We set out at 9 this morning to drive the Kerry Ring which is a seaside  drive of some 110 miles around the Kerry Peninsula. There are endless wonderful views along  the way, far to many to incorporate in this blog. 

There was one surprise when we approached Waterville, clearly not an Irish name.  It is the nearest mainland point to the eastern end of the first transatlantic cable that made landfall in Hearts Content  New Foundland and Labrador it is on an island just off shore of this village. Who would have thought we would be at both ends of that cable in less than a year. I guess if we had thought about it when we planned this trip it might have occurred to us.

Before reaching Waterville we took a side trip up a  narrow twisty road to see a stone circle fort. For some reason I have never heard of these structures which were such a major part of the Irish landscape.

We had a substantial climb up to the fort which sits atop a ridge line.

Then I climbed to the top for the view the defenders would have had.

Other stops included Lady’s View where Queen Victoria stopped with her retinue for a picnic and later for lunch for ourselves.  I continued my beer exploration with Killarney Red, a lager. The last highlight of the drive was Toric Falls. I know this picture needs some “fixing” but I didn’t bring the tools on my travel computer.

We  headed out to wander and for dinner soon after writing the above.. I had a Killarney Blonde that was quite good with sea bass. No new whiskey as one of the ladies on the tour bought a bottle of RedBreast 12 and offered me a glass. I enjoyed it again, but I have my limits, so that was it for the day.

We woke, eventually, to a very different day. it is grey, cool and misting to raining. It is much more like the weather we have been lead to expect. 

We decided to visit Ross Castle about 2 miles out of town on the lake. As we set out to walk there Michael Hannity greeted us and offered an hour long Jaunting Car ride to the castle through Killarney National Park. So we took a Jaunting Car (horse carriage) ride through the park, as we had contemplated, behind Gypsy Rose:

Even in the cool and rain it was pleasant ride and as it turns out the route we took through the park was far more interesting than the walk we had proposed.

Along the way we paused to look at this former gatehouse which now functions as a tea room. We are quite taken with the thatched roofs we see. The government pays a bounty to encourage retaining these roofs, the insurance companies charge an extra premium for the added fire risk.

Eventually we came to Ross Castle which was battered in the war of 1912 for independence and restored in the 1980’s. It is a great pile of rocks, the first of many we expect to see.  Also note the lush green in these pictures, I’ve done nothing to enhance them. 

At lunch at O’Donahue’s I continued my exploration with a glass of Smithwick Red Ale.  We are sitting in the hotel lobby as the rest of our crew filters in. One lady has missed her flight and will not be joining us until tomorrow.

Beer and whiskey report from dinner, 1 pint of Guinness, included in the meal and a portion of Redbreast 12 as recommended by a dedicated researcher. It is  a fine choice.  Glad to have it on my list.

After two uneventful flights, San Diego to Newark and onward to Shannon, thank you United, we were met by our driver at the exit from customs with no problem. Two hours later we were at our hotel in Killarney. The first thing we learned was to shorten the “i” to the vanishing point when saying K’llarney. As our plane broke through the clouds we were greeted by the greenest green land we could imagine. For most of our drive both of us were swiveling our heads so we would not miss anything. Exhaustion did not seem to catch up with us, yet

We checked into the hotel and set out to find a spot for lunch. This is a tourist town. What wasn’t a restaurant or hotel was a shop mostly with local goods. We made a number of stops and haven’t bought anything, yet. Carol found a wonderful sweater in a green she loves, but they do not have her size and the item is discontinued. I have not bought the sweater, shirt, scarf I have fallen in love with, yet. 

We had lunch in a pub and I had my first Guiness of the trip, yum! Then we walked to Killarney National Park, not more than 15 minutes from our hotel, by the direct route. While listening to the guide describe the history of the house  I fell asleep, standing up! As I started to fall, I woke up and caught myself. We decided it was past time to call it a day. We got lost returning to the hotel, well may be bit disoriented, and took an extra 15 minutes returning. By now the temperature had risen into the 60s and the sun was shining, something every Irish person me spoke to commented on – it is quite rare. 

We slept for just over an hour until awakened by a call from our guide,  Rowan, who had just arrived at the hotel. We felt refreshed and joined him in the lobby for tea and ginger bread, Oh My! Then off to seek out dinner and music all within 10 minutes of our hotel. Rather than start with Jamesons, I had a shot of Crested 10 chased with Murphy’s Stout. It is going to take some doing and record keeping if I want to sample all the varieties available. We crawled back to the hotel with the sun still shining at 9 PM and I am falling asleep as I write this.

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We fly out of San Diego on Sunday landing in Shannon Ireland Monday. The trip is a survey touching on most of the  sites one would hope to see with the usual wonderful OAT stops to meet locals and encounter how they live. For the record we return to San Diego on June 7 and will return directly to Jojoba Hills SKP Resort.

For a first step towards packing, I retrieved the travel duffels from the coach storage bay and transferred them to the shed. I verified that my basic travel clothes are packed away ready to go. In thinking about extended travel by air I decided to replace my travel CPAP with a new machine that fits in my palm and is very automated. It is a bit noisier than my  primary machine but less so than most of the old models I have used over the years.

I have been very busy in the park with some activities that surprise even me. We started a project a year ago to make internet available to every site in the park included in our monthly maintenance fee. That passed in February and ever since we have been working to implement the service. In short we needed to get more bandwidth available to us, provide more connections to that bandwidth and rewire the entire phone room to make it all work. On May 1 the bandwidth came online and the internet tech showed up to replace the connection equipment (I am avoiding talking about the Dslams). He left with some people connected at higher speed and the rest of us waiting until the next day when the phone tech arrived to rewire the phone room. 

Each of 300 phones needed to be rewired to the phone system and to the internet source (Dslams). Since there are 4 connections for each line of two wires  that is 2400 connections or possibilities for error. Many of our volunteer tech team “JCATS” have left the park for the summer and several more of us – see paragraph #1 above – will be leaving soon. Since Friday we have been tracing missed connections, crossed connections and just plain internet nonsense. I will put in a couple of more hours tomorrow then leave it to the few who are staying on. This is going out over the new system 🙂

With all of this I have found time to play Bridge, take walks with Carol and have Happy Hour with friends. Love this place!

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Quiet is a relative term. The coach has stayed on site at Jojoba Hills since we got back from Redlands. Mostly I have been attending to my interests in the park, Finance , Marketing and digging into an understanding of our infrastructure has been very important to me. Along with that I have played a lot of Bridge

and gone on several hikes with our hiking club.  I noticed that I am getting up most weekday mornings to get to one sort of activity or another by 8, except on Thursday when the ROMEOs go out for breakfast, leaving by 7:30. It seems I was never up and out this early when I was working. 

This weekend we are at our family’s apartment in Los Angeles supervising (loosely) the activities of Azriel and Avi, our grandsons, while their parents are in Las Vegas for a conference and some fun. Yesterday while the boys were in school we went to the Nethercutt Museum

which we had first heard about while watching Huell Howser reruns on the local PBS channel. Although we have now seen more old cars than is normal for any time period, today we will go to the Petersen Automotive Museum , at least the boys and I will go, Carol has had enough cars.  

Although I love the Bridge and enjoy the committee work, I find the most interesting activity is the hiking. It takes me to areas I might not otherwise visit and gets me out and active. After overcoming all the excuses I could come up with I joined in on the hikes and find I am unhappy when I can’t go because of conflicts. The group is very congenial and while we have different levels of capability no one is ever left behind and it is seldom that the faster hikers get very far ahead of the group. We generally hike about 5 to 7 miles and have faced elevation gains of 400 feet to 1,800 feet. The latter is quite strenuous but all of us survived. One hike-Cedar Falls -was “upside down” starting with a long descent to the base of the waterfall

and then returning up that same grade. Entering on a 2 1/2 mile climb after descending that distance is very different than starting with the climb and then descending. Several of us were at or beyond our limit upon our return to the trail head. It was a very quiet ride back to Jojoba Hills.

The very next day Carol and I set out in the Jeep to climb a nearby Jeep trail which turned out to be closed part way up so we turned around and I drove out to the prior day’s trail head near Julian. 

We came to Redlands, part of the Greater Los Angeles  metro area, for some repair to the coach. We have spent time in Redlands Truck and RV Performance campground waiting for work to begin and then we took some time to get to see Redlands.

Our search turned up a big surprise, a Lincoln Shrine, the only such west of the Mississippi. I thought maybe a statue in a park, but this is what we found:

Originally built in 1932, the center section contains a wonderful marble bust of Lincoln and some memorabilia. The two wings were built in 1998 and contain a timeline of Lincoln’s life a tremendous library and many more memorabilia from his life and from the Civil War. There is also a Norman Rockwell oil commemorating Lincoln. The center building is painted by Dean Cornwell who did a major interior at the Los Angeles Library. I could not do the dome and murals justice with my phone. For much more detail about the shrine here is a link  http://www.lincolnshrine.org/

The shrine is on the grounds of A. K. Smiley Public Library dating back to 1898.

We toured the interior and were very impressed with the collections in addition to the books. A local stained glass worker has been adding windows as recently as last year. For a VRtour http://www.akspl.org/about/#360vrtour will also provides links to history. The architectural detail is very attractive as well:

This is just one of the many columns.

We did a bit of shopping – food mostly – and returned to the coach for a bit. We found one of the doors restored and work proceeding on the rest. We elected to go out for dinner and returned to the center of the city to Eureka Burger. We enjoyed our meal, Carol found a veggie burger made of beets with more salad than she could contemplate eating. I had a specialty burger and enjoyed it a lot. We would go back . A warning, it is noisy.

Today, Wednesday, we have a museum and a mansion on the agenda after lunch. The rain has cleared and painting is proceeding.

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Catchy title isn’t it. After sitting in one place since November 25 we  have moved a short distance to Redland CA. Here we will have some minimal bodywork done on the coach, mostly a door that has delaminated and needs to be fixed. Maybe some scratch repair too. 

We spent last night in Oceanside just north of San Diego. We had Thai dinner at I Love Pho and went on to Miracosta College Performance Hall where Kronos Quartet were playing. We were excited to find the Walkers who were happy to share our love for the kind of music Kronos performs. It seems Kronos have moved well into what I would call hybrid forms mixing live performance with recorded material. The Mahalia Jackson number incorporated spoken and sung words drawn from air checks of her on the Studs Terkel show. It is very powerful. The trip entailed an hour drive in the rain each way. I was indeed tired when we got home, but too exhilerated from the evening to get right to sleep.

Staying focused on day to day activities and in park politics does a reasonable job of keeping me from dwelling on national and world politics. I read a bit in the NYTimes and listen to NPR in the morning just to assure myself that the world was not come to an end and it is worth moving on with my own daily actvities. Working with the tech crew to keep TV, Internet and phones working in the park. Now, paying attention to all of the infrastructure systems to be sure they too are mintained and working. When there is a spare moment I still play bridge in the card room, give tours and escort guests to their rental sites. 

Amidst all of this activity I am thinking about travel. We are blessed to be able to travel, just talked with a friend in the park whose wife is ill and they have not been able to travel for a year, they are in their 50’s. Others have come off the road and settled into Jojoba HIlls until their children have called them home. And yet others, like us keep traveling and hiking and learning new pastimes just because. These are the people we emulate. We have been drinking from the fountain of youth, and it isn’t the local wine, good as it may be.  It is the constant activity keeping our brains alert and our bodies in shape. 

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In our time on the road we continue to stay in touch with friends from all parts of our lives. An important part of my life was four years at Brown University. From those years several friendships endure. Among them are Toby and David London. It happens they come west each year and are within an hour of Jojoba Hills. One year they visited with us here in Aguanga and last year we visited them in Palm Desert. This year we decided to meet half way in Idyllwild. The following is a sample of pictures from that visit:

We met at Dores Mountain Art Garden on CA 243 on the way to Idyllwild. We were joined there by Shari, the daughter of friends from Rochester. We spent a long time with Dore looking at the sculpture he has all over his land and then at the small gallery housing photography on metal by his wife Trish Tule. We will soon have a piece of Dore’s work to mount on our shed.

We drove in to Idyllwild and found lunch at Gastrognome, a place that we had excellent reviews for. For a wonder there was a table for 5 available. We enjoyed the meal and were allowed to stay on at the table with no pressure. Finally we took a walk around town and left in plenty of time to be off the road before sunset.

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Well February 1st was an interesting day. Ballots had been rolling in for the board election since mid December. They were opened and counted and then the announcement that I came in fourth for three positions. To a certain extent there was a whew emotion as our plans for travel open up. A board position requires more time spent in the park and devoted to the park. I my most immediate comment to myself was “I can go on the Tuesday hike this week after all.” While I was going through that process I was approached to take on a major committee chair position. Then I was further propositioned for it and by late afternoon I was on the phone with the board member who is liaison to the committee verifying that it was okay to submit my name to the board . More when the board gives its approval.

Carol is happy with the new project and my not being on the board. My well wishers all say “next year” and I am saying we’ll see about next year when the time comes.

Carol is still is Covesville, where it is cold and has snowed some. The kids(!) should be boarding their flight out of Jo’burg soon. They land in Dulles sometime Tuesday AM and will decide how to get back to Covesville when they are on the ground. Carol flies out of Charlottesville on Thursday. 

I have been playing a lot of Bridge, helping put up a TV antenna on the top of one of the water tanks (if you follow me on Facebook you may have seen these pictures):

And otherwise staying busy and out of trouble. This was the kind of volunteer project that happens regularly around the park. If it needs to be done those who know how work with those who don’t to make it happen. I call it fun. If I had to do it, I might call it work.

The patio is almost done. I will post pictures in a day or two of the finished, but incomplete patio. Carol and I still don’t know  how we will furnish it.

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We have been married 53 1/2 years. In that time we have each traveled on our own from time to time. The longest time may have been eight days when I flew to Israel for meetings while Carol flew to Long Beach to welcome a new grandson. I made it for the Bris, 8 days. A couple of weeks ago we got a call from Dan and Malena that they needed to go to South Africa for a memorial for Malena’s brother from another mother. Could we chaperone and chauffeur the boys in Charlottesville while they attended and then did some touring  since they were already there for 16 days.

I couldn’t go. Months ago I put my name in to run for the board of directors of Jojoba Hills and I made some commitments to continuing board members and to myself to be present. Our election is tomorrow – there are 4 candidates for 3 seats and board training commences on Monday February 5. Carol is off in Covesville VA providing adult presence and driving the boys to their classes and events. She won’t be back until late night Thursday the 8th. I am lonely and I miss her. Even as I write I am looking up to where she normally sits to see what she is doing and when I finish I will miss her final edit and comments.

I am in community and the only time I have alone is in the evening. I am continuing to go on hikes, go to JCATs meetings and play Bridge. Tonight our neighbors had a Howling at the Moon event and I went and met some new members and guests in the park and even got to talk to people I know, but have never gotten the chance to talk with. I looked over my shoulder a couple of times to see who Carol was chatting with.

Tomorrow is our annual meeting and election day. The sealed ballots have been submitted and will be opened with appropriate pomp and security and counted, in secret. I will attend the meeting which will continue with other matters including a floor vote on the budget. By mid afternoon I will know the results. I expect that Carol, running unopposed as of now, will be elected to Co Chair of the Social organization – Hilltoppers – and everyone tells me I am  sure to win, but I’ve heard that before and will wait for the count.

As I said at the beginning I am alone and lonely, yet I am surrounded by some of the nicest, friendliest people I would care to know. They aren’t letting me feel lonely when I am in their midst.

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