCourt and Harvard!) so we skip it and head on to Ross Castle which was eventually owned by more landlord types but which started out being built by a local chieftain so that exempts it.  Plus which, as a 15th c. tower house, meticulously restored, it is pretty interesting.  Patty compliments our guide Siobhan (so that's how you pronounce that, says Peter) on her ability to navigate the steep, narrow, and very uneven steps of Ross castle in such high heels.  Here we learn about where the word threshold comes from (the step that holds the thresh on the floor in the room), and the unsavory origins of garderobe.  Basically, if you were a 15^th c. Irish chieftain or somesuch, your cloak-like garments would be full of ticks and things when you came in at night.  So you would hang them in the garderobe, which happened to be positioned over the pit into which the refuse from the necessary room fell.  The ammonia created by human waste would rise into the garderobe and kill whatever critters were hanging on your clothes.   End result:  you smelled like pee, but you didn’t have ticks. 

At the Torc Waterfall (way more splendid than those of Dochart by which Bill and I were underwhelmed in Scotland many years ago) Izzy and I have a long discussion about fairies, and what a nice place this would be for them to live in, how they would build their houses, and so forth.  It is mossy and rocky and (today) dappled with sunlight, and really quite perfect for all types of woodland sprites.  Needing to know more about the cultural intersection between fairies and leprechauns, we turn to our local expert Peter, who, not surprisingly, is quite knowledgeable about a whole range of magical creatures.  He might lose his audience when he veers into Norse mythology, except that of course all the beings we are discussion are members of the E(M)U - the European (Magical) Union.  And since Ireland holds the EU presidency this year, it follows that the E(M)U is here as well.  Possibly even at Torc Falls. 

Bill presses us onward down the internal spine of the Ring of Kerry which is high and barren and beautiful, and contains Barfinhinny Lake which could be how you feel after completing that particular portion of the Ring and get down to the coast.

We are all a little tired and cranky but we know that we should usually go where Bill suggests (and he is driving so we don’t have much choice) so we head inland and upland from the coast on a one-track road to the magnificently dramatic remains of the Staigue Fort, a 2,000 year-old circular rampart constructed without one bit of mortar.  The remaining wall is still pretty high, enough to drive me to almost tears of nervousness as my children clamber up the narrow steps like goats (which you don't see a lot of here, surprisingly) ignoring my pleas of NO HIGHER! 

We are very happy to find a laundromat in Kenmare. 

Have I mentioned how cold it is here?  Pretty much any building made out of stone – gaol, tower house, 12^th c. chapel – is colder than the outside, and the ladies rooms are the coldest of all.  And it is crazy windy. 

Speaking of ladies rooms, Isabel confesses to me that she doesn’t like the toilets in Ireland, because the hole is too big.  She is afraid she might fall in. Fortunately for all of us, she manages to keep her seat.

The owner of the grocery store in Kenmare has been in Boston for the marathon apparently.  According to the innkeepers at The Coachman's, he ran a personal best which is good because it got him in about half an hour before the explosions.  Everyone is talking about this, and it is hard to switch your mind off and focus on your travels.

4/17

Today turns out to be a day of driving and wind or maybe we should just say driving wind.  Not that much rain, but so soggy, and the previous night's rain turned the river that runs across the Berea Peninsula into Kenmare Bay into a raging torrent!  And, it ran right beside the road out of Kenmare so that was quite dramatic as in some places it looked like it might breach the low banks of the road.

Have I said what a good driver Bill is?  He's loving shifting, and doing it with his left hand as is natural for him, and all the twisty turny ups and downs and narrow lanes are apparently fun to drive if you like that sort of thing.  Being the passenger on the left is not quite so much fun however, as I am frequently just a little bit too up close and personal with various hedgerows, banks, walls, and now that river. 

Mizen Head is the most south-westerly point of Ireland, and it is indeed a dramatic drive out there.  And once you arrive there, you get to cross a suspension bridge to go to the light, and it is on dramatic cliffs and really spectacular.  Except for today when due to planned maintenance, the power is off so there is no visiting the signal and it is so windy there is no crossing the suspension bridge.  Which is a bummer because the view is enticing from the parking lot, with crashing surf at the bottom of a dramatic cliff, but we know it is better from the light. 

The wind blows us to Skibereen where we encounter baps (which are a kind of soft roll) and a really delicious lemon-rhubarb-almond cake for lunch.  Not without some awareness of the irony, we follow that up with a visit to the local Heritage center which has a fine exhibit on the Famine.  Skibereen was apparently terribly hard hit by this, and the impact was particularly well-documented by visiting do-gooders and journalists and artists, including James Mahoney, whose pictures in the Illustrated London News did much to raise international awareness of the disastrous conditions.   We learn many Famine facts from the gruesome – young Tom Guerin, assumed dead and placed in the mass grave, only to bust his way out and live into his eighties, with a limp likely caused by his mum breaking his legs so he'd fit in the coffin – to the obscure – among the larger donors to famine relief were the expected (Queen Victoria) and the less-so (the Choctaw nation).

The lady at the Skibereen Heritage Center was awfully friendly, as most Irish are, but we think it may also have to do with the fact that there is not much going on at the Skibereen Heritage Center this time of year.

You have probably figured this out, but the Famine drove land reform – at a minimum, when your population reduces by almost a third through death and emigration, that will get rid of a lot of smallholders – and land reform went hand-in-hand with nationalism, whence cometh the great patriots of the late 19th and early 20th c., so you can see where this goes, straight back to our history lessons from Malachy McCourt and the Kilmainham Gaol.

But we are leaving the tragedies of the modern era for a moment and are going farther back in time, to the Drombeg Stone Circle, a 3,000 year old stone circle set upon a nice hilltop in the middle of some very soggy fields which are almost flattened by those screaming winds.  In addition to the stone circle, there are also remains of a hut and complex cooking system, and it is a tidy and compact little site.  When the area was excavated in 1957, archaeologists did experiments with the water trough and stone found in it, and determined that 70 gallons of water could be heated to boiling in 18 minutes, by adding very hot stones.  We, on the other hand, have a very hard time remaining upright in the wild winds, so we beat a measured retreat to our car. 

The Celtic Knot:  you may think this is an ancient design element, but in fact it is what happens to Isabel's hair in the wind.

The wind blows us to Ballymaloe House, which proves to be my fantasy of country house living come to life.  Right down to the candles guttering in the drafts from the wind that rattles the huge and beautiful windows in their frames, and the flickering electric power during the evening.  But some tea by the fire in the drawing room, sets us up rawther nicely, as does the delicious five-course dinner consisting of salad, baked oysters for me and house-smoked salmon for Bill, roast duck and lamb and local hake and kassler (which, yes, is kässler ripchen, aka smoked pork loin), and a sample of lovely local cheeses and our children’s introduction to that glory of the UK dinner event:  the dessert trolley.  I swoon in particular over a rhubarb and custard tart, and blood oranges in caramel sauce.  Because you know, you can have more than one dessert when it comes from a trolley.

4/18

And the hits just keep on coming from Ballymaloe at breakfast.  After the obligatory expressions of concern and sympathy about Boston from the charming waitress, we check out the offerings set up for self-service which are:

Fresh squeezed – and it is the real deal – OJ and pink grapefruit juice

Several different kinds of stewed fruit, including rhubarb, “breakfast fruits” (prunes and apricots), and apples with sweet geranium

Some mueslis, which I don’t like but Bill does, and the one with fresh apple delighted our friends the next morning

Yogurt from a local dairy

A discreet jar of cornflakes

A great vat of deliciously salty porridge, flanked by a pitcher of milk (pfft!) and one of yellow cream (yeah!), and a dish of dark dark brown sugar

Various home-baked breads – brown, raisin, soda, etc.

Scones

Tubs of jewel-like jams incl. marmalade, black currant, and rhubarb ginger, all homemade, natch

A great Mizen Head of yellow butter

Once you’ve loaded up from there a few times, the nice lady hands you a menu of cooked items – eggs, sausages, rashers, black and white puddings, kippers, fresh fish of the day, broiled mushroom and tomahto – and says, “now, what would you like for breakfast?”  After which you are brought yet more toast, and eggs with practically orange yolks and the freshest fish ever, and tasty sausages and rashers of bacon.  Did I mention the gallons of tea that you can have to wash all of this down? 

It is with some reluctance that we leave the breakfast table, relieved only by the fact that we get to come back tomorrow.

Peter, Izzy, and I explore while Bill deals with his unfortunate wind-driven occurrence of the previous day – his car door blew open and smashed the side-view mirror of the car next to ours, which turned out to belong to one of the very nice young women who work here.[1]  Here’s what we find:

- the “bird sanctuary” which appears to be mostly for crows and ducks,

- some picturesquely muddy piggies,

- the vast kitchen garden

and

- some massive antlers from an Irish Elk, a species which went extinct either 17,000 or 7,700 years ago depending on your source.  The 10-foot-wide rack was found on the grounds around 1700  and has hung in the front hall of the house since.  According to the house history, around 1700 is also when a dwarf named Chuff was part of the household. 

We finally roll into Cobh (pronounced Cove, unless you are Peter, in which case it remains Cobb-huh) late in the morning, for a rendezvous with our travelling pals Andy[2] and Laurent at the Lusitania memorial.  This is directly across the street from the Titanic Experience[3], and a half-block from the Titanic memorial for yes, that is the tragic history of Cobh:  it was the last port of call for the Titanic before she began her ill-fated crossing. Cobh was a great port of embarkation for lots of folks travelling to the US, but tragically it was also the final destination for many of the victims of the Lusitania, which was torpedoed not far offshore.  She sank in 18 minutes, with 1,189 souls, and just 789 survivors.  The memorial is beautiful, and is not only for the dead but for the living who strove mightily to save those whom they could, and who recovered the hundreds of bodies that are buried in mass graves outside of town.  But we can’t quite escape – the pained and exhausted faces of the rescuers sculpted here surely reflect the emotions of the first responders in Boston on Monday. 

We are determined to complete the Lusitania Experience by visiting the mass graves in the Old Church Graveyard, but drive in about fourteen circles around the same square kilometer of Cobh before we finally realize – thank you Google Maps – that it is in fact about a klick and a half out of town.  A highlight of this adventure was the app. 75 point turn that Bill had to make, with the assistance of a giggling Peter marking distance to walls, to get out of the lane in which we ended up when we lost Andy and Laurent. 

Amazingly we all end up at the right place at the same time, several expensive international text messages later, as Andy says.  But this is a great graveyard.  It is terribly crammed, and bleak and weathered and windy with scudding clouds and rain drops, and has a ruined church with 17^th and 18^th c. graves, and of course the stark rocks that just say LUSITANIA on top of great patches of bare green grass.  We search in vain for the grave of the late Jack Doyle, a heavyweight fighter of the 1930s, great of talent and looks, and an Irish tenor of note to boot, but also a great one for the drink and the ladies.  Doyle was a great star who burned out fast.  He died a pauper, having spent a fair amount of his post-fight life in and out of jail for penury, and for beating people up.  Per the little biography on the cemetery map at the gate, our Jack was brought down by his great flaw: “a serious lack of purpose.” 

And now comes our serendipitous Ireland moment.  We decide to head for Ballycotton, an apparently picturesque fishing village not far from Ballymaloe House.  You should follow Bill, I said to Andy and Laurent, he’s a GREAT guide.  And indeed, he gets us back to the highway and off again . . . and then the fun begins.  Off we go, merrily toodling down country lanes, then, oops, ending up at our hotel, and following the signs to Ballycotton, which take us, ha ha, in a circle back to Ballymaloe House AGAIN.  We are toodling down more country lanes, not quite so merrily this time, although the backseat finds this all riotously funny.  Finally we reach Ballycotton, and make everyone get out of the car.  Andy wants a cup of tea, Peter just wants to go back to the hotel, but we force-march everyone down to the breakwater, where yes, it begins to rain.  I forbid anyone from going out on the slippery breakwater in the rain, sounding an awful lot, according to Andy, like a mom.  As we debate what to do, the rain ends.  The sun comes out.  And so does the double rainbow arcing perfectly over the little fishing port, ending just below us in the bay, so close that Peter thinks he might just be able to swim out to that pot o’ gold.  Well, okay then, that was pretty great. 

Dinner is at yet another new-Irish-local-ingredient temple called Sage in Midleton, and features an unpronounceable-ly named stout, some local chorizo (really), a fine monkfish, and steaks that Peter and Laurent pronounce excellent.

I am awakened overnight by repeated Harvard message-me emergency text alerts and Cambridge police code reds, updating me on the manhunt in our hometown.  It is unsettling to say the least, to know that all of this is happening in real time, but to be following it in the conservatory because that is the only place there is wifi here.

4/19

I swear to god that my breakfast cod had been swimming an hour earlier, it was that fresh.

After another brilliant breakfast at Ballymaloe, we are off to Lismore Castle and its lovely gardens, which are really all that you can see because the castle is actually the Irish home of Lord Burlington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire, for whom there will definitely be no tag days. 

It is kind of grey today, which does not do the harbor town of Dunvargan any favors, nor does the driving in circles to find parking or the search for lunch.  But we come to ground at a portside pub called the Moorings, which features an outstanding fried plaice in a convivial pubby setting. 

We are now in a bit of a rush so have to give the nearby headland a miss, along with the supposedly charming town of Youghal (pronounced y’all), because we have a scheduled Experience at the Jameson Distillery at four p.m. 

All the Jameson whiskey in the world is made right here in Midleton, but now it is made in a shiny new plant next door to the picturesque 18^th c. distillery buildings where it was made until 1975.  And let me tell you, they are mighty proud of their product.  We learn about the malting of the barley, see the giant waterwheel that once turned the millstones, drop our jaws at the vast vats where the initial fermentation took place, and take many pictures of the beautiful, giant copper potstills – the largest in the world – where the actual distilling occurred.  We learn that Irish whiskey is so good because it is triple distilled, which makes it particularly smooth.  The Scots only double-distill, and we Yanks are apparently in such a rush to get to our booze that we only distill it once. 

We are all particularly intrigued by the barrels.  While there is still a master cooper (along with a master distiller and a master blender), they don’t make their own barrels anymore.  Rather, they import them from Spain (where they once held sherry), Portugal (port), and the US (bourbon).  In the US, distillers can only use a barrel once, so once they’re done, they send ‘em to Ireland where they can be used three times.  And once they’re done in Ireland, they go to Cuba for rum, in an interesting variation on the Atlantic trade.  It is the master blender’s job to produce a consistent product by blending from all the casks, which of course impart a particular flavor.  Irish whiskey also has to be aged a minimum of three years by law, but your basic Jameson is four and a half to five years.  We view samples of various ages, all the way up to 30 years, which costs 5000 euro a bottle. 

You know who really paid attention during this whole tour, and can rattle off all kinds of facts related to whiskey making?  Isabel.  So if you want to know how Jameson is made, ask her.

At the end of the tour, you get a sample, of course – soft drinks for the wee ones.  And if you raise your hand, you might get picked for the Special Tasting, which, amazingly, Andy, Laurent, and I all do.  While we hope there will be a taste of the 30-year-old, in fact our task is to compare Jameson with some scotch (Johnnie Walker Black) and some bourbon (Jack Daniels).  This is a hard job, but we are up to the challenge, and we all dutifully proclaim the Jameson the smoothest.  For our troubles, we are given certificates proclaiming us Master Tasters, which we brandish with great authority.  And another sample, which I take with some ginger beer and lime which is mighty tasty, so all in all we are a very jolly group making our way back to Ballymaloe. 

I think that Ballymaloe is like Brigadoon.  It exists in a parallel universe where everything is gracious and delicious and beautiful, and you drop in on it and experience this for a while and then you return to your modern, industrial, less-locavore, faster-paced and vaguely less congenial life while at Ballymaloe they just carry on serving stewed apples with sweet geranium and smoked salmon and tea in the conservatory.  If you are lucky enough to land there on a Friday night, you will enjoy the zenith of the Ballymaloe dining experience, which is the seafood hors d’oeuvre buffet.  This takes the place of the first course at dinner on Fridays, and here’s how it works.  You go into the small red dining room, and take a plate and stand expectantly around a small but laden table while a spritely lass explains to you that there is:

Leek salad

Two kinds of beetroot salad

Potato salad

Dressed eggs (we’d call them deviled)

Various relishes and pickles of cucumbers, carrots, and some homemade mayo

Oysters on the half shell

Head-on shrimp just like our Maine shrimp

Steamed teeny clams and mussels

Picked crab salad with fennel seed

Salmon rillettes

Smoked salmon

Smoked halibut

Vol-au-vents filled with creamed smoked haddock

Two kinds of smoked mackerel – hot-smoked and cold-smoked

Cod with a green sauce

Smoked mackerel pate on little rounds of cucumber

Smoked mussels in a mustard vinaigrette

Pork rillettes

Country pate (pork)

Pork and chicken pate

Chicken and bacon galantine

Chicken liver pate

I’ll have to run this list by Bill to see if I forgot anything.

We take the server at her word that we shall have to come back for seconds.  We can barely stop eating to talk about how marvelous this all is.  Even Isabel enjoys the smoked salmon, while Peter maturely tackles his deviled eggs with a knife and fork.

After this you might have a bit of onion and thyme soup, and then perhaps some lamb that appears completely well-done but is perhaps the tastiest and tenderest lamb you’ve ever eaten.  And let’s not forget the cheese, and the dessert trolley which tonight features a banana-toffee roulade that my husband so loved, he has requested it for his next birthday, and a passion fruit posset (that’s like a light pudding) and a prune and Armagnac tart, and some stewed rhubarb.  And did I mention the beautiful bowl of ice with flowers frozen into it that contains ice cream balls?  I have to confess that dinner tonight completely fells me to the point where I cannot entirely enjoy breakfast the next morning, which is quite disappointing.  But I think about it all the way home.

4/20

All journeys must come to an end, and ours does today.  We have a long drive up to Dublin, although it features a serendipitous stop for the loo where we also find a 13^th c. chapel ruin that has little ponies running around in it!  I frantically spend euros in the airport, and am consoled about leaving just a little by Daniel Craig in Skyfall on the flight home. 

Here’s the best thing about Ireland:  I never had a bad cup of tea.  Ever.  Even on Aer Lingus, the tea from the carafe is perfectly fine.  I think that a good cup of tea says a lot about a country. 

---

[1] Niceness is not limited to Ballymaloe. Upon learning that we’d left a) the (borrowed) camera in the taxi and b) Isabel’s beloved bluebie blanket in bed, the staff at Buswells promptly bundled it all up and shipped it to Ballymaloe where it awaited us when we arrived. 

[2] We are so happy to be spending yet another fun vacation with Andy, who is featured in our Rome journal, Roma 2011, and was an integral part of our London adventure in 2009.  Now he comes with the “really smart” (per Isabel) and thoroughly delightful Laurent. 

[3] There are a lot of Experiences in Ireland.  We could have gone to Dublinia, an Experience in Viking Dublin (but we didn’t, put off by those splash tours as we were) and we will go to the Jameson Experience.  We skipped the Ewe Experience, seen on the road between Kenmare and Mizen Head.  Kilmainham Gaol was an experience, but it wasn’t an Experience.