2016

I started the year off by spending the Holiday Season in Arizona and California.  My cousin and her husband took me to see Diana Ross on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day I was able to see the Rose Parade in Pasadena where they live.  

In Arizona my friend Jan and I went to the Grand Canyon for a few days which was amazing.  It is a spectacular place and although it was chilly we spent a whole day going from one fantastic lookout. spot to the next. 

I also was able to see a Seattle Seahawks football game with my friend Kerri when they played the Arizona Cardinals which was really fun, especially because we won the game. 

I didn’t go traveling during the winter because my friends from Paraguay came the first of March, after a few days in Disneyland. We did a whirlwind tour of Seattle in the few days they were here and spent some time at The Microsoft Museum as they both work in IT jobs.

They left their daughter, Veronica, with me for four months so she could go to school to learn more English. One of the first things we did was go to Alpental Ski Area because she had never seen snow before.

It was fun to have her and she made a lot of new friends from all over the world. It was interesting to see her experience all their different cultures and things she takes for granted are just not available to her friends from Saudi Arabia for example.   I took her all over Seattle and soon she was the tour guide for her friends.  Before she left we went to Port Townsend, the Olympic National Rainforest, down the Washington Coast to Cannon Beach in Oregon, then Portland, and Mount St. Helen’s for the volcanic exhibits before coming home.

When she left in early July I went to Ireland to meet my friends Lise and Renee.  We met several years ago when we walked The Camino de Santiago across Spain and have had several get-togethers over the years. I met them in Dublin where we spent a few days with another Camino friend, Patrick, who lives there and it was really fun to be together once again. 

I really loved Ireland.  The streets are narrow and charming with beautiful old buildings, flowers cascading from window boxes and tons of Irish Pubs. 

We visited Trinity College, Ireland’s most prestigious and oldest University. The main attraction being the library which houses about 200,000 of its oldest volumes including the Book of Kells which contains manuscripts created around AD 800 by monks.  One of the oldest books in the world, it contains the four gospels of the New Testament.  

One morning Lise and I decided to take the tour of the Jameson’s Distillery, which is the original site where their Irish Whiskey was distilled and of course we got to have samples.   

In the afternoon Patrick took us by train to Dunleary, a beautiful suburban seaside town where we spent several hours just walking along the huge pier and hanging out together.  

After leaving Dublin by train we rented a car and began our adventure around The Ring of Kerry, a scenic drive in southwest Ireland.  Our first stop was in Glenbeigh where we stayed in a beautiful B & B on the ocean. 

And then on to Valentia Island, a charming place that is famous because it was chosen as the eastern terminus of the first Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable from Newfoundland, which established the first link between Europe and North America in 1866.  

Our main reason for going there was so we could visit Skellig Michael, a rocky island with an abandoned Christian monastery.  After an orientation you start to climb 600 steps to the top to where there was a settlement of monks founded in the 6^th century. It is a hard climb and as the mist rolls in we  can't see where we came from and feel like we are lost in a kind of mystical environment.

They built beehive like cells varying in size to live in, had vegetable gardens, collected water in cisterns and managed to survive there until the 12^th century when they moved to the mainland.   

It is just amazing to think that people could actually live in that barren environment. It has become more famous now because the final scene of the latest Star Wars Movie was filmed there. 


Continuing around The Ring, along the Wild Atlantic, we ended up in Killarney where I had to say goodbye to them as they were going home and I continued by myself for the next three weeks.  

I spent some time in Cork, then to Cobh where there was a fascinating Heritage Center with great exhibits chronically the famine years when more than 70,000 people left through the port in order to escape starvation.  They also told the story of the prison ships that were sent to Australia and had a video showing the howl of the storm, the roiling sea, the clipper ships and the terrible storms along with exhibits of what the accommodations would have been like on those ships, how long it took to get there and how miserable it must have been.  The port is also famous because it was the final port of call for The Titanic so it tells the story of it setting out on its final journey.
 

On my way back to Cork I was able to see the Blarney Castle set amidst beautiful gardens. I climbed up to the top of the castle to get a look at the famous Blarney Stone. 

I took a day-trip to Waterford because I wanted to see the Waterford Crystal Factory. When you enter the showroom you are greeted by the world’s largest collection of Waterford Crystal.  It is dazzling.  They have been making crystal for 200 years and the guided tour took us thru the process of making the beautiful objects. The etching on this piece took 100 hours. 

From there I headed for Galway where it was very overcast and misty so I never did see ‘the sun go down on Galway Bay’ like the song says. It was Ladies' Day at the races and it was amazing, music,  street musicians, people crammed into the pubs, drinking everywhere, in the park, in the streets, everywhere. And everyone is all dress up, lots of women wearing the little Kate Middleton hats.

I did take a couple of tours, one to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, famous for its fishermen knit sweaters.

and then to The Cliffs of Moher, beautiful vertical limestone cliffs that rise 666 ft (203 m) out of the water in rigid formations.  

I didn’t want to miss the Midlands so I took a daytrip to Athlone to cruise on the famous River Shannon.

 

From there I headed to Londonderry in Northern Ireland. The most interesting excursion from there was to the Giant’s Causeway.  The stones along the shore are amazing as the vast expanse of regular, closely-packed hexagonal stones look so perfectly carved and arranged it is hard to believe it is just a natural phenomenon.  Besides the small stones there are columns of stones all perfectly piled on top of one another and some in stacks of vertical columns resembling a pipe organ.

 

In Belfast I mostly focused on Family History Research at the Public Records Of Northern Ireland where I spent a couple of days going through the old church records which are so old some are hardly legible.  I did find my great, great grandparents’ marriage certificate and a lot more. I wanted to go to the little villages where they were from but because they are so small there was no public transportation.

I finished up with a tour to The Wicklow Mountains.  The area has entirely different landscaping from anything I had seen so I really felt like I saw a lot of Ireland.  That area has the bogs, where they get the peat moss they use for heating their homes.  It is beautiful with tons of purple heather and yellow gorse flowers.

 

I also spent a week with my friend Marie in La Coruna in northern Spain.  I met her in Morocco several years ago and we have spent time together over the years in Spain and California where she has family. We also went to Africa together in 2011.  It was great to relax at her place after my busy time getting from place to place in Ireland.

 

For the rest of the summer I just enjoyed being in Seattle.  In September I went to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon with three friends.  Our plays were mostly in the evening which left our days free to explore.  We went to Crater Lake one day, an absolutely gorgeous place, to Jacksonville another day which is a charming village with great shopping and we took in some wineries.

In October I went to Vancouver for a reunion with my former roommates to celebrate our 50 years of friendship.  We get together each fall and this year I made a dvd of the timeline and all the things we have done together over the years with of course the music of the time.  Our ski cabin days at Mt Baker, our birthday celebrations, our reunions each fall and we have been on cruises together, to Las Vegas, Victoria, and several resorts in Washington and British Columbia.  We had a luncheon and invited friends that have been around with us that long and everyone loved the video.  Then the four of us went to a resort/spa for a few days up the Sunshine Coast to The Painted Boat in Sechelt.

Of course my year wouldn’t be complete without sharing some fun times with my friends Lilia Elena and Kevin and their family.  We just did a trade where the parents come to my house for an overnight and I go there with the kids.  They are growing up so fast.  Robert is in a jazz band this year and I went to a performance a couple of weeks ago and couldn’t believe how terrific they are.  Ana Lilia had her Confirmation this year and got to wear a beautiful white dress which made her look like a little angel. 

So with my Zumba classes, the creative projects I love to do, my friends and keeping my house in good shape the year has just flown by.

I wish you all the best for the coming year and hope you have a wonderful holiday season with family and friends. 

P.S. If you haven’t seen enough photos and you have access to Facebook I have more albums of my travels on Facebook.