These Feet Can Take Us Anywhere

What do good travelers need? Good travelin’ friends who are willing to meet you on another continent for a bit of shared birthday fun!

Our good friends from Portland, Brian and Annie, had taken to the traveling life themselves in March of this year and so - since we were all round about Europe somewhere - it was agreed that we would come together again in Kenmare, Ireland, to celebrate that Brian and Christine would be turning 34 within a few days of each other.  Thus was born the idea for the Virgo Ireland Birthday Bonanza Extravaganza….or V.I.B.B.E.After we left Eldamare Farm we were at a bit of a loss as to where to all meet up.  We’d been doing some research on renting cottages, but since we were all on a strict budget we couldn’t find a place we could afford for very long.  However Ireland is a land that relies on word-of-mouth, and it wasn’t long before the perfect solution was presented to us.  A wonderful woman in town, Siobhan (pronounced Shivonne), owned a B&B called Limestone Lodge.  Initially she offered us a few rooms in the top of the lodge that the four of us could have to ourselves at a discounted rate, but then she quickly had a better idea she offered us.  It seems she’d just recently had a brand new house built down the road which she intended to rent out as a single family dwelling.  It was a four bed/four bath house with every new applicance you could think of, fully furnished with beds and all.  It still needed some finishing touches - curtains hung, floors polished, shelves hung, etc - and that was where we came in.  In exchange for a bit of work we could all stay in the house just as long as we liked!  Jon and I stayed in the house for the week before Brian and Annie arrived to get it a bit ready, since when we got there the kitchen was still floor to ceiling with construction refuse and packing materials.  We both got to do fun/creative projects to finish off the house - Christine sewing and fitting curtains, and Jon sanding this old rusty fire surround.

By the time our friends arrived we had a bonafide home all to ourselves: a huge luxury for a pair of wwoofers! Annie and Christine got right down to the business of doing some cooking and baking. A new co-op had opened around the corner, so between that and Siobhan’s organic garden, maintained by all-around good guy Buddy, we had so many great ingredients to work with.  Being that we all pretty much stay in line with a vegan/vegetarian diet, it was great fun for us to be creative in the kitchen together and not have to compromise with other dietary habits.  We came up with some pretty great stuff!

  

And of course the very special vegan birthday deliciousness: apple cake made from local apples we gleaned from an abandoned orchard and vanilla bean goats milk ice cream Annie made from the organic goat’s milk they’d brought with them from the farm they’d just been wwoofing on.

Wow!  More, please!!

We watched movies, played lots of cards, baked a ton of vegan goodies, made lots of salads and soups and yummy seasonal food.  We even had a pot luck dinner party with 6 guests (which is amazing considering we’d only been in Kenmare a month).  Everyone had a great time and the week passed by all too quickly.  It was fantastic to get time with our friends, and Annie and Christine especially enjoyed having some serious girl time.  No doubt about it, it was a fantastic VIBBE!During the week it so happened that Jonathan ran into a bit of luck.  Earlier in the month he’d been eyeing an Alternative Energy Conference being held at Findhorn Community in Scotland. We were making tentative arrangements for him to attend when we found that it’d been canceled for lack of attendance.  The disappointment didn’t last long when we found out that there was to be an alternative building symposium happening in small Kenmare that very week! And as luck would have it, we had already been introduced to the man putting it together, and he said that Jon could help run the AV equip and attend the conference for free!  Awesome!  And so it happened that on a few of the days of VIBBE, Jon was able to attend the First International Hemp Building Symposium and get a lot out of that.

An unforseen side benefit we all got from Jon’s attendance was an invitation to go on a car trip to the famous Skellig Michael Island with some symposium attendees. So the four of us crammed into the back of the car for a road trip!

The island of Skellig Michael is a wonder of the world - it’s a steep rocky island about 15 off the coast and is the larger of the two Skellig Islands. After being founded around the 7th century, for 600 years the island was a centre of monastic life for Irish Christian monks. This crazy monastery, sitting atop the summit of the 230-metre-high rock, is one of Europe’s better known but least accessible monasteries.  To get there you have to make arrangement well in advance, take a small chartered boat and pay 50€ per person to do so.  It was that last bit that got us, and so we walked our friends to the dock and saw them off on their journey.  The boat goes out one time and comes back five hours later, so for four hours they’d be on the island and said we could tool around in their car if we like.  Great!  Here we are seeing them off:

We saw some beautiful beautiful sights that day.  We were blessed with a gorgeous day for amazing Irish sea and country.  The pictures are too numerous to put it, and we fear they can’t begin to do justice to the nature we witnessed that day.  But we had a wonderful time and want to share it with you as best we can!

When we drove up on a ridge we could look out and see Skellig Michael, the island where our friends were:

Do you see it all the way out there?

We had a picnic lunch at the beach which included free hemp chocolate (zero THC content if you were wondering)!  On the way back to Kenmare the group stopped at an old medieval ring fort, probably the oldest, best preserved in Ireland. Really neat stuff and almost perfect dry stone wall construction. Amazing! The four of us friends had a great celebration V.I.B.B.E. together. After a tearful goodbye to our dear friends Brian and Annie, we were off to spend a few days with Jon’s cousin Evan and wife Jane, with their one-year-old daughter Sophie.

Such a beautiful and happy baby - we really enjoyed having the time to spend with family. We delighted in pulling up their potatoes they had planted and talked earnestly about buying land and becoming self-sufficient. Jonathan was also fortunate enough to take a walk with the family to the local park where he marvelled at the exotic trees planted there, including the invasive Japanese rhododendron as well as the fungi growing on some others.

Like all things great however, our relaxation time had come to an end and it was on to the next experience: helping rebuild a boat moored on the coast of West Cork.  Evan was kind enough to drive us to the next big town where we could catch the bus, travel for two hours and finally arrive in Baltimore, Ireland, where our adventure would continue!

Tags: 2009-Sept., Annie, Brian, Tag Index

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 7:56 am and is filed under 2009-Sept.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.