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)

Pioneering 2013: A no-electricity adventure

When my husband and I lived on the prairies of Illinois, we were without power occasionally, but never for very long. 

Normally, when we lived near Galesburg, we could hear the transformer “pop” or look out our family room window and see it hanging askew. A call to the power company with the exact location of the problem would bring the sound of a power truck to the road outside our home without much delay.

Later, when we lived south of Bloomington, our power was supplied by a main feeder line that apparently ran somewhere along Historic Route 66 near Lincoln. We were without power once for 36 hours in the dead of winter. It was COLD out. 

We retreated for a while to my brother’s house almost an hour away, and returned home a few hours later to see if the power was back on. Just as we were to head back to my brother’s, the house lit up. 

Believe me, electricity is something we take for granted. Go without it for 75 and three-quarters hours sometime, and you’ll know what I mean. 

That’s how long it took our rural Missouri electric co-op to get to our outage and repair it last week. We were lucky. Some were without power for a day or so longer than we were. 

You know what, though? 

I don’t regret the experience. It brought out the tough in me and in my husband. We survived and we learned from our adventure. Still, we’re not ready to relive it anytime soon. 

I’m a farm kid, so I grew up with occasional power outages, times when the pump on the well malfunctioned, or snows that had us housebound for several days. You learn to prepare if you have time, adapt whether you have warning or not, do without the things you want, and get by with the things you have on hand. 

The culprit responsible for this power outage was a winter storm. It dumped several inches of very wet snow and a bit of ice on mid-Missouri and was accompanied, in some instances, by nasty winds. It knocked out more than half of the power in the 2,300-square-mile area served by our rural electric cooperative. 

In the five days the power company worked to repair all the storm’s damage, its linemen were joined by workers from nearly 20 other utility companies, some who had completed repairs in their own areas before coming to ours. Through it all, the communications team from the coop used social media to keep us apprised of the status, inject a little humor, exude a lot of compassion. 

What did we do to survive, to stay in our home without freezing, suffering the potty woes of the passengers on the recent cruise ship disaster, dehydrating, or starving? 

We planned for it—thanks to the advice of some farm-bred neighbors, my experience as a country kid, a bit of good old common sense, and a dose of Girl Scout preparedness. We had the right stuff—from water and batteries to muscle and persistence. 

Our home has a gas furnace, stove, and water heater, but each of them works in conjunction with electricity. Fortunately, we have a wood burning cast iron stove in our living room, too. 

Our home overlooks a really big lake, but our running water comes from a community well with its pump powered by—you guessed it—electricity. 

So, not only were we without heat and lights, we were without water. 

We had a plan, though. 

For heat, we’d use our wood burning stove. We had some wood cut, split and ready, and more that could be firebox-size with just a little work. We had plenty of matches and, even better, several of those lighters designed for gas or charcoal grills, candles and the like. 

We had a stockpile of candles, several flashlights and a battery-operated camp light or two. We also had extra batteries. 

To cook our food, although the electronic igniter on our stove wouldn’t work, we could turn the burner switches to “ignite” and use a match or lighter. We did. 

Thanks to the advice of a neighbor, we filled our bathtub with water, which we used to flush the toilets. We also had several gallons of drinking water and a little more than a case of individual bottles of water. 

I had books to read and hubby, though he much prefers television, spent time watching the flames in the fire and reading magazines—when he wasn’t splitting or carrying in wood. 

There are a couple things we now have in the house that we didn’t before—larger bottles of hand sanitizer and a tub of diaper wipes for sponge baths. 

This time, we were fortunate that the roads were cleared after a couple days so that we could leave our neighborhood. We were able to shower at a friends’ home and to eat some warm meals at local restaurants when our refrigerated and frozen food began to go bad. Though we had plenty of things like peanut butter, canned foods, crackers and chips, after a couple days, we were longing for a warm meal. 

By the third day, our originally half-filled bath tub was running low, so I’d begun to melt snow on the stove so we could flush toilets. 

The best thing about our adventure was that it gave me a chance to read—an entire book. I chose “Tales from Two Rivers I,” a collection of nostalgic essays written by Illinoisans who were born and grew up in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. 

As I read of young school teachers traipsing through snow, mud and wetlands to get to school in time to fire up the furnace for their students, of people traveling by horse-drawn carriages or in Model T automobiles on rut-filled roads, sometimes overturning or having tires explode, and of all the other trials and tribulations people like my grandparents faced, our little power outage seemed more like an adventure or minor inconvenience than like a catastrophe. 

I realized I had a lot to be thankful for—a roof over my head, a warm home, a hubby willing to split wood and keep the fire stoked, water for flushing and for drinking, and friends who opened their home for a warm shower on a cold day. 

They offered a bedroom, too, but even when the conditions aren’t optimal, there’s just no place quite like home. 

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2013

(Image via)

A legacy of laughter—and of love

It was my first experience with death. I was 10, and our cousin was living with us for the summer, a city kid working on the farm. 

When I awoke that morning, this 15-year-old, had-to-grow-old-too-soon, was bearing the news that our grandfather had taken his last breath as he sat down on the edge of his bed after the 10 o’clock news the previous night. At 71, Grandpa’s life was over in an instant, due to a massive coronary. 

My cousin was in charge for the morning, while my dad took my mother to their hometown to be with my grandma. Together, this young man and I tried to comprehend our loss.

In talking recently with some of my cousins about that time in our life and the days following our grandfather’s death, I found we all have different memories. And, no matter our age at the time, we all saw life a little differently after that day. 

My strongest memory of those days is of one of my younger uncles, who was then in his early thirties. It was a couple mornings after Grandpa’s death, a day or two before his funeral. A number of us were sitting around the big table in Grandma’s even bigger kitchen, with its tall wooden cabinets, often-whirring treadle sewing machine, and heavy iron hand pump. 

I don’t remember for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, over her housedress, Grandma was wearing a homemade, flowered-print bib apron, a few straight pins stuck into the front of the straps, ready and waiting for the next sewing project. She usually did.

It was breakfast time, and the old two-slice toaster under the window on Grandma’s counter was working overtime. 

What a toaster it was! 

I’d never seen one like it before and I’ve never seen one since, but this toaster popped the toast high out of the slots and sent the slices soaring through the air. As kids, it was as exciting to watch that toaster as it was to walk to the small-town Ben Franklin with Grandma, crisp dollar bill clutched in hand. 

This uncle was always quite a clown. My mother tells stories of how, when he was a young lad serving as an altar boy, my uncle would push the paten under her chin to try to make her laugh as she received Holy Communion.

And, yes, even in grief, he knew how to bring joy to the moment. 

As we sat around the kitchen that day, my uncle took my grandmother on his knee. We children had never seen anyone bounce our grandmother on their knees. Soon all three generations were in stitches—and not from the treadle machine on the far wall. 

A few seconds later, the next two slices of bread flew through the air. As my uncle caught the flying toast, his tiny Irish mother balanced on his knee, we giggled more, and all knew that, even in our loss, we had each other. We’d be all right. 

I learned a couple of lessons that day—how much comfort can be found in a family making memories and that a little laughter can go a long way toward soothing hurting hearts. 

Yesterday, my uncle left us to join Grandpa and Grandma. As I stop to remember his life and his legacy, the laughter is once again the thing I remember most. 

He didn’t leave us as quickly as Grandpa did. Cancer took its time in claiming my uncle’s life. 

He fought it with courage, and I’ve no doubt one of the tools in his arsenal was his sense of humor. 

More than 50 years later, hearing the news of a loved one’s passing isn’t any easier, though. 

I love you, Uncle Lyle. Godspeed.  

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2013

(Image via)