At the close of another eventful year in Ireland.

I've reread all of the posts for this year and I'm struck by how well the year has passed.  Much of what I'd anticipated in my initial post of 2013 has come to pass.  After one reaches a certain age, and I'm well past that, there aren't many years in which you don't suffer a major loss.  A loved one passes, an illness or some other life changing event occurs that sets you on your heels and you have to regroup.  It is with a lot of gratitude and humility that I say 2013 was not one of those years.  I don't want to let that milestone pass without noting and celebrating that good fortune.  I know it's not the case for many of those close to us and I wish for them such a respite in the coming year.

As we planned when we made the decision to start our retirement in Ireland, we continued to travel throughout the past year and plan a similar schedule in the coming year. We will start the new year with a trip to Lisbon, scheduled for mid-January, then a week in Aruba with our friends Irene and Craig in February. We're scheduled a few days in Stockholm for my birthday in April.   In June we are planning a month in an Apartment in Amsterdam.  In July I'm going to do the set dance workshop at Willie Clancy week in Clare.  In September our friends from Virginia will return for another week in the West, this time in Ballyvaughn and there's a possibility that I will do another leg of the Camino de Santiago on the Portuguese Way earlier that month.

The one thing that has changed is work.  I was thinking that I would do a large research study for my former employer beginning early in the New Year and lasting at least through June.  This was going to involve at least three trips to the United States, including one in August to present the findings.  But, that project will not go forward.  I was surprised by that turn of events, but fortunately I didn't count on it and find that I'm not particularly disappointed.  It means that I will have more of an opportunity to volunteer here in Ireland and toward that end, I've accepted a position on the board of the American Women's Club.  I've also scheduled a meeting in January with a nonprofit organization that helps single parents, that would probably involve working on their fundraising database.  Also, maybe I'll get back to that book, a project that is easily pushed to the back burner.

Although I expect that we will spend the entire coming year in Ireland, it feels like we are coming closer to making the plan for our departure.  I really want to stay here, but Alan is concerned about not making and renewing the connections with family and friends in the USA that we will need when we are more frail. While we are both hoping that we have at least another 20 years of good health, we both have had experiences with our parents that make it clear that one needs a good network in the later years.  If you don't work on that, you don't have it.  Our situation is compounded since we don't have any children.  There's no one obligated to take care of us and help us make decisions when the time comes.  Coming off such a good year, you'd think we could just let that slide for a while, but I think we are both realists. So, something really radical would have to happen for us to plan to stay here another 5-10 years, an outcome that would suit me fine. From the beginning, I felt more settled here but Alan still feels the tug of home.    

Still, we end 2013 with a lot of gratitude and anticipation, and I hope the same for everyone that reads this.Thank you for doing so.

Time flies!  I haven't posted for over a month, but there was a good reason until now.  For most of November we didn't do very much, just pursuing our normal life after a busy fall. It was good to get back into set dancing and bridge lessons. Alan was happy to resume his Monday writers' group, although he has been very consistently writing throughout our time here. We also found a nearby pool and have started a water aerobics class on Wednesday mornings.

Things picked up by the end of November, when we took a trip to Berlin, where we spent Thanksgiving and Alan's 65th birthday the following day.  It was a good trip, but both Alan and I were struck by an unsettling feeling of being in an old, old city with an almost exclusively modern built environment.  It was creepy.  We did a lot of walking and viturally every time we saw an older building, there was a poster nearby describing its prewar function and history.  Almost all of the posters called out the bullet holes in the facade.

We stayed in a newly built Marriott hotel in the former East Berlin, pretty much right on the wall.  On the east side of the wall was a "no man's land" while in the west they built right up to the wall, so almost everything around where we stayed was built after 1990.  There continues to be a lot of building in Berlin and we could see that Germany's economy is flourishing, unlike most of the rest of Europe we've visited since coming here. The weather was cold and gray, conditions which really affect Alan but as long as it's not raining, I don't mind.

We bought a three day museum pass and spent a lot of time visiting a variety of museums.  There are lots of them in Berlin, at one I was told there are over 200.  We started with the Pergamon, one of the National Museums, housing their antiquity collection.  The Gates of Babylon were amazing and the Pergamon Altar was quite impressive.  The latter was the motivation for visiting because when we were in Turkey one of the places we visited during the morning of the Ephesus tour was the ancient city from which the altar was taken. The guide noted that the Germans did a lot of excavating in the early 20th century and there was some interest in modern Turkey in getting back some of the loot they took.  This seems unlikely since the Pergamon Museum was purpose build to hold that altar.  Anyone going to Berlin should not miss this museum.

The following day we visited the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg collection of Surrealist art and Brohan Museum, a collection of Art Nouveau and Art Deco works. I really enjoyed both of them. I was particularly taken by the way the Brohan displayed the collections and how they juxtaposed Art Nouveau and Art Deco. We saw some really beautiful things that day.

On Sunday, we went to a concert at the National Concert Hall.  I've never been to a concert in such a formal setting in the morning (11 a.m.) but I really enjoyed it.  Mozart's overture for the opera Lucio Silla and his Haffner Symphony as well as CPE Bach's Concert for Flute were performed.  We followed that by lunch in a traditional German restaurant where both of us ate too much.  A post prandial walk through several Christmas Markets and a turn on a Ferris Wheel rounded out an active day.  I was particularly delighted to get Alan on the ride. His last experience was on the London Eye with our old friends Louisa and Roger 10 years ago. I reminded him that he was OK on that because, like this one, it was an enclosed car. He grudgingly agreed to go, but it was no London Eye.

On our last full day, we went to Checkpoint Charlie, a private museum at the gate where Americans were permitted to cross into the East and the site of the serious cold war tensions in 1961. I remembered that well because my oldest brother was in the Air Force stationed in Berlin then.  My mother was beside herself with worry, and after reading about it at the museum, I see that the world was very close to war then.  The Checkpoint Charlie Museum could definitely use some curatorial help.  It seems like a collection that has just grown like Topsy.  There are really only so many Volkswagen car trunk, suitcase, air conditioning unit, tunnels, and all around derring do escapes from East Berlin that a person can absorb.  At the end, Alan and I agreed that only small people could leave East Berlin, the big ones had to stay behind.  In addition to documenting every escape, they have expanded the collection to include lots of information on non-violent peace initiatives, which I wholeheartedly support, but here again, Ghandi's flip flops were just over the top.

We returned to Dublin on Tuesday and have resumed our normal activities.  I've put in a proposal for a lot of survey work in the coming year and should hear about that in the coming days.  If the project happens it is likely that I will be in the USA several times in the winter and spring and definitely in August to present the results at the association of associations' convention in Nashville.

We have been cured of any further desire to cruise.  Our 12-day Black Sea cruise on the Celebrity Constellation was a mixed bag.  We were really interested in the Black Sea, loved Istanbul and Ephesus (Kusadasi) in Turkey, Sevastipol, Yalta, and Odessa in Ukraine and Burgas in Bulgaria, found the two sites in Greece (Athens and Mykonos) a little daunting with a number of angry people and really disliked most of the time on the ship.

On the plus side, all of the locations in Ukraine and Burgas were so, so interesting and places that are pretty much unspoiled by tourism.  They were also places that we would have been unlikely to have seen otherwise.

I particularly loved Sevastipol, a place where most of the people we encountered were surprised to see anyone that alighted from a ship!  Except for a trip long ago to the island of Lanai in Hawaii when there were just 11 hotel rooms on an island otherwise filled with pineapple fields, I've never experienced a place so untouched by western ideas of tourism.  I think a lot of Russians may go there to vacation but their expectations must be quite different from ours because there were no hawkers of touristy stuff, no traveler specials, nothing suggesting that tourism is an economic driver.  It was really nice.  All we did was walk around the city, visit a park commemorating the Seige of Sevastipol during the Crimean War and had a very nice lunch, but it was just enchanting.  Too bad we had to get back on the ship! The second stop in Ukraine was Yalta.  A city just chock a block full of interesting history, including the meeting between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin during which they made the decisions about carving up the spoils of WWII.  The third, and final, stop there was Odessa; a much bigger city and very used to tourists from the countries in the former Soviet Union, but still exotic and interesting.

We had one stop in Bulgaria, Burgas, a seaside city similar to what Mykonos may have been like before every cruise ship in the Mediterranian stopped there and attracted hawkers and overpriced, mostly useless tchotchkes frequently made in China or India instead of the country visited.

In general, the Ukranian and Bulgarian people we encountered were generally curious and interested in us. Although few spoke English, there was a nice spirit of trying to get along.

Greece was a little less nice.  In Athens we encountered a number of angry people, likely owing to their dashed hoped about what affiliating with the European Union was going to mean for them.  We kinda expected it because there has been a lot in the Irish press about the difficulties they have encountered, what with the Euro Zone expecting them to pay taxes and all.  That has to be annoying.  But seriously, their economy is in very bad shape and that seems to have affected how they feel about tourists, particularly from Europe or America.  Mykonos was just a huge tourist trap, although I did visit the island of Delos, just off Mykonos, the birthplace of Apollo and his twin sister Artemis, which was very interesting.

Turkey was great, we started and ended in Istanbul, a city to which Alan and I agreed to return.  On the first day there we toured the Topkapi Palace and bought a rug (which I hope we don't regret) and on the second, just before boarding the ship, we visited the Grand Bazaar.  On our return we had another day there and did the hop-on/hop-off bus to get a sense of the city in advance of a trip we are hoping to take back to Turkey before we return to America. Ephesus, the place where "mother Mary" spent her last days, was very interesting, very much outside the large port city of Kusadasi where the boat docked.  So much antiquity all around, it was just amazing, particularly in light of our earlier trip to Connemara in Ireland where we spend so much time looking at Bronze Age stones in remote fields.  These were whole, amazing cities, so well preserved.  I would definitely recommend a trip to Ephesus to anyone interested in early civilization.

By far, the worst was the time we spent on the ship.  We expected an all-inclusive, fun filled adventure, with lots of people who were open to meeting new people and having new experiences.  What we got was constant up-selling of "extras"  (who knew water was in extra), constant sanitizing of all surfaces "for your safety", amid hundreds of already formed cliques all operating in their own little sphere jockying for any desirable space in common areas and "saving" huge swaths of it for the exclusive use of their posse, whether the others were there or not.  The prices were staggering, $80 for a bottle of gin (and you can't bring it back with you from the shore, they check); $30 for a bottle of the cheapest wine or a corkage fee of $25; $200 for a massage; $3 for a half litre of water that goes for 50 cents a litre when you disembark; $3 for a coke and close to $100 per person for a shore excursion that you can arrange for half that privately once on shore.  We were so disappointed.  The only good thing was that our table at dinner was great.  Our group consisted of a nice couple from New Jersey and a single woman from Sydney, Australia.  We all agreed to keep in touch and I hope that we do.  If it were for them, we would have had nothing good to say about our time on the Celebrity Constellation.

All in all a lesson that we are not cruise people.  I wouldn't do it again if it were free. That said, the experiences we had on shore in Turkey, Ukraine and Romania were just great and we are grateful to have had to chance to see them at this stage of development.  We are happy to be back to normal.

The day before leaving for Istanbul. My last post was just a brief rumination during our trip in Connemara.  This will be a longer post, mostly in order since the last one.

I begin with a recap of the walk on the Way of St. James, The Campostela de Santiago, "The Camino," for short.  I took this trip with a group of 11 other people, all of whom I've met in Ireland.  The trip was suggested by my good friend Mary last winter, which I suggested to my other good friend here, Deirdre. Alan stayed home.

To quickly recap, we walked 6 days of the weeklong journey starting September 12 ending on the anniversary of the day Alan and I met on September 19th (also Alan's mother's birthday, when she would have been 98 years old). Alan prepared a great dinner to celebrate our 37 years together when I returned home.  It was so nice to see him and to celebrate both our meeting and his great mother, who we both miss very much.

Walking The Way 

The walk was a good one.  The first and second days were the most difficult.  We walked 'the French Way' (the way of St. Frances, not walking in France) beginning in Sarria in Galicia Spain, all of the walk was in Spain.  Sarria to Santiago is the minimum one can do to get a certificate from the church at the end, It's 110 kilometers (about 65 miles) in total.  When one signs up for the walk you get a 'passport' which you get stamped as you stop along the way. For pilgrims starting from Ireland, you can get two stamps in Dublin at the St. James Gate of the Guiness storehouse and also at the Church of St. James, around the corner from the Guinness storehouse.  During one of our preparatory walks, Mary, Deirdre and several others stopped in to get those stamps before we departed Dublin. We did the stamps all along the way and all of us got the certificate too! Mine is now framed and sitting in the window well in our guest room.

We landed in Santiago and were met by an organizer and bussed to Sarria for the first evening.  We began the walk the following day.  The trip organizer that we used arranged for hotels, meals (breakfast and dinner) and transporting our luggage from hotel to hotel.  The hotels were 3 star establishments.  All were nice, all had restaurants attached, none were luxurious but more along the Holiday Inn or Marriott Courtyard quality. In general all good and clean with in-room bathrooms, several had bathtubs but most were just shower rooms.  The food was good in all of them.  Generally we were so tired and hungry at the end of a the day of walking it was all wonderful, particularly the three hotels with bathtubs, where a good hot soak at the end of the day did wonders.

The first two days were the most difficult, 20 and 22 kilometers respectively.  All days had up and down walking but the first day was the most challenging.  I re-discovered that I am much stronger on the up than on the down. This was something I learned in 2008 when Alan and I did the Bright Angel Trail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  The down on the first day of the Grand Canyon walk was much harder than the up on the second, even though I was well and truly exhausted on day two.

Day one walking on The Camino was was long and moderately strenuous until the very, very end when there was a challenging downhill followed by a long, high bridge over a big gorge, ending with a medieval gate consisting of about 100 steps to the top and into the town.  Coming over that last bridge and seeing those stairs was about the most demoralizing sight I've seen since the end of the Grand Canyon walk when I saw the rope bridge swaying in the wind over the raging Colorado River to our campsite.  My feet really hurt and I noticed a little irritation on my toe, but I thought a good night's rest would make it all OK.

Day two was a little longer than the first day but a little less challenging, again, until the very end when my toe really flared up.  I just couldn't believe how much it hurt.  I was so annoyed.  I have always felt I had good feet.  As a Taurus (earth sign) I really feel rooted and my feet have never given me problems.  I thought my hip would be the problem, since I have a hip replacement, but it was hardly noticeable, except during those times when everything hurt.  The last 2 kilometers I could hardly move, I really felt like I was walking like Frankenstein at the end.  It was so pathetic.  Still, I was optimistic that a good rest was all I needed.  Before I left I'd paid big bucks for a custom made orthotic (300 Euros!!!!) but decided I needed to take them out for the walk on day three because the extra space they took up in the shoe was part of the problem.

Day three dawned, a 16 kilometer walk was in the offing and my toe really hurt, but I did it.  When we got to our hotel, in the largest city on our journey, I was delighted to find a bathtub in the room.  I was rooming with Mary, a great companion all around, she left for lunch with the others and I took a hot bath including the sachet of juniper salts I'd brought along "just in case."  Oh, it was so wonderful.  After the bath, a good nap and I felt much better.  Still the toe hurt but not so much.

Day four was 18 kilometers ending in a much more rural location.  There was a bath there as well but after that soak I sensed that my toe issue was beginning to change.  Just after the bath, I discovered to my amazement, that you can get a blister under the toenail.  The blister burst and my nail turned a purpleish color, which continues to today, almost three weeks later.  I think it means I will untimately lose the nail.  Still the relief was palpable and the following days were much improved.

Days five and six were much shorter, 14 and 16 kilometers each.  They were punctuated with nice, shady walks and good conversations with a variety of my companions.  Since I wasn't so distracted with foot pain, I really felt much better.  However, it was during this time that I noticed that I wasn't feeling very spiritual, a sensation that others had assured me would happen while walking "The Way."  I mostly felt satisfied that I would be able to make it to the end.  Which I did; but mostly it felt like a long, hard walk.

The city of Santiago is very nice and we had most of late afternoon and evening and the following morning to explore.  We also went to the mass in the cathedral there at 11 a.m. on our last day.  Except for tons of people who seemed not to understand "no flash photography" and others who seemed to think that the mass was a performance and applauded at the end, it was a very nice culmination.

When I returned I learned that during a lengthy interview while I was away the new Pope (Frances) said he thought the focus on abortion and gay marriage was distracting and shouldn't be the only thing on the agenda for Catholics. I really feld the spirit then.  Maybe the walk really contributed to a change.  Certainly I felt more close to my Catholicism than any time in the last 30 or so years.  It was a good way to end.  I don't know that I'd do it again, but it was worth doing.  In addition to feeling closer to my Catholic roots, I also cemented my friendships with both Mary and Deirdre and know I will know and value them both going forward.

I had two days home before our friends Linda and Bob arrived with Linda's brother and sister-in-law for two days in Dublin followed by a week in a house in Connemara.  This was the subject of my last post (below).  It was so great to see Linda and Bob and to meet Tom and Charlotte.  Both Alan and I were delighted to renew our old friendship.  We had a lot of fun exploring the many antiquities found in the west of Ireland.  We would never have done such an adventurous trip were it not for their interest in discovering the very oldest remnants of civilization in Ireland.  Up hill and down dale we went in places where there were no other tourists.  Several times we had to knock on farmhouse doors to get permission to walk their land to see the stones, ring forts and burial sites.  I also had a chance to do a little set dancing during a side trip to Innishboufin, on of the smaller Aran Islands that we visited for a day trip midweek.  The house we rented in Clifden was a great home base and for all but one evening, each couple made the evening meal after a long day of exploring.

Linda and Bob returned with us to Dublin on Tuesday and left on the Irish Sea ferry to London on Wednesday.  Tom and Charlotte went on to Cork where they were booked into a house in Kinsale for one week followed by another week in a remote location outside Dingle in Kerry.  We parted company with them in Galway.  In addition to catching up on laundry and putting our place back in order after visitors, we have been busy packing for our next adventure.

Tomorrow (Saturday), just four days after our return from Connemara, Alan and I leave for Istanbul.  We will spend Sunday there and begin a Black Sea cruise on Monday.  We are both heady with anticipation.  In addition to what I hope is an exciting day in Istanbul, including a booking to see the whirling dervishes in the temple there, we will stop in several ports that have facinated me since childhood.  Just the names:  Sevastipol, Odessa, Yalta, Ephesus, Athens are exciting.  I hope I haven't built it up too much in my mind.  My only worry right now is seasickness.  I will get pills for that.

Hopefully I will post again by the end of the month, soon after our return.

Today is day 6 in Clifden in Connemara.  A beautiful area in the west of Ireland.  We have rented a big house with two other couples, visitors from the USA.  I was here for an overnight tour earlier this summer but Alan didn't come along on that trip so it's a first for him.  Its been a series of really great day trips in a car that we rented in Dublin. It's a much better way than day tours by bus, we have had a lot of freedom to explore.  The first day we went to Leenane, a town I visited earlier and remembered a map of the many nearby Bronze Age antiquities on the visitors' center wall. Our guests were interested in that aspect of the area.  It turned out there was a printed map that I bought.  We have been using it to identify the location of our tour.  Yesterday we went to Innishbofin, one of the Aran Islands, also a new experience for me. Today is the next to last day we return to Dublin on Tuesday.

Wow, I haven't been keeping up my blog!  It's been a busy summer but I have to get back to the discipline I'd had earlier.  This is my second post today, the other one is a summary of our first trip back to the States July 29 through August 19.  One of the things I did when I was in the USA was meet with a possible publisher for a book on the experience living in Ireland.  She was encouraging and asked for a proposal.  I still haven't done that, but keeping the blog up, at least for the purpose of using it as a reference for that, is a renewed goal.  The other thing I did while there was lay the groundwork for a lot more research work.  If that goes forward, I'll be visiting the US several times in the upcoming year.  Also, while we were there we made the decision to remain in Ireland for yet another year.  We won't leave here until 2015 now, although we are now saying "indefinitely".

Right now I'm anticipating several really fun things.  First is a trip to The Camino de Santiago, a walk on The Way of St. James, a pilgrimage path in France and Spain.  The group assembled for this walk will only be doing "the last bit," a 110K walk over 7 days just in the Spain portion.  Some people may remember some news about The Camino earlier in the summer when a train headed there derailed.  It was a very bad accident caused by the train engineer approaching a curve at twice the recommended speed.  I expect that has cast a pall on the subsequent walkers this year and in the terminus city of Campostela.  Our group, 11 really great Irish women and one man (not Alan) will leave Dublin on September 12 and return September 19.

On September 22 we have friends from the US arriving. After a day here in Dublin we will all go to a house we've rented in Connemara for a week.  They are interested in antiquities so I expect we will do a lot of tours of old sites in that area where there are old stone forts, monasteries, castles and prehistoric stones galore.  I was in Connemara earlier this summer with another US visitor.  Then we did a daylong bus tour, so I'm looking forward to exploring that area on my own.  It will be great to see our friends, Linda and Bob, and Linda's brother and his wife, Charlotte and Tom (we haven't met them yet).  The four of them will be coming off a week long walk in Scotland so everyone but Alan will likely either be very tired of walking, or very fit and raring to go for more!

Next, in early October, we have a cruise in the Black Sea, stopping in Intanbul, Sevastipol, Odessa, Yalta, Ephesis and Athens.. I remember my grandfather singing a song about a trip to Sevastipol and I'm looking forward to seeing it. Yalta is the site of the meeting between FDR, Churchill and Stalin during WWII, and I'm hoping for some interesting history there.  The area has been one of the world's hot spots, but is now more or less peaceful, so I'm looking forward to seeing it.  This is our first sea cruise and both Alan and I are looking forward to seeing lots of stars in what we hope is a very black sky during the overinght sailing.

By mid-October I'm hoping to be back to a more normal schedule and I'm looking forward to restarting set dancing and bridge.  Also to getting back to more regular blogging.

The trip to America was a huge success.  It went like clockwork and there were only a few times in the 2900 miles that Alan and I drove together in the car that were tense.  The one thing we omitted was the two days in Hot Springs, Arkansas between Atlanta and St. Louis.  It was going to be out of our way and cause two 8+ hour days of additional driving.  Instead, we headed direct to St. Louis from Atlanta via Nashville.  The only other change like that occurred at the end as we were returning to Washington. I thought I could do a 10 hour driving day just to get back to DC from Bloomington, Indiana but I didn't count on having to cross the Appalachian Mountains throughout West Virginia and long into Virginia.   I don't know what makes me so optimistic when I think about driving.  The highways through these particular mountains are all fast, filled with trucks, windy and treacherous.  We stopped after 6 hours and completed the final 5 the following morning.  The car was the biggest issue for me going in and I'm happy to say that I believe I've found a way to get myself in a better place on these long drives.  So that was a big goal achieved.

The remainder of this post is going to be just a summary of the days we spent, roughtly in order of their occurrence.

We arrived a few hours last into JFK on Monday, July 29th (my childhoold friend Linda Eisemann's birthday).  It's morning flight and you gain 5 hours going east so we got to New York in mid morning.  After renting the car, we headed for our hotel in Long Island City.  LIC is the place where both my parents emmigrated to from Ireland and all of their early history is steeped in the area.  It is still so familiar to me, although the residents have changed from mostly Irish to mostly Hispanic, although there are still many Irish in the area and they seem to get along.

After getting settled in the hotel for our one night stay, we connected with my niece Monique and her husband Jack to confirm our plan to meet them in a restaurant in Hicksville, Long Island that was about half the distance for both of us.  It was called Mio Posto and I'd definitely recommend it.  We had such a nice time with them, as usual.  I really like to keep up with their doings and hope that they will be able to come visit us here in Dublin.  We parted company around 11 and Alan and I headed back to the hotel for a good night's sleep in order to face the drive to Washington as soon as rush hour in New York was over.

We left New York at about 10 on the 30th.  Traffic was pretty good all the way through although Alan hit some debris in the road and following that noticed that the gas guage didn't work.  We didn't know if the two were related or he didn't notice it before but it was something we definitely needed to have fixed and went to the Hertz place at National Airport to exhcange cars.   We arrived at our friends Mark and Judy's house around 3.  They had a nice dinner planned ad we spend our first evening catching up.

Three days in Washington, DC were spent mostly visiting our stuff in storage and buying more stuff.  Judy has a membership in Costco so we went there and really stocked up on stuff you can't get here (Q-Tips, tablet aspirin, and the like).  Our adventure there and elswhere is discount shopping land filled one of our extra suitcases.  The other was filled by stuff we took from storage.  We left those two suitcases at Mark & Judy's and headed for Atlanta on Friday after buying a new phone to use there.  This was important not only for the phone itself but now we have an American phone number as well.

Our first stop in Atlanta was a visit to Dorothy.  It was so, so good to see her and her parents.  I was also happy to see her nephew Nye.  Then we signed into the ASAE Annual Meeting convention and hotel downtown.  The Annual Meeting went very well for me and I saw lots of former colleagues.  Then on to Nashville, where we stayed for one night before moving on to Alan's family reunion in St. Louis. That was also great, three nights and two days of catching up.  What a pleasure.

Following St. Louis we went to Bloomington, Indiana, our new home in the United States.  There we signed a lease and did a few other things to establish residency there.  We also saw friends there and in Indianapolis.  I'm very happy with the idea of living again in Bloomington when we return, but it was there that we decided to remain in Ireland for yet another year.  Earlier this year we thought we'd leave here in June, 2014 but now it looks like it will be into 2015 at least, although now we're saying indefinitely.

After Bloomington we went back to Washington, with a stop overnight outside Charleston, WV.   We spend a nice three days with friends Irene & Craig.  Then departed again for New York and our final leg on the trip. We stayed at the same hotel in Long Island City and had dinner with a former colleague, Haisong, at The Grill Cafe in Bryant Park.  It was great to see Haisong doing so well!

Over the three weeks, we saw 50 or more friends and family and put 2900 miles on the rental car.  I only had two auto meltdowns and we made the big decision to stay another year in Ireland.  All in all a great trip.