A Weekend in the West - from Ben Bulben to Loop Head

Ben Bulben from a hill in Sligo town

 Two weekends back we went for a short break to the West of Ireland - hubby had a meeting in Sligo so I went along. We stayed in the Clarion in Sligo town and had booked in a few weeks earlier, so imagine our disappointment on arrival to find our room on the second floor offered a view of...the airvents of the hotel! There was no way at their prices we were going to stay put and even though the Irish are notoriously bad at complaining we were moved up a floor after a phone call. This was a bit better as we could at least see over the airvents to see the iconic table mountain, Ben Bulben, famed in poetry by Yeats "Under Bare Ben Bulben's Head".

The (first) room with a view in the Clarion Hotel Sligo!

As we were only staying a night in Sligo we had a lovely meal in the hotel, and a few drinks in the bar. The journey up had taken over four hours so we weren't ready for a night out in Sligo town, and the hotel was a bit too far for a stroll to town by my reckoning. The following day after the meeting ended our time was our own so we drove around some of the renowned beauty spots of the area - Lough Gill with the Lake Isle of Innisfree famed again by the prolific WB Yeats in his eponymous poem, and Glencar Waterfall which is actually in Co. Leitrim! These were two places I'd often heard of but never visited before, so it was an opportunity not to be missed. Never mind that it drizzled and was a typical Irish misty day, muggy and close but deceptively wetting, as you can see in some of the photos. Val, who lives in Sligo, blogged as Magnumlady the week after of the same places we'd seen only her trip was in glorious sunshine, so you can see in her blog how it can look in fine weather.

Lough Gill Co. Sligo

Lough Gill in the mist.

We drove down through Mayo and into Galway in very inclement weather, after a loop round Strandhill and Knocknarea, with Queen Maeve's burial mound at the top, visible for miles around, and bade farewell to Ben Bulben, which will always be Sligo to me, since I first saw it in 1976 when I went to a number of weddings in Sligo of nursing colleagues who were quick off the blocks and got hitched as soon as they finished nursing school.

The trip through Mayo was blighted by the bad weather so we amused ourselves with taking photos of funny signs - the poll topper being the one for the Cowdung Festival, closely followed by the Enniscrone Black Pig Festival, which takes place not too far from Muddy Burn's pub! We arrived in Galway by early evening and checked into the Harbour Hotel, which we'd booked on the way down from Sligo - thank heaven for smartphones with apps like TripAdvisor! The hotel was nice and we'd another lovely meal. There's something about arriving in a new hotel after a day on the road that never loses its appeal, whether it's after a day's driving or hitch-hiking as we did in our youth, or a day trekking in the hills as we did in our backpacking days in India and Nepal, and indeed Africa, though that was less so as we had kids then and couldn't be as free and easy as when we were on our own. Now we've come full circle, as we're back to just the two of us - our teen queen is at the stage where hols with parents are total anathema unless mitigated by the presence of a handful of peers, such as when we hit Dublin for Summerjam 2011!

Parke's Castle, Lough Gill, Co. Sligo

Sunday morning dawned bright and sunny and we had an early breakfast, followed by a relaxing walk through a sleepy Galway city centre - through Spanish Arch and along Shop St. to Eyre Square which I hadn't seen since the controversial revamp a few years ago. There are some seriously odd pieces in the Square, of dubious artistic or cultural merit, so I can see why the revamp was not universally acclaimed. Padraic O'Conaire, the writer whose statue marked a meeting point in the Square and a photo-op for every tourist who sat on his little lap, has vanished to the confines of a nearby museum. In his stead is part of the facade of a merchant's house from the 18th Century, and a very modernistic Galway Hooker - no, not that, we're talking the type of schooner famous in this neck of the woods!

Glencar Waterfall, Co. Leitrim

Onwards to the final leg of our weekend jaunt - we decided to take the scenic route through Co. Clare and hug the coastal road as far as possible, which was a fabulous trip as the sun shone and we had a lovely day. Through southern Galway and around by Kinvara and the Burren, the famous limestone scarp in Clare. We didn't follow Corkscrew Hill, which would have taken us inland, so we stayed coastal after Ballyvaughan and headed down towards the Cliffs of Moher - we passed the tourist trap of the Cliffs, as it was just too packed with busloads of tourists, and there seemed to be a people jam on the way to the Interpretive Centre which is the gateway to the cliffs. The last time I was there was in 1998 with my mother and three youngest kids, and it was just park the car and you were off on your own up the cliff path and prayed that the wind wouldn't blow you over the edge! There was a barrier fence but it was rudimentary and quite low.

We decided to head for Kilkee and go to Loop Head instead - and were delighted to see unspoilt beauty in West Clare, particularly Loop Head which is like a mini-Moher - cliffs with about half the height but all the wild ruggedness that Moher had before crass commercialism took priority - and there was a splendidly vertiginous sea stack - a breakaway cliff that stood alone and parallel to the cliff we were on - and it was not a place for the faint-hearted or anyone with a fear of heights. There's a lighthouse on Loop Head open to the public but we were a little late for that so we just walked off on a lovely clifftop walk, and looked across to the Aran Islands which are best reached from Co. Clare even though they are part of Co. Galway.

Jan and me in the mist at Glencar Waterfall - soaked!

Something for the weekend!

We enjoyed the drive home through the Limerick Tunnel, bypassing the city, and were back home by 8 or so - in good time for a rest before I returned to work the following day, well refreshed after my two week staycation. Enjoy the photos - they're all taken with my iPhone which has made my poor camera well-nigh redundant.

Muddy Burns pub in Co. Mayo

Somewhere in Sligo or Mayo!

Spanish Arch, Galway

Galway signs

Árd Rí = High King - Galway

Nice juxtaposition of speciality treatments!

Merchant's House facade in Eyre Sq. Galway

A Galway Hooker - sort of - Eyre Sq. Galway

Cliffs of north Clare

North West Clare looking out to Inishere Aran Islands

Cliffs at Loop Head, Co. Clare - with sea arches and caves.

Sea cliff caves Loop Head.

Closer view of Sea Arches, Loop Head.

Closer view of Cliffs and Arches Loop Head

Sea Stack off Loop Head - hard to get closer cos of Cliff Edge!

The Big Knit - Little Hats with an Innocent Twist

Up the Deise! The Waterford Colours!

Oh dear I have been such a dreadfully bad blogger lately but now I am on holidays for the next fortnight I have a chance to catch up with no real excuse. Nothing much planned as we are not going abroad on hols this year and we will probably go to Dublin for a few days. Meanwhile the weather is pretty awful - today's the August Bank Holiday Monday and it's a steady Irish Mist outside. Temps equally miserable - 14C - and I have been trying to cycle a bit more than I had been doing in prep for the50km leg of the Seán Kelly Challenge end of August. 

Enough excuses for my non-blogging. Reason for this post is to tell you about the latest crafty business I've been getting up to - a fundraising initiative for charity, namely the Innocent Big Knit for Age Action Ireland. This is my first year participating but it's been on before. The idea is to make little hats for Innocent Smoothie bottles and then they donate €0.25 for every hat and bottle sold. So it's a win-win- Innocent get to sell smoothies ethically and the buyers get a feel-good factor from a) buying a smoothie which is ostensibly good for you and b) supporting a deserving cause. There are patterns on the Website to download and you can join in and post them off by October 14th 2011 if you are living in Ireland - or the UK which has a similar campaign going on for Age UK

A selection to a few days ago!

The benefits for the knitters/crocheters are that creativity can run riot and imagination know no bounds. Plus a hat can be knitted up in no time - about half an hour for a knitted one and about half that or less for a crocheted one. Jany my d-i-l -to-be is a whiz crocheter and has made some wonderful ones, and a whole zoo of crocheted animal bottle toppers - and I've been doing a mix of crochet and knitted ones. There is some fierce rivalry on Twitter over the County Colours (GAA) and I've made a Deise colours hat in Blue/White while the Red/White one I made could be construed as being a Cork hat - or Where's Wally? - or the good old Labour Party red with a bit of white thrown in. You can follow on Twitter at the hashtag #BigKnit and @AgeAction, and on Facebook you can Like the Innocent Smoothies Ireland page here and the Big Knit page here

It's a great way to use up stash scraps, and anything goes - bobbles, tassles, flowers, leaves, beads, buttons, ribbons, you name it, embellishment is the order of the day and you can go with whatever takes your fancy. some of the members of the Tuesday Knitting Circle at the Lismore Design Workshop are knitting hats with great gusto, and Angela will post them all on her Facebook Page which you can check out and Like - here.

Where's Wally? (or Cork, as you prefer!)

Dennis the Menace!

So here are a few of the completed creations - there will be plenty more added to the Facebook and Twitter pages - and my own Twitter stream if you want to follow me @CatherineRotteM here. It's all good fun and the nice thing it they are so quick to do you don't have to set aside your own projects or WIP* to do these little hats - and Jany is great at making baby clothes for prem babies and little blankets for Project Halo which makes keepsakes and blankets for stillborn babies. One of the women at the knitting circle is also making these white blankets and they are welcomed by most of the maternity hospitals which prepare memory boxes for parents who lose their little ones during pregnancy. It must be a great comfort to these parents to know there are so many caring people out there who lovingly make these blankets and clothes. Irish Prems are closer to home and have a Facebook page here - they may be happy to have crochet or knit clothing and blankets too.

From Knitting Stash to Splash - Upcycling through the Recession

My new jumper

 I've just finished knitting this jumper from my yarn stash and am delighted with the result - it was practically a freebie as I bought the original jumper in Shaw's Dungarvan last year and found it didn't do anything for me - in other words I looked frumpy in it when I got home and tried it on. Of course in the shop on the hanger it looked grand and for €7 was a bargain too good to miss. So it was a bit of a disappointment to find it looked so awful on, adding decades to my already mature years! It languished on a hanger on my clothes rail (don't have a wardrobe, just a rail from Argos!) for about a year, till I was doing a charity cleanout and came across it. On mature reflection I decided to deprive the charity and upcycle the yarn. This entailed unpicking the seams and cutting ruthlessly into the jumper from the neckline down - and then painstakingly ripping and rolling the yarn into manageable balls. I probably should have washed and unkinked it but as it was a ribbon yarn it didn't really react like proper wool would have and had an impact on whatever I was going to make. So I just weighed the salvaged yarn and had 350gm. That's like 5x50gm balls so I felt very smug as that would make a jumper even though I couldn't save the top of the jumper from the V-neckline up.

Finished jumper detail

I had a plan to make a jumper like a cream one I had made earlier in the best celebrity-chef tradition - also a ribbon yarn and one I wear to lots of gigs here as it's so comfortable and quite smart to wear - you can see it in the photos in this post - and this lovely burgundy yarn was going to make another similar but slightly longer jumper.

I only started it about a month ago and kept it going between other projects to alleviate the tedium of knitting stocking stitch - or stockinette as the Americans call it. 

A ripping yarn!

 I was making Jaywalker Socks concurrently so that kept  me on my toes - no pun intended! These were a nice challenge and I was delighted with the results using the pre-patterned Lidl wool which is brilliant for socks - I  have about 6 pairs in the red and the blue colourways and I am making a pair now in the grey-black colourways. When I'm going on any long car trip as a passenger the socks are a great way to mitigate motorway monotony - bypassing every village and town on the road to Dublin is great to shorten the road but boy is it a dull trip! At least now there are services with decent food and diversions - a good way to part fools and their money but I'm as much a sucker for Supermac's as the next fast-food fan and they do the Carlsberg of Curry Chips - outside of the Perki Chick in Drumcondra and Lennox's of Cork, Supermac's are hard to beat.

After all those deviations from the topic - here's the end result - I am totally taken with my upcycled jumper and I love the cream stripe at the hem - it used a bit of the leftover yarn I had from my first jumper. It's a perfect summer jumper as it's cool and airy, and the three-quarter sleeves are a great compromise - and a great way to mask any hint of bingo-wings!

Stash quantity - 350gm

Weigh-in of salvaged stash!

I'll try to post some more snippets on recent knitting and crochet projects in the coming days, as I've been a disastrous blogger in the past few months. Life's just too busy with work, concert gigs in Dublin and Cork, house renovation in Dublin - a whole other post - and keeping in touch with the kids and grandkids in Dublin and Cork. And as it's summer holidays for the teenqueen in our lives there's a lot of taxi-ing to and fro between friends and sleepovers hither and yon. Never a dull moment, and we wouldn't have it any other way!

Summerjam at the O2 - Teenage kicks for a new generation

Summerjam 2011 in full swing.

The night before last I found myself at the O2 Arena/Point Depot for Summerjam 2011 - a teenfest for fans of the stars appearing at the concert who were all unknowns to me prior to the gig - and it was a far cry from the last gig I enjoyed at the same venue in May, Eric Clapton. This was strictly for the teen generation and the long-suffering adults who had to accompany the under-16s. I was there in that capacity, along with teen daughter and two friends - it was a birthday present for one of them. They had a blast, and I kept my distance as befits someone of my mature years with granny status already endowed. It would not have been cool to be a helicopter parent hovering over the charges, and they are old enough to mind themselves at something like this.

The Revolver Big Wheel

We made a two-day trip out of the gig - up to Dublin early on Tuesday, stopping off at the new Services in Cashel at Exit 8 of the M7 motorway. Motorway services in Ireland are a bit like buses - for ages there are none and then along come two in quick succession. So now between Cork and Dublin there are two good services at well-spaced intervals - also near Abbeyleix at Junction 14. Thus we found ourselves bizarrely in McDonalds for breakfast - not a place I'd normally frequent at any time unless in the company of the girls.

When we got to Dublin we were too early to check in to the Skylon Hotel so we met son Martin and a friend of his from his Tanzania days who was over in Ireland from Australia/England for a short break. We'd a nice hour or so with them and then checked in where the girls spent the next few hours getting ready for the gig. They went all out with the fake tan, nails, eyeliner tattoos and fluorescent tops and socks! They were all pretty much clones of each other and when we got to the O2 I saw that the every tween and teen girl in the place was in similar attire! It was like a uniform - funky and colourful and with lots of indie style to make their outfit unique, despite the uniformity of the look.

Looking down the Liffey from Revolver wheel.

As we got to the O2 too early for the gig, we decided to go on the Revolver Big Wheel - which was only a fiver - in-keeping with Liveline's Fiver Friday perhaps, or just trying to get a bit of business going - and it was nice to see the city sights from a height. The Wheel is only half the height of the London Eye so not that exciting but then the Dublin Skyline isn't that riveting apart from the landmarks like the Aviva/Landsdowne Road Stadium and Croke Park, Liberty Hall, the Beckett Bridge and the Pringle Box Convention centre. The River Liffey and Dublin Port are the main vistas. After working in Dublin hospitals back in the 70s and 80s there's not much the skyline can offer that's new - from the top floors of Jervis Street and the Mater hospitals you could pretty much see forever!

Looking at the crowd queuing for Summerjam 2011

The gig was noisy but very energetic and lively - the girls were near the stage and I positioned myself near the shop at the back - close to the tea and twix bars for sustenance! I took lots of videoclips for them and as I'd been Tweeting about it earlier I was delighted to meet a fellow-Tweep there - Val who tweets as @magnumlady was there with her son and daughter and we had a mini- tweet-up! She and her kids got to meet and greet the stars as they stayed in the Gibson Hotel in the Point Village beside the O2. She has some terrific photos on her blog - and she's an avid tweeter as well so we connect from time to time.

Cactus display Botanic Gardens

As for the stars - I'd never heard of any of them before the night - though I realised as the night wore on that I was humming along to most of the songs - Ke$ha, LMFAO, Aggro Santos, Alexis Jordan and Fugitive were all headliners - and the quality of the music and rap and dance was impressive. The staging was good with great lighting and props. Spin FM were doing the warm-up disco - though I'm sure it's not called that nowadays (showing my age again!) and the crowd control was good, with a couple of troublemakers picked off early on, when there were a few scraps and turf wars going on. I loved watching the crowd enjoying the gig and it was fun to see all the long-suffering parents there too. It was nearly 11pm when it ended, after over four hours. So it was good value for the punters and they certainly enjoyed it. We were back in the hotel before midnight and went to Abrakebabra on the way home to get some fish'n'chips. You can't beat them when the midnight munchies strike!

Succulents garden Botanic Gardens

The following day some serious shopping was done by the girls, while I relaxed by visiting Martin and meeting up with my friend Darina and her little granddaughter Amelie in the Botanic Gardens - a lovely tranquil oasis in the heart of Glasnevin where you could imagine yourself in the heart of the country. We had coffee and cakes in the light-filled courtyard tearoom and enjoyed a walk around the gardens and the enormous glasshouse with gigantic palms and bananas. The lushness transported me back to the tropics and the equatorial rainforest we knew so well in Tanzania.

The Victorian Greenhouse at the Botanic Gardens

 The girls were all shopped out by teatime and we headed for home - with a pit stop at Supermac's in Junction 14 near Abbeyleix - and we arrived by 10pm - and as they say in the best tradition of the school essay "What I did on my Summer Holidays" - tired but happy!

Darina and Amelie in the Botanic Gardens

Having a Blast in the Home of the Black Stuff - Friends Reunited!

Sláinte! Theo with Jan and me in the Guinness Storehouse

Last Sunday hubby Jan and me travelled to Dublin to a very special musical interlude - our old friend Theo from Deurne in Brabant in Holland was conducting his Dutch Brass Ensemble Mé Tresse (My Tresses in the local dialect) in an afternoon performance in the Guinness Storehouse - the Home of the Black Stuff, as the ads have it - and we planned to be there. Theo had sent us his tour schedule some weeks back and we decided there and then to go to at least one of the shows. The last time we saw Theo perform was in Schouwen Duiveland in 1995, during our leave from Tanzania, when he played with a Jazz Quartet or Quintet in a local venue.

Theo playing to the gallery with Jan & Martin

Sinking the Black!

Theo the Musical Director

A bit of background mightn't go amiss here for those of you who mightn't know who Theo is or where our friendship developed. We met in Iringa in Tanzania in 1993 when he came to be a "manny" - male nanny or au pair to two Dutch boys whose mother worked for an international aid agency. As everyone knew everyone, especially expats, in Iringa, it didn't take long for us to meet up. Our kids were already friendly through the Danish School where they all went for sport and music and craftwork, subjects not covered by the homeschooling we were all doing to some extent or another. The Danish school catered for the MKs (Missionary Kids) of the Danish Lutheran Pastors around Tanzania, and the Danida (Danish Bilateral Aid) kids from the area - Iringa was a prime recipient of Danida largesse. Thus we got to know Theo very well over the year he was there, and we had a lot of fun together - not least because he was and is a brilliant musician and entertained us all at Christmas and parties with impromptu concerts on the trombone and piano, and his warm extrovert personality endeared him to everyone. We even first saw Riverdance in his house, on a video of the Eurovision that someone sent out to Iringa weeks after the event took the country and world by storm.

Mé Tresse with Theo directing in Guinness Storehouse

Not surprisingly, we kept in touch - albeit erratically - in the years that followed. He visited us on a number of occasions when we were in Holland and when we were staying in Liessel with Addie in 2002 we had a memorable evening around a campfire with music and craic into the small hours. A few years ago he turned up on our doorstep in Lismore and we had a lovely few days with him and his friend Liet, and relived a tradition of beercan building from floor to ceiling that had begun in Iringa on a memorable Good Friday back in the 90s.

Jan and Martin - pints and Peelneutjes!

Since then we've had sporadic contact until now, and we were delighted to renew the links with this great performance in Dublin, having collected son Martin before heading to St. James's Gate and the Guinness Storehouse, the iconic shrine to the national drink (besides tea!). The band played under his direction for about an hour and a half and the crowd loved them. Theo played trombone and conducted all his own arrangements, and included a number of Irish songs including Molly Malone and The Fields of Athenry, and they finished up the show with a rousing rendition of what we know as The Red Rose Café - in Dutch, Het Kleine Café aan de Haven. He welcomed us in his speech as old friends from Tanzania and he even played a bar of Mungu Ibariki Afrika (the Tanzanian National Anthem - God Bless Africa, the universal Anthem of Africa that we all know from South Africa as Nkosi Sikelele Afrika,).

Theo and me having a laugh

We repaired afterwards to the Gravity Bar at the top of the Guinness Storehouse - where Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were offered a pint - and enjoyed the panoramic vistas over Dublin. We had a lovely afternoon together catching up on old times, taking some photos of the reunion.

All the boys have fond memories of their time in Iringa with Theo when they were young and homeschooling, and his flamboyance made him easy to remember. If the others hadn't had work Monday I think they'd have come from Cork to meet him.

In fact, Jan went to Galway tonight to see them play in the Augustinian Church with the Galway Choral Society which was a terrific show. I was working and couldn't go, but our friend Fran who lives in Galway went and thoroughly enjoyed it, I had texted her earlier this evening to tell her about it.

I will post a few photos and a video clip if I can upload it to YouTube, and hope you enjoy them and get a sense of the fun and enjoyment of the show as much as we did. Here's a clip from the band from YouTube.