The emerald dream: Planning an Irish adventure

Ever have one of those way-out-there dreams—something you wished for a lifetime, but never thought would come true? 

For me—and for my octogenarian mother—the dream was a trip to my maternal grandmother’s ancestral home—Ireland. 

Mother and I first talked of the trip a couple decades ago, but the stars didn’t align to make the trip a reality back then. 

This time they did. Accumulated airline miles helped. A trip such as this is easier to finagle when airfare isn’t in the budget. 

I knew several things going into the trip. 

First, we were limited in our choice of dates. We needed to schedule our flight quickly once we decided we were going so that we could arrive in Ireland in decent weather, but before higher in-season tour rates and lodging prices applied.

Two, I didn’t want to drive in a country which allegedly had narrow winding roads (ironic considering I live in Missouri, where such roads are commonplace), some big cities and where people drove on the “wrong side” of the road. 

Three, we knew that we didn’t want to miss seeing County Limerick, from which we knew some of our ancestors emigrated during the potato famine of the mid-1800s. (The accompanying photo is of the Famine Memorial along the River Liffey in Dublin.)

A diligent researcher, I spent hours on the Internet, pouring over train and bus schedules, looking at hotel and bed and breakfast websites, and pondering over tour company itineraries. The more I looked, the less confident I felt that I could plan the trip and the more overwhelmed I became. 

“What if I booked a trip or a room and the website I chose was a scam?” I wondered. “How on earth would I know from here in the States what company over there was legit?” 

Finally, I cashed in a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” chip—I phoned a friend. 

One of my high school classmates has made several trips to Ireland, with her dad, her mom, siblings and friends. If there was anyone I trusted in steering me right, it was my Irish classmate. 

Her advice: “Mom and I went on a CIE bus tour. It was great, especially for a first-time visit.”

Whew! I had that decision out of the way. 

Now I was back to the drawing board to find a trip that went where we wanted to go—along the coast of southern Ireland and to Limerick during the dates we’d be in country. The coastal trip wasn’t a problem. We could see the sites we wanted to see—the Cliffs of Moher, the Ring of Kerry, Blarney Castle and County Cork—but Limerick wasn’t on any itinerary that would fit our schedule. 

So what did I do? I planned a side trip—on my own. I just had to find a little village in Limerick that was easily accessible using public transportation and that had the charm we always imagined our “homeland” to hold. 

I found it—the village of Adare—and it didn’t disappoint. I also scheduled one extra day on our own in Dublin before we left the country. I was glad I did.

In my next post, I’ll share what went into preparing for the trip and some of the ways we found to make our travel easier—here in the States, in the air and on the Emerald Isle. 

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2013 (Words and image)

An emerald dream come true

What’s on your wish list? Are there people you want to meet, things you want to try, places you want to visit? 

For me, it’s all of the above and more. 

Some people say dreams are more likely to come true if you write them down. I tend to believe it. 

A few years ago, a friend of mine created a ‘50 at 50’ list. Over the next few years, I watched as she made one after another of her dreams reality. 

It took me a while, but eventually I created my own list. Each year, I cross off the dreams I’ve seen come true, replace the ones that aren’t important to me anymore and add enough to make the number of dreams equal to number representing my most recent birthday. I’m working on 60 at 60 for a couple more weeks; then it will be time to look at the list once again. 

Recently, I crossed off a big one – one of the biggest, perhaps. I went to Ireland – and so did my mother. We talked about going a number of years ago, but one thing after another seemed to get in the way, and we didn’t make the trip back then. 

This time, thanks to lots of free airline miles, my mother and I were able to cross the Atlantic for nothing. Once there, we had expenses, of course, but the overall cost was considerably less than it would have been had we had to pay for our air fare. 

I think both of us have held a little piece of this dream in our hearts for most of our lives. 

My mother’s mother, full-blooded Irish, was always proud of her heritage. Her ancestors had come from the Emerald Isle, most during the potato famine. One young married couple lost their first-born daughter on the overseas journey. Like many of her day, little Mary was buried at sea. 

Mother grew up hearing this and other stories from my grandma and great-grandmother. Grandma and mother shared them with me. 

Through the years, I think Mother and I imagined that Ireland must surely have been a magical place. We longed to see it and painted it in our imaginations brighter than the gold in a leprechaun’s pot. 

From the moment we stepped off the plane, and I suggested we kiss the ground for Grandma’s sake, (we didn’t, though) to the time when we stepped from the Dublin airport floor back onto the ramp to our Boeing 767, we felt as if we were living a dream. And, indeed we were.

In coming blog posts, I’ll share snippets of the places we visited, the sites we saw, the people we met. 

Was the dream worth the effort, the experience all we’d hoped, the time the gift we thought it would be? 

Absolutely! 

What’s your dream? 

First, imagine it. Then, put it down on paper. Next, work to make it come true. All you’ve got left to do after that is to savor it. 

We sure did. 

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2013 (Words and image)

It didn’t used to be this complicated

It used to be pretty easy -- going potty, that is. 

When I was a kid visiting my grandparents’ farm and decided to use the outhouse instead of the indoor bathroom, I had but two choices to make – whether to sit on the adult-sized potty hole, where I had to tense the muscles in my arms to brace myself and keep from falling in, or on the child-sized hole, which I was soon to outgrow. Then, business taken care of, I had another choice to make – corn cob or Sears Roebuck catalog. One was scratchy, the other so slick it was as if I hadn’t wiped at all. Of the two, though, each had its benefits, depending upon the outhouse business that trip. 

Today, bathrooms are way too complicated. 

C’mon, admit it. You know what I mean.  Be it the sink, stool, soap dispenser, towel machine, waste receptacle, door or hot air dryer, you never know from one potty stop to the next what you’ll need to do, how things will work. 

On a recent road trip through Illinois and Missouri, many of those miles traveled along Route 66, I made more pit stops than I’d like to admit – at fast food restaurants, highway rest stops and super discount stores. It seemed as if at every stop, I had to re-learn going to the bathroom. 

Seriously now, how did it get so confusing? 

Take toilets, for instance. 

Some flush when you get up, some don’t. Of the flush-when-you’re-done variety, some do it right away, some wait until the next person is through the door, seeing the evidence you left behind before it all swooshes away – if it does. Some stools supposed to flush on their own don’t do as intended. When that happens, you’ve got to figure out what to do – move your hand back and forth in front of the electric eye or push a button. If there’s a button, where is it – top or side, black or chrome? 

And, with it all so automated these days, it’s becoming easier and easier to just plain forget to flush at all. Occasionally, though, you will still run across a toilet with a lever, especially at home, where the next person in the bathroom knows your name and can nab you as the “who-done-it” when you do forget to flush.

In this little piece, we won’t even talk toilet paper dispensers or stall doors. They seem to be the least complicated of any of this stuff these days. 

But, hand-washing – what a challenge it’s become! 

Does the water go on by itself or do you have to push or turn something? If it is automatic, where exactly do you need to hold your hands to get the water flowing? If you have to push the faucet on, does it go off by itself, or will it still be running when you’re 10 miles down the road? 

We women must be a bit ahead of the men on the receiving end of restroom technology – that or we visit more restrooms. The other day, my hubby told me he’d just run across his first automatic soap dispenser.  

What about those things? Did you ever mistake one for the faucet? I’ll admit it. I have.

As for the regular soap dispensers, how often have you tried to use one, only to find it’s empty and, instead, there’s a bottle of dollar store soap on the counter – or nothing at all? Or you go to lather up with soap and discover you’ve used the antiseptic hand sanitizer by mistake? 

Come time to dry your hands, all the confusion often begins anew. Is the dispenser automatic or isn’t it? 

Automatic? Where do you hold your hand for the dispenser to kick the towel out? 

Manual? Do you turn a dial, pull down – or what!? 

Is it one of those bathrooms with fabric towels? Ewww! How many germs are breeding there?

Or perhaps there’s an electric hand dryer. 

Now you’ve got to figure out whether to push a button or not, hold your hands here or hold them there, wait for them to get blown to kingdom come or wonder if the air is coming out at all. 

About to go out the door, if said bathroom is one with towels, you’ve got another dilemma.

Is there a wastebasket? Is it in the counter, under it, beside it, or across from it? What kind of gymnastics do you have to do to open the door with the towel, brace it with your shoulder, and reach back around without touching anything to toss the paper? It isn’t easy sometimes, is it? 

To make things even more complicated, some of these bathroom doors have a pedal on the bottom. It’s supposed to open the door – great idea. No cooties after you wash your hands. There’s just one last problem here. It seems like you need a Ph.D. in restroom innovation to know how to work it. 

Next time I’m road tripping, I may just forgo all the potty stops and try to find an old abandoned farmstead. 

In my dreams it will be as simple as they get. Out back I’ll find a one-hole outhouse with a yellowed phone book for toilet paper and, somewhere nearby, a pump with a bar of lye soap, hole in the center, hanging from a string. 

As for the towels, who needs ‘em? 

It’ll be a lot less complicated if I just shake my hands dry as we did back in the good old days.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012  

(Image via)

It’s all about enthusiasm

But a lot of hard work helps too – and a little talent – and some encouragement. Don’t forget the right environment, a nurturing community, a fan or two, and, oh, yeah, some family support. 

About a decade and a half ago, my husband and I moved to a small town on Route 66 in Central Illinois – a town where everyone wore purple, without the red hats.

It didn’t take us long to learn, back there in the last half of the final decade of the twentieth century, that the move we’d made was to a football town – and a pretty good one at that. Seriously, that town was so into football that it seemed 95 percent of its residents were under the Friday night lights. The rest of town looked like a ghost town during those games.

Now, I’ve never understood football – and I probably never will – but I lived for those games, partly because my daughter was in the high school band and I love being a band parent, partly because it’s really fun to see your team take off, get bunches of touchdowns and go into post-season play year after year. 

There was one thing, though, that I really loved about those games – not a thing, but a person. It was the team’s water boy, the coach’s son. 

That little kid, who must have been nine or 10 at the time, ran out on the field with that carrier of water bottles as if his life depended on it, as if the game depended on it, as if it were the most important job in the world, as if he loved being a water boy. 

And, maybe he did.

But, as I’ve watched this little guy grow into a man and followed his career in his hometown paper and mine halfway across the state, I think maybe what he loves even more is that game – football. 

And what he has, as much as talent, as much as determination, as much as the love of the game is enthusiasm.

As a quarterback at that high school with the purple uniforms and later at a college that donned red, Alex Tanney played football, the same way he carried those water bottles – as if his life depended on it, as if the game depended on it, as if it were the most important job in the world, as if he loved being a quarterback.

I think he does.

This week, the Lexington Minutemen and Monmouth Scots legend, the record-breaking player, viral video sensation signed to play professional football with the Kansas City Chiefs. 

I still don’t understand that game, and I doubt that a small-town boy making the big time will help my sports literacy. 

And, too, as much as I like that poem that says, “When I grow old, I shall wear purple with a red hat,” I’ve never donned the two together, hesitant to join a group which conforms on such a non-conformist concept. 

But come fall, you never know -- you just may see me wearing my purple Lexington sweatshirt with a red Kansas City Chiefs hat. 

If anything can make me wear purple and red together, it might be this guy. 

Don’t be surprised, though, as he’s running out onto the field in a great big stadium, and I’m watching at home on the television, when you look in my eyes, you’ll see I’m a million miles away. I have a feeling that instead of an NFL quarterback, I’ll see that big, strong man shrunk kid-size again running with water bottles out to the huddle. I’ll be remembering that cool little kid.

Congratulations, Alex. Way to go!

A little blog begins a big new journey

This is a scary, happy kind of time for me. A blog that was conceived as a musing on a two-lane highway more than a dozen years ago starts out on a new adventure.

Like the mother I was years ago watching my kindergartners, their tiny little legs climbing great big bus steps, the “Mommy” looking on as the door shut and the yellow monster rounded the corner, I can’t help but wipe away a tear or two. They’re tears of fear for what this new little blog may encounter and tears of joy for what it might become – and, yes, tears of relief that we’ve made it to this point.

My words come back to the pages where they first earned a byline in 1998, at the newspaper that Abraham Lincoln said “was always my friend,” The State Journal-Register. (Actually, he said “The Journal paper…” but that paper lives on in this one today.)

My blog will join those of veteran journalists and other bloggers on the newspaper’s website – and I’m as giddy as a junior-high girl peeking around the corner at the boy of her dreams.

If this is the first time you’ve read my words, welcome. If you read some of them before on the SJ-R Books page, on my Lincoln Buff 2 bicentennial blog, through social media, or in a publication or on a website for which I have written professionally, thanks for joining me again.

This adventure is nearly as new for me as it is for you. “Musings on Route 66” was born as 2012 opened its eyes, born to be a place where I could write about the things that tug at me, where I could share my passions with others.

I’ll tell you about aspects of Illinois history and literature that move me. I’ll write about things that touch me as a baby boomer. I’ll share stories of sensational beings and simple things, including stories about my second-favorite state, Missouri. And, from time to time, I’ll write about that two-lane road that stirred these musings in the first place – or I’ll just “muse” about something that won’t go away until I get it written down.

I’m a lifelong “word nerd,” so I’ll also write about books and quotes that I love or believe are worth sharing.

Because those same words give me great pleasure as a writer, I’ll talk about the craft. My words didn’t get to this page by themselves. Along the way, I had many fine mentors and writers – known well and little-known – encouraging me even when they didn’t realize it, sharing their pointers and guiding the way.

Now, it’s my turn. If you’re a writer or writer wannabe, you’ll want to visit the “Wanna be a writer?” section of my blog for tips that can help guide you as they have me.

If you dropped in today out of curiosity, why don’t you pretend like you’re Mike and Frank from “American Pickers”? Snoop around, climb in the attic, look in the corners. You just never know what might turn up. And, once you head down the road, don’t stay gone long. You never know what new old treasures you might find the next time you drop in.

Thanks for stopping by.

As The Beverly Hillbillies said back in this boomer’s younger days, “Y’all come back, y’hear?”

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

(Image via)

Meet Robert Waldmire

When I think of Route 66, I think of one man, Robert (Bob) Waldmire, and his VW bus. Waldmire was an artist. His subject was the Mother Road.

Waldmire spent much of his life traveling the highway, capturing its heart and soul in his work, living in his vehicle.

As he was nearing the end of his life, the Chicago Tribune interviewed Waldmire in the converted school bus he called home.

I never met Bob Waldmire, but I have always been convinced that if I had, I would have liked him. We’ve got a common bond. I don’t know about “kicks”, but I think we both agree we got our ideas on Route 66.

(Video via)

Text © Ann Tracy Mueller 2012