Christmastide 2011 and New Year’s Greetings from the Tidewater Allens!

Greetings of this joyous season from Nashville, to which we came several days ago and set up shop in a nearby Residence Inn.  Prior to this Christmas trip, we had just returned after a five-day mid-December sojourn in the Caribbean where we celebrated the beach wedding of Candice Chung, one of Caroline’s five college roommates, all of whom showed up for the occasion. It was wonderful to be there — and a bit disorienting to experience the Christmas tree and hear carols floating thru the open-air resort lobby, wafted along by the warm breezes.

As we enjoy your kind seasonal greetings and catch up on your doings, we will share some of ours. On New Year’s Day, we rolled the A/Bus II for Orlando and its winter home at the Wycliffe Associates RV Park, from which Gary helped with the annual Aviation & Insurance Law Symposium nearby and then did volunteer work for the WA worldwide Bible translation support ministry. Marie, meanwhile, vigorously pursued her Masters of Divinity courses at Asbury’s Orlando campus, taking time on the weekends to go along in the convertible as Gary scouted out local airshows and a gathering of vintage RV aficionados. In February, we flew to Southern California for a Lawyer-Pilots Bar Association meeting and to spend a few days with Andrew, now ensconced in North Hollywood as he pursues his last year in USC’s graduate film program. We stayed in Orlando well into April this year and were rewarded with much warmer weather than in 2010; Gary was pleased not to wear his winter clothes to the Daytona 500 this year.

Marie continued her consulting on several records management matters, and Gary was selected for an aviation arbitration matter that would require his presence in London for the whole month of July. We gathered the whole family in Nashville just before departing to celebrate the opening of Physicians’ Urgent Care, a new urgent-care center in which Brady is a founding partner, and then flew off to England. Gary flew back just six days later to keep a weekend performance commitment outside Baltimore with the Three Jolly Coachmen, his Kingston Trio tribute group, and was back by Sunday night, so amped up with the performance and his consulting excitement that he was unfazed by jet lag. Though London is a favourite and familiar city for us, Marie attacked its manifold historicity with characteristic determination and thoroughness, walking many miles a day and taking Gary out for the highlights every weekend. We toured Buckingham Palace and saw The Dress at its premiere, heard Amy Grant in concert in Croyden, visited John Wesley’s house and church, and enjoyed dinner in the homes of new friends with whom Gary was working. We immensely enjoyed living there.

Once matters in London concluded, we started August checking off a long-overdue box on our Travel Agenda: Ireland, an amazing omission given that Gary’s paternal grandfather had emigrated from there in 1899 as a 19-year-old. Marie had devoted intense on-line and in-person efforts in London to supplementing what we knew about young HWW Allen and unearthed a treasure trove of new information. After spending our first three days in Dublin wrapping up this research in records there and finding the very house into which he was born, Gary fearlessly launched an Audi A3 diesel on a thousand miles of wrong-sided driving as we followed the threads of his life, including several palatial country homes in which his extended family and parents had lived. Marie even found “Heathfield,” a country estate Gary’s father had heard many stories of, which was believed by the family to be long gone, and visited its ruins in the company of the family that bought it after the IRA had confiscated it from the Allens. As well as the history, we were smitten by the beauty of the country and the warmth of its people.

We returned home to Greystone in late August after seven weeks abroad – and left again eight days later on a spur-of-the-moment trip accompanying Caroline on a weeklong business trip to China. She wanted to see Beijing at each end of her trip into the interior; Marie had been there before and I had not; fares were reasonable. That’s all the excuse we needed. We drove to Chicago just ahead of the Virginia earthquake and Hurricane Irene, and then flew off together for a most memorable week. With Caroline, we saw the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, and of course the Great Wall. The ‘Rents also toured the historic hutong alleyways, visited the pandas in the zoo, saw the famed acrobats, and more.

When we got back home in mid-September, we had slept in our own beds eight of the previous 80 nights. Greystone had four big oaks down across the fence in the back and some minor water damage from a couple shingles blown away by Irene. It was time to stay home and attend to things – which we pretty much did, throwing in another Nashville trip for Marie’s birthday and an LPBA trip to Pensacola for another LPBA meeting and the Veteran’s Day airshow.  And of course there was another Thanksgiving at The CondoLine in Chicago, with Rew again joining us from LA, and then the aforementioned wedding trip in the Turks & Caicos. Blessings all.

Caroline’s world-girdling travels remain complemented by her voracious appetite for beach volleyball, at which she excels and for which she has traveled to Colorado and Mexico for tournaments. She loves dog-sitting her boss’s Brittany, who is amazingly like the late, great Britt Allen, and remains active in her church.  Brady & Holly have been very busy with PUC and four young kids, with Holly providing the lubricant that keeps the whole family machine humming. Andrew, in addition to his studies, is webmaster for Padinga.com, a gaming site, and thru connections he has made in several internships, has been able to “pitch” some projects to major entertainment companies. Sooner or later, one of them will take root.

It is once again a Nashville Christmas with the whole family, especially including Brady & Holly’s precious four kids, and then another First Night Williamsburg three-show extravaganza for the Three Jolly Coachmen – and then off to Orlando to start the whole cycle again, with LPBA/Hawaii in February, the summer LPBA meeting in Williamsburg in July, and a Russian rover cruise on September, Lord willing.

As 2011 winds down, we hope that you find yourself surrounded by the love of family and friends this Christmastide. May God’s peace be with you and may you enjoy abundant blessings of every kind in the New Year.

For photos, go to  www.GWAblog.com  and click on the album “2011 in Pictures.”

Boy, I knew I was remiss in postings here but didn’t realize how abjectly so. In my defense (such as it is), we’ve been On the Move quite a bit these last couple months and my other writing responsibilities for the LPBA Journal and the upcoming ALIS aviation law symposium have together required over 10,000 words of my deathless (or death-enabling) prose in the last few weeks.  Yoiks.

We’re fresh back from our Second Annual CondoLine Thanksgiving in Chicago, where Rew again flew in from Hollywood for the occasion and Caroline had temporary custody of her boss’s beloved Brittany “Bacon,” who is amazingly close to our late, great Britt. Thus a Very Large Tyme was had by all, with weather that ranged from wonderful to wild, with winds on our last day there gusting over 40mph.  We gave Caroline an early C’mas gift of a new Costco nine-foot lighted tree and it was fun helping get it set up and decorated. We marveled at the fact that in just a few weeks we’d all gather again in NashVegas with Dr Brado and Holly’s gang and the anticipation is palpable.

In the meantime, though, this weekend we’re welcoming two couples who “bought” a Grand Illumination Weekend at Greystone in last winter’s charity auction down in Orlando with Wycliffe Associates and are getting our decorations up and working the Roombas hard. And on Tuesday, we fly to the Caribbean island of Grand Turk, intersecting with Caroline at the plane-change in Charlotte, for five days there celebrating the wedding of Caroline’s former college roomie and our Quasi-Adopted Chinese Daughter Candice, who is one-half of the formidale Life Force called The CandoLine. Fortunately, groom Dave appears to know what he’s getting into. It should be mucho fun.

A couple weeks back, I did a five-day round trip by A/Bus to a conference in Pensacola co-sponsored by LPBA. Thus on 11-11-11 I got to see the last Blue Angels airshow of the 2011 season and it was, as always, a thrill.  We had dinner that night in the justly-famous Naval Aviation Museum and it was a memorable occasion.

Both M&I have been fairly busy with our respective consulting activities and M has been really bearing down on her sole seminary course this semester: Greek. I took a couple of years of Latin (where I learned a LOT about English) in high school but Greek puts Latin on the trailer. from what I can see.

I’d better get back to GuestPreps> Happy HolidayPreps ~

Yesterday was the 39th anniversary of my buying the Blue Max, our 1972 BMW Bavaria that sits on jacks in the garage, awaiting my oft-promised but ofter-delayed mechanical ministries. Thinking of BMWs as I put the A/Bus II away from its faithful service the night before as the TJC Band Bus for a gig in Blackstone VA, I remembered I had an uncashed Groupon for an EagleRider motorcycle rental. Two hours later I was picking up a well-kept 2007 BMW R1200RT with 60k miles on the clock over in Richmond.  This afternoon, 25 hours later, I turned it in after 335 miles.  It was a  real eye-opener and cobweb-clearer after 25k miles on trusty BluZu, my ’95 Suzuki Intruder 1400 cruiser. A few comparative observations seem in order.

BluZu is Thor’s hammer, its massive V-twin slugging your backside with frame-bending, eyeball-blurring combustion thunderclaps of torque at any speed in any gear (it only has four, and only needs three). But BZ is happiest lazing along at 45-65mph sniffing the scents in the air. It tracks the road like the City of New Orleans and encourages moderation in the twisties. It’s not an athletic bike; that’s not its thang. But if you want an Amtrak locomotive to rear-end you, just open the throttle.

The BMW’s two-cylinder opposed “oilhead” engine quivers and stutters at idle like a two-stroke outboard and needs a load to smooth it out. Once underway it is an odd combination of lower-rpm twin-cylinder vibration blending into smoother but still buzzy lunges into the higher rpm ranges, where it sounds like a thousand little German gnomes are shaving ice chips down in the crankcase. It is ferociously powerful but comparatively short on torque, the brute-force right-now response of a big-bore V-twin like BluZu. So you’d better have the Beamer in the right gear if you want those explosive horsepower slingshots to get you around slow-moving glurks.

The headrush really gets going as the tach passes 5000 on its way to the 8400rpm redline, at which point you’re above most US speed limits in second gear — with four more still to go. The massive slotted twin-rotor front brakes emit a reassuring metallic SWSSSSSHHHHH when applied and with ABS on tap, you can just keep squeezing the levers until you feel your retinas begin to detach from their optic nerves. The stopping power is just as amazing as its high-speed capabilities. Effortless rushes up to and back down from orbital escape velocities are just a twist and a squeeze away.

And if BluZu in the twisties is like dancing with Olga the Deep-Muscle Masseuse, the RT is like a twirl with Ginger Rogers — and you’re suddenly Fred Astaire instead of Ralph Kramden. Just think and it turns. My inherent cautiousness prevents me from cornering at speeds where I wouldn’t have a fighting chance if Something Unexpected suddenly hove into view, so about 70% of the RT’s cornering capabilities are wasted on me. But I can tell it’s there.

BluZu does interstates at any speed you ask, but with no windshield or fairing and cruiser exhaust (which, to be fair, I’ve drilled out a bit), 65mph is plenty fast and the slow lane is the place to be. After an hour or so you’ll feel like you’ve been wrestling with a shark.

 The RT, on the other hand, IS the shark. I pulled onto 295, the Richmond beltway, in the lightly-traveled southeastern quadrant, and enjoyed some nice RPM sweeps up thru the gears to what seemed like a nice, brisk pace — and then wondered why everyone else had slowed down. I glanced at the speedo and the first digit was a nine. Oops! To give my license a fighting chance, I had to engage the cruise control (first one I’ve ever used on a bike) and set it at the limit +9. Even then, I found myself rolling in a little extra from time to time so I could always be moving forward thru the school of traffic, which is so much easier and safer than watching the killer whales bear down on you from behind. But would The Man think so?

 The comfort at speed is due to both the BMW DNA and the excellent wind protection afforded by the deeply-sculpted sides into which you tuck your legs, and the gee-whiz electrically-adjustable windscreen which virtually eliminates knocking your head around in the windblast. While my six-hour day in the saddle (with a brief timeout for some NC BBQ at the Pig & Steak in Madison, near Graves Mountain) left my neck and shoulders slightly sore, a similar day on BluZu just about pulls my arms out of their shoulder sockets and leaves me happy but beat — if not beat up. [Again, in fairness, BluZu needs a "riser" or a new set of handlebars that fit my physique (such as it is) better; I've known that for ten years.]

 I returned the RT to the EagleRider in Richmond; the dealer also handles beautifully-restored British bikes (Royal Enfields and Triumphs) and even had a ’72 Honda CB350 like the one I had in law school and sold to pay for our Abaco Island honeymoon that year. On the rental row are a Yamaha FZR sportbike that looks interesting, and a gorgeous Gold Wing, which is kinda like our Avalon sawed in half.

Stay tuned ~

Where does the time go? Last time I wrote an entry here, we were sitting in our hotel room in Beijing, looking forward to a Sunday excursion to the Great Wall and then to the Summer Palace complex. In the 10 days (!!) since then, we have indeed traveled to and marched upon the Great Wall, sailed across the lake at the Summer Palace in a Dragon Boat, made our way safely back across the top of the world to Chicago, decompressed there for a couple of days, and then journeyed home to Greystone by car.

Our trip to the wall was amazing and enjoyable. Our private guide (Americanized moniker “Joe”) picked us up in his black four-door Red Flag, which proved to be a Chinese copy of the 1990ish Audi 5000, and off we went through the suburbs of the greater Beijing area. The roads ranged from excellent down to good, and as we journeyed further away from the heart of the Big City, we saw more venues and lifestyles which one would associate with Third World conditions, though overall they were much better than, for example, North Africa or Egypt. China is clearly prosperous, and once you get within hailing range of Beijing proper, the construction cranes are everywhere. Clearly, this is a country on the move.

The Great Wall, of course, is a throwback to a time when China’s security could only be vouchsafed by the construction of a massive, 3500 mile serpentine wall which is the only man-made structure that can be clearly seen from outer space. Thanks to Joe, we beat the rush to a more distant, less–touristy area of the Wall, though that is a relative thing, and took the cable car up to tower number 14 and began marching westward there. As the morning progressed, the low clouds which shrouded the higher elevations of the Wall lifted and weak sunlight broke through. The crowds were very manageable, and we saw by far the largest number and percentage of Americans there than anywhere else in our entire time in China. Biggest surprise: the extremely mountainous terrain so close to Beijing. It was like being plopped into the middle of the Sierra Nevadas.

As you ascend toward tower number 24, the way is steeply upward and one wonders how many folks keel over in the effort. It would be a very long way to the nearest defibrillator. A few of the Chinese climbers took cigarette breaks on the way up, a rather daring demonstration of a conviction of immortality; as a jogger of 45 years standing, I was blowing like a beached whale and glad to remind myself that my pounding heart could be reasonably relied upon to handle the strain.

Uber-athletic Caroline had, of course, zoomed on ahead of us and was surprised and pleased to encounter her parents farther up the steep climb than she had imagined as she came back down. She reversed course and completed the last part of the climb with us, enjoying the fist-pumps and other indicia of Triumph that attended all who made it to tower number 24 — which was as far as one could first proceed  before encountering dire Official Announcements of dangerous and non- passable sections ahead .

We reversed course there and made our way back down to the cable car and then descended through human forests of vendors offering us T-shirts emblazoned with the legend, “I Climbed the Great Wall.” If you’ve ever wondered how much it really costs to make a printed T-shirt in China, here is a clue: they were selling them two for an American dollar, before negotiation, and presumably making a profit.  Had I not left my American money in the hotel safe, I would have bought some; I did not feel like hassling with them over whatever the price might have been in Chinese money.

Amazingly, here at the base of the Great Wall of China was a Subway restaurant, and a welcome sight it was indeed. My own digestive situation at the time would be Facebook-classified as “Complicated,” thanks to my indulgence in tap water at the hotel the previous evening.  So that six- inch roasted chicken sub with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles and green peppers with honey mustard really hit the spot.  God bless America.

Thus fortified, we left the Wall about 1:30 PM and had Joe drop us at the Summer Palace on the far northwest side of Beijing. This was a holiday weekend, with Monday being the highlight of the Moon Festival, and so this normally busy site was absolutely thronged with visitors, 98% local Chinese. Alas, the gorgeous weather of the previous Friday failed to replicate itself and the day was rather gray, humid and smoggy. Nonetheless, the vistas and structures of the vast Summer Palace complex were amazing, and we climbed all the way up to the highest vantage point at the Palace to look out over it all. The skyscrapers in the distance on every side were certainly something that the Emperor could never have imagined, but within the complex, all was pretty much as it was in the Imperial days.

We made our way out of the north entrance to the park and stumbled upon a McDonald’s, where we enjoyed some McFlurries before proceeding onwards to the underground station and from thence on back to our hotel. After a brief stop there, we made our way to one of the large shopping malls and had dinner at a Pizza Hut. Just think about it: it took American ingenuity to take an Italian dish, help popularize it in America, and then franchise it around the world, such that we had to wait for 10 min. to be seated amongst the completely Chinese crowd.

That evening, M and I watched live as the 9/11 ten-year observances unfolded back home, what with our  +12 hour time difference over the East Coast. We went to sleep early and arose early the next day so as to squeeze the most out of Going Home Day.  Our flight was not until about 4 PM, and a private car, thoughtfully provided by Gray Line after M complained about the restaurant quality on our Thursday night tour, was not scheduled to leave until 12:30 PM. Thus, Caroline and I headed out so I could squire her around the Temple of Heaven, where M&I had been three days earlier; M Herself was off to search out appropriate and particular gifts for our grandkids.

My visit the previous Friday had been characterized by spectacular weather and rather modest crowds, most of whom were local tourists enjoying the fantastic historic sites of this amazing venue. But on Monday morning, a holiday morning, the place was thronged with locals who were very busy doing all the things that might be featured on a travel show entitled “Seeing the Real China.”

I’ve been to San Francisco and seen the groups of people gathering in the parks early in the morning to do ritualistic Chinese exercises.  That is Nothing. For in Beijing at the Temple of Heaven Park, there were thousands of people of all ages doing everything imaginable thing, and many that you cannot imagine because they are simply so different than anything one would ever see similarly-situated people doing in America.

You would probably and reasonably expect me now to describe these activities, but that is hard to do. There were large groups of people singing, dancing, moving their bodies individually or together in slow, expressive manners. There were sizable groups of individuals playing traditional Chinese stringed instruments, which sound somewhat like two-string violins or cellos played at considerable volume; the fact that each player was sawing out an entirely different tune did not impair their individual performances in the slightest, though it caused a mental musical tailspin in trying to keep track of the cacophony. We saw one trio of individuals underneath a tree; one was reading something aloud as another moved in graceful synchronicity with the reading, and a third contorted herself into positions that would do any Chinese gymnast proud. In the distance were about four people, one in a wheelchair, slinging 10 foot bullwhips in circles over their heads and then cracking them with rifle-like reports.

You know, all the usual stuff.

We made our way to the south end of the complex where the Circle Mound stands, the elevated center of a large stone circle laid out with stones, panels and sections which are multiples of the magic/lucky number nine; at the elevated stone in the center of the circle was the point from which the Emperor would deliver his remarks, his voice unusually sonorous because of the sonic effects of the carefully-engineered circle.  On this morning, loads of Chinese were taking their turn to stand on the stone and make a largely nonsensical pronouncements, to the general amusement of the others waiting their turns. While Caroline would only pose for a picture, I decided to fulfill my parental responsibility of embarrassing my children no matter what their age by stepping up to the stone, raising my can of Coke Classic to the skies and bellowing, “Coca-CoLAAAAA!” at the top of my voice. I think the assembled Chinese were, overall, appreciative. At any event, we got out of there alive.

We left the park and took one more ride on the excellent Beijing subway system and then separated, Caroline heading back to the hotel to pack and me stealing away for a little more shopping. As previously noted, prices in Beijing are relatively reasonable, most especially for handmade touristy stuff that is heavy on labor costs,which obviously are minimal by US standards. Also, the Chinese are not bothered by fussy little Western concerns with things like animal rights and so, for example, you can buy a baby turtle perfectly and forever entombed in a block of clear Lucite about the size of a very large bar of soap.  Likewise, small keychains may be had with various varieties of insects and sea life similarly captured in clear Lucite which, as a bonus, glows in the dark. Scorpions were a particular favorite of mine, but you could also get small crabs, rhinoceros beetles, and the like.

We had an interesting and animated conversation with our limo (actually, a nice Volkswagen Passat) driver on a variety of subjects. He was interested in hearing M and I explain our respective careers and, as was the case in another conversation or two I had in China on the same subject, was surprised to hear that in my field of aircraft accident litigation, bribes under the table played no part in the outcome of judicial cases. For his part, our driver, in his early 40s, was an exemplar of a growing dilemma among the working Chinese:  he reported several intense discussions with his wife, who also worked, about why they were working so hard and so long for mere material gains and missing out on the more experiential side of life. “I tell her, ‘We’re doing okay, we are well off, it’s time to relax,’ but she is not buying it,” he said.  Like Joe, our Great Wall driver, he said he worked almost every day, especially in the busy season, for months at a time.

Arriving back at Beijing International Airport, I appreciated anew the incredible expanse of this facility, one of the biggest in the world and the busiest in Asia. It is absolutely enormous and, like so much of metropolitan Beijing, clear evidence of the enormous wealth and prosperity which has been generated in the upper half of the demographic there. Outside the windows at our gate sat our United 747-400 and though we’d all enjoyed our time in China, never did an airplane look better. In 11 hours and 50 min., it carried us safely across the top of the world and plopped us down in Chicago at about the same time on the same afternoon we had left.

I recall that as my beloved late father Boo aged, his wonder at modern marvels increased almost exponentially. Maybe it’s not a good sign, but I find myself more amazed at modern air travel than I was when the very first 747 took to the skies almost half a century ago.

Caroline split off and had a cab run her on home so she could head to the beach for several hours of volleyball, where she won (another) Queen of the Beach competition. She came home, changed, and then went Out with her BeachBuds for a couple hours, capping a 30-hour day.

Take-away: it’s great to be young.

M&I spent three days in Chicago decompressing and adjusting our circadian clocks. After M completed her first quiz on her new course in Biblical Greek at noon on Thursday, we loaded ourselves into the Solara and, in newly arrived fall-like temperatures, rolled out of ChiTown with convertible top firmly in the Up position.  After an overnight stop in Grove City, on the south side of Columbus, we were home by 5 PM the next day, 27 days after leaving.

On the one hand, it was heartening to see that Governor’s Land, upon casual examination, appeared largely undamaged some three weeks after Irene came calling. On the other, our street was lined with gigantic piles of sawed-up trees awaiting the county’s promised removal (which did not actually begin until today), and the backyard at Greystone has been forever altered by the loss of two 70 foot trees and the eruption of the ginormous root balls which await the attentions of Grandaddy’s Stump Grinding. And there are two more trees which we’ll have taken down next week.  Sadly,as I’ve mentioned before, the trademark flowering pear trees which line the road to the Club on both sides were decimated by the storm, and are being removed.  Greystone also took some water in through the roof over our bedroom, and have the appropriate folks coming out next week to have a look.

But obviously we were fortunate. Though our street took one of the heaviest hits in our community, our damage compared to the tornado ravaged parts of the South this Spring are nothing by comparison.

When we arrived home, I did an approximate count and determined that since July 1, we had spent 70 of 78 nights sleeping elsewhere than at Greystone, with roughly 49 of those 70 abroad.  It was a great run, and a memorable summer unlikely to be equaled: London, most of Ireland, Chicago and Beijing.

But now, it’s time to stay home.

Greetings from Beijing! It is a warm and hazy Tuesday evening in China’s capital city, with the ineffable smell of polluted air that I haven’t smelled since Bangkok almost 20 years ago. Every time I visit the Developing World I rethink my jaundiced opinion of the US EPA as I see (and smell) the alternative; here, though one doesn’t see the thousands of smoke-spewing two-stroke engines of some third-world locales, there are enough airborne pollutants here to make my eyes burn just a little and keep the view gauzey.

We arrived here Monday afternoon after an uneventful 12 hour 29 minute flight aboard a United 747, landing on the old south runway at PEK which featured rows of trees perhaps 100 feet off our wing tips on each side. We taxied about five miles to the broad expanses of the new side of the field and its new terminal and then endured about 45 min. in line to clear customs.  From there, it was another, shorter, line to get a taxi. The 45 min. ride here would have cost about $120 in London; here, it cost $13. This is the first non-US city I’ve been to in decades where at least SOME things are cheaper than in comparable cities stateside.

Beijing’s a far more modern city that I imagined. The freeways that we rode into town were relatively new and choked with Monday rush-hour traffic. The cars were all recognizable Asian, European and even American brands, with Buicks being a particular favorite here. Our hotel, the Regent Beijing at 99 JinBao Street downtown, is in a neighborhood of swanky shopping that would do Beverly Hills proud. The main level of our hotel features a Rolls-Royce showroom on the right flank and a Bentley showroom on the left, and just down the street is a Ferrari and Lamborghini dealer, with Maseratis available across the street. Even more surprising is a dealer for AC Schnitzer BMW’s, an exclusive high-performance BMW-authorized modifier of that brand that I’ve only seen in magazines until here. This evening, we discovered a stunning indoor shopping mall with every designer and luxury-goods store you can think of spread out over two floors and as long as two or three city blocks, plus dozens (literally) of restaurants of every description.  One was in itself a ginormous foodcourt suite that was large and so varied it’s hard to describe; suffice it to say, I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere.  And the whole mall is still expanding.  A subway station disgorges its passengers thru there and the place was thronged with prosperous-looking locals toting designer-label shopping bags homeward. It is a stunning testimony to the unleashing of Western-style consumer economics.

Hello, Chairman Mao?  Comrade Lenin? This IS what you had in mind, right?? Talk about your Great Leap Forward . . .

To backtrack a bit, we left Greystone in the Solara (chosen from the GWA Fleet for its top-down potential at the destination, though we also did the first three hours al fresco) at about 4 PM on August 20 and made it to Charleston, West Virginia by midnight, where we spent the night at our customary hotel there. We rolled on into ChiTown the following day, dropping the top as we cruised up Lakeshore Drive and on into The CondoLine. A few days after our arrival, Caroline invited about a dozen of her friends over for a “How Much Allen Can You Stand?” dinner which was a lot of fun. On our first Friday night, I joined M for a reception at the Field Museum sponsored by the archival conference she attended for the second half of that week.

We bit our nails and prayed a lot as Hurricane Irene bore down on Tidewater Virginia; I briefly contemplated driving or flying home to be there and ride it out but decided there wasn’t that much I could do. Neighbors started the generator for us and then used the house the next several days until power was restored. GovLand took a good lick between about 8pm and midnite that Saturday night, with wind gusts approaching 80mph that downed a lot of trees and decimated the flowering pear trees that line the last mile to the Club.  Our house and the A/BusII parked nearby came through fine, but we lost a huge oak in the back which took down a section of our perimeter fence and a couple of trees with it. However, thankfully it fell away from the house; had it fallen towards it, the results would’ve been ugly indeed. Hate to lose it, but I’ve always looked at it and pondered how big a trench it would punch into our roofline.

During our second week in ChiTown we had a welcome visitor at the CondoLine: Bacon, the two-year-old Brittany who belongs to Caroline’s boss, moved in for the week while his owner traveled. Bacon provided enormous entertainment and companionship for the three of us all week. This dog is the veritable reincarnation of our beloved family dog Britt, who died in 2006 after 16 years as a family member. The resemblance, both physical and psychological, is so striking that I called Bacon by his double’s name about half the time. Bacon provides the unique life experience of regaining something that normally would be lost for a lifetime.

M and I enjoyed sampling the pleasures of summer life in ChiTown, going out to restaurants every few days and providing a “Burgers and Bacon” dinner for another bunch of ChiGirl’s friends, producing Bumsburgers to an appreciative audience. We got to watch C play beach volleyball and took a walking tour of the Old Town area which was fun despite thunderstorms which got us reasonably wet during the second half. We celebrated my birthday on the 9/3 with a nice dinner out at a quality Mexican restaurant nearby. And I midwifed the next edition of the LPBA Journal just before we launched for China Sunday afternoon.

On the trip to China, you lose a night and gain a day; we departed at 1 PM and arrived at 3 PM the next day without any darkness along the way. It was good to fly aboard a 747 again, and experience an old-skool 53-second takeoff run (more modern designs leap off in 30 seconds or less). After arriving and settling in here at the Regent, M and I went out and walked the local streets a bit and then each managed to get a relatively normal night’s sleep with the help of melatonin and Ambien. Despite the +13hour time difference from CDT, we were doing okay today.

This morning we three enjoyed an abundant breakfast buffet here at the hotel and then headed out on foot to find the Forbidden City, which proved to be about a 20 min. walk from here. This huge complex made up of hundreds buildings ranging in age up to 600 years was formerly the palace and grounds complex serving the Chinese Emperor, populated solely by his eunuchs and servants and wives and concubines. The whole shebang narrowly escaped torching by the edict of Chairman Mao, who saw it as an unwelcome and embarrassing reminder of  China’s imperial past. Fortunately he died before this plan could be carried out, and his successor Deng Xiaoping knew better. The seemingly endless succession of grand buildings housed various ceremonial halls which emperors used for particular occasions, each graced with a name which in English takes a long phrase or an entire sentence to translate. The place was very busy with tourists, mostly Chinese;  very few Americans.  In fact, I don’t remember seeing any of our countrymen in the area, though doubtless there were some.

Caroline has now left us and flown onto the interior of the country, where she will work this week on a second visit to a business her company may buy, returning here Friday evening. We’ll do a tour to the Great Wall on Sunday and in the meantime, M and I will do some low-pressure touring around greater Beijing. We find our hotel is a most agreeable place to hang out and Beijing, though filled with things to see, is not London. So tomorrow we’ll take a walking tour of some of the city’s storied ”hutongs” (alleys) and this evening we may walk back to Tiananmen Square to do a walk around.

There are minor irritations in being here: we are stuck with CNN International, for one thing, which means the same self-promotions we saw for six weeks in the UK and the same endless commercials for Qatar Airways and the international news one tries to care about.  And for another, Facebook is blocked here by the Chinese government, which is silly. And finally, Verizon is relatively worthless here, and so expensive that it’s better just to keep our smart phone and Blackberry shut down.

On the other hand, prices here are (as noted) far more reasonable than in Europe and it is most interesting to be somewhere where I’ve never been before. And I have my personal tour guide here to show and explain it all to me.

What’s not to like? As Chairman Mao said, “Seize the moment.”

Greetings from Greystone where “better late than never” might well be (or more correctly should be) the theme of this entry, given the unconscionable lapse since the last one. This will be a somewhat abbreviated version of activities that deserve a lot more, but as will be seen by the end here, more travels are afoot and there’s a lot to be done before once again we launch on another adventure.

Picking up on our tour of the West of Ireland, we spent Sunday August 7, which fortuitously enough was the most beautiful weather day of our trip, on the Dingle Peninsula.  That perfect weather complemented an absolutely spectacular drive around the Ring of Dingle, which featured gorgeous panoramas of green mountains sloping dramatically down to radiantly blue waters. Hopefully I’ll get a few pictures up either now or soon, because the beauty just beggars description. M and I agree that the area is on our top 10 Life List of beautiful places we’ve been fortunate enough to visit.

We stayed in Dingle at the gracious and hospitable Emlagh House, a relatively new guesthouse with an appropriately Victorian look that featured beautiful views of the surrounding pastures and water. It was a nice way to end our time in the Western peninsulas of Ireland, a place to which someday we might well return.

On Monday, August 8, we pointed the nose of our trusty Audi A3 northbound for what was, as expected, our longest day on the road, clocking in at about 300 miles by the time it was over. No biggie stateside, but when over half of it is non-motorway driving in Ireland, it’s got some Street Cred. We left the Peninsula and drove northward to the town of Portumna, site of the eponymous castle which, M’s research had revealed, was the ancestral home for over 200 years of  one branch of the Bourke side of the Allen family tree. The castle and grounds had fallen into substantial disrepair but the government took it over and invested very substantial sums in reroofing and restoring the building to a large portion of its former glory. We dodged the usual rain showers coming and going and resumed our northward trek after 90 minutes there.

The objective was Ballina, the Salmon Capital of Ireland (a river runs thru it, to coin a phrase) where we stayed in a riverfront hotel, and Ballycastle, a town about 15 miles up the road. Nearby and somewhere between the two, M had learned, was the ruin of Heathfield, the ancestral home of another branch of the Bourke family whose presence in the area dated back to the 1600s. My father had retold stories told by his father HWW about childhood memories of Heathfield, to which HWW’s mother had returned after losing her first husband and then marrying a second. Although family tensions between my grandfather and his stepfather eventually led to the former’s emigration to the United States in 1899, his memories of time on this country estate were pleasant (and, having now seen it, we say understandably so).

My parents never discovered in their lifetime that Heathfield, which they believed to be completely destroyed and unlocatable, in fact survives as a substantial ruin in County Mayo overseen by a second-generation new owner. The combined research horsepower of M and Google made this discovery possible – and this only because the current owners mention the ruin by name as an attraction in promoting their former B&B business, which they are no longer operating but whose website remains up and thus, discoverable.

We had only a general location with us and so stopped at a convenience store in a small town nearby, where the proprietor, fortuitously enough, was very familiar with Heathfield as a local landmark and gave us helpful guidance for finding it. On the main road we found the tidy house (and former Silver Sycamore B&B) where we were to meet Mary and Michael in the evening; Michael’s father had purchased Heathfield in a government auction in the 1920s, when it was still in relatively good condition. The estate is located across the road and about a quarter of a mile down, and we drove over there to check it out.

The setting was lovely, in rolling green hills with a stream and small waterfalls/rapids nearby; the house, equivalent in size to maybe a 5000 ft.² American house, could be called a ruin, although it is not quite that bad. In fact, it is a protected site under the Irish national government, and the owners received a grant to put a new slate roof over the main part of the house to decelerate its deterioration. One would have to be immensely wealthy to maintain, much less restore, such an old and sizeable estate house.

We walked all around it as the owner’s several dozen sheep and cattle kept us company. Michael’s knowledge of the house and its history was encyclopedic, and he showed us the old roadbed that runs through the property predating the current highway; it was up this road that invading French forces came in their attempt to conquer that part of Ireland in the 1790’s. They helped themselves to a substantial portion of the contents of Heathfield and did damage to it during their brief occupancy, prompting an eventual claim for damages which was eventually paid and recorded for posterity by the Irish government.

After spending about 45 min. walking all over the property, Michael offered to take us to a pair of nearby cemeteries in which Bourke ancestors are buried.  We  all piled into the Audi and made our way along trademark Irish country roads with hedges close and on both sides of our one-lane passage. The first church and graveyard had been completely overgrown by brush, even though Michael reported it had been completely restored just a few years ago; it contained the graves of Walter and Rev William Bourke, ancestors who were early and relatively recent ancestors, respectively, of my grandfather. We drove on to a small seaside town which featured a ruin of a 17^th century stone church and a graveyard with the prominent and still- readable monuments to Bourke ancestors who died in the 1600s. “The trail ends here,” said Michael. “This is as far back as we can trace the Bourkes in Ireland.”  It was a memorable place indeed to find the trailhead.

We wanted to do SOMEthing for our gracious and self-effacing hosts, and as the long summer evening faded they accepted our suggestion of stopping by the local pub there in this town of perhaps two dozen buildings.  To say that this was a local -color establishment doesn’t begin to describe it. It was a homey place with a nice view of the ocean and a few locals quietly enjoying their Guiness, which seems more common in Ireland than Coca-Cola. I would say that tourists rarely visit this town and especially this pub; it was pure Ireland.

After finishing our various drinks, we loaded back in the car and proceeded back to Michael and Mary’s house, where we placed a transoceanic call to another Bourke descendent, a woman who had lived locally for a time and was now back home in, of all places, Brevard, North Carolina, where there are some family roots on M’s side of the family. We got her contact information (which does not include e-mail) and vowed to correspond and eventually get together, and M has already sent her a packet of materials gleaned from our travels.

We took our leave of Michael and Mary, assuring them of our grateful appreciation of their time and efforts on our behalf, and made our way back to the hotel in Ballina.  The following morning we did a walking tour of the town and found a Methodist Church in which HWW’s mother remarried, and visited an old but still operating Church of Ireland site and found a West family plot which contained several generations of that branch of the family. From there we made our way to Enniscoe, a state-run genealogical/ancestry resource center located in another gorgeous old Irish estate, where M met with a woman she had engaged via e-mail to do research in their records. The soft-spoken lady produced an amazing volume of previously- undiscovered materials, including a handwritten genealogical family tree of Heathfield –related Bourkes that measured approximately 3’ x 5’.  Her work product was well worth the relatively modest amount we were charged for her labors.

With this concluded, our final Irish destination was the memorably spectacular Drumoland Castle Hotel, located just 20 min. from Shannon international Airport from which we would depart the following day for London. The castle sports an internationally famous golf course (on which some of our GovLand friends have played) and suitably impressive facilities both inside and out. Although it was cloudy, windy and spitting occasional raindrops, I suited up and went out for a much-needed jog, noting that in my shorts and T-shirt it was almost too cold to do so. That evening we had dinner in the hotel’s five-star restaurant with another couple from Cincinnati that we had met in Kenmare about five days previously; both were attorneys and we enjoyed one another’s company.

Our departure from Shannon was not until late afternoon the following day, so we hung around the Castle until checkout time and then headed out into the local countryside to tour a re-created Irish village. By the time we got there, however, there was insufficient time remaining to see the place and it was raining besides, so we headed back.

On this leg of the trip I embarrassed myself for the only time in 1008 miles of wrong-side driving on the mostly- challenging backroads of Ireland; after missing a GPS-commanded left turn, I turned around in a driveway and, fixated on the road junction just a few hundred feet ahead onto which I would now turn right, proceeded down the right/wrong side of the road until sighting an oncoming car whose driver was, fortunately, indulgent — and living so close to Shannon International, probably used to the occasional wrong-way driver from Europe or the States.

Suitably chagrined and re-humbled, I steered us back to Shannon, dropped M at the ghostlike terminal complex (which, like Dulles in the 1970s, apparently comes to life only when the several international flights per day come and go), and returned the faithful Audi to Hertz in a pouring rain shower. My triple-checked calculations showed 50.7 miles per gallon for the entire thousand miles.  Love those stick-shift turbo diesels, especially when the fuel is over $7.70 a gallon. (Because of its efficiency, the per- mile fuel cost of driving the Audi there was about the same as driving one of our Toyotas back in the States.)

Upon returning to London and our beloved 51 Buckingham Gate hotel, we noted to each other how much like coming “home” it seemed.  I observed that I could easily handle another couple of weeks, most especially if I could go back to doing exactly the same work I was doing there previously. M for her part agreed.

During our Irish absence the UK riots had occurred, and a number of our friends and family were concerned for our safety. As has been the case in the US when such unpleasantness occurs, it was confined to outlying areas (one of which, admittedly, was Croydon, where we had attended the Amy Grant concert) and the area where we were staying, hard by Buckingham Palace and New Scotland Yard, was now overrun with police and probably the safest place on the entire planet.

We made one more trip to the local Sainsbury grocery store to pick up the makings for a final dine-in meal in our suite. The oven initially malfunctioned, and by the time it was ready to eat, M was in bed and sound asleep.  Next morning we again took advantage of our late afternoon airline flight to spend the morning out and about, riding the Underground one last time, posing for a picture by the International Dispute Resolution Center building in which I had worked for four weeks, and then touring the incomparable Christopher Wren masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral. We participated in one of the brief hourly prayer services there, a nice bookend to the evensong service in Westminster early in our London stay.

Finally it was time to go. The ever-efficient staff at 51 had our cab waiting at the appointed time and saw us off in grand style.  I couldn’t think of a way to finesse another business class upgrade for M on the flight home, so I swapped seats with her periodically to keep the peace. Brother Dwight and Owen, a Corgi that the Queen would like, met us at Dulles and enjoyed the thumbnail briefing M gave him of her genealogical efforts. We then decided to go ahead and strike out for Greystone, although I recognized that by the time we got there I would be at the end of a 23-hour day.

The drive went well enough considering the unappreciated and unanticipated  30 min. construction back up on southbound 95 for a two- lane construction zone that was completely unpopulated as we crept through.  Once back home at 0130 EDT I popped an Ambien and had a bowl of soup before heading for bed.  Having successfully traveled tens of thousands of miles in the preceding six weeks, I flubbed the last 100 feet from kitchen table to bed in a vaguely – remembered, Ambien-induced lurch that I arrested with my outstretched left arm, somehow  mildly spraining my left wrist. D’ohh!

Greystone was in fine shape, though overrun with tiny ants who had made the kitchen island their base-ops.  The yard had suffered in the intense summer heat, though no worse than others and better than some. It was good to be home, and we enjoyed a dinner on the patio at the Club our first night back.

We’ll not be here for long, however; M has a professional meeting in Chicago next week and we had already determined to use that as an excuse for spending several weeks in the CondoLine with our ChiGirl.  Our plan is to leave this weekend, having been home a whole eight or nine days.

Yesterday while at the Costco, I got an e-mail from Caroline reporting that during our stay with her, she would be leaving for a return business trip to rural China and had routed herself through Beijing so she could briefly tour the fabled city that her mother has so often urged her to see and that has been placed upon my bucket list as a result of M’s visit there about 10 years ago.  I noted that C’s e-mail included her United flight information and so I scrolled down to the bottom, idly curious as to whether it included fare information.

It did. To my considerable surprise, the fare for this 6600 mile nonstop from O’Hare to Beijing was less than the fare we had paid between Dulles and London. I found M at the front of the Costco.  “I have some news from our daughter, and a crazy idea,” I said.

Bottom line: on September 4, we and Caroline will fly off to Beijing together and stay in the same hotel that night. C will fly on the next day for her business while I gets squired around Beijing by my personal Travel Professional M for the next several days.  At the end of that week, Caroline will rejoin us for two days of catch-up touring together, and on the 12^th we will all fly back to Chicago,again  sitting together.

Other than all of the above, why, we haven’t been doing much and have no particular plans. Thanks for coming along.

It is a pleasant Saturday evening in Kenmare, County Kerry; I am at the table in a small study in our three-room suite here in the Park Hotel and M is relaxing on the sofa beneath one of many classical paintings beautifully framed and arranged around our living area. We’ve just come up from a lovely dinner in the dining room, followed by dessert and coffee which were delivered (per our request) to the lounge, which afforded an even better view of the surrounding mountains as the last light faded .

As we left the lovely Cashel Palace Hotel two days ago, I thought we would not likely see its equal again on this trip. I underestimated M and her powers of travel research.  After 104 pleasant road miles, we rolled into town and our GPS guided us right up the driveway to this 1897-vintage hotel, an imposing grey stone edifice set on a rise overlooking a nearby lake and park area with a range of low mountains behind, all bathed in the soft verdant green which characterizes the Irish countryside. We were led to our room on the third floor and were ushered into this comfortable suite ,which has a Victorian charm and drop-dead views out its windows.  We may have had a room previously with such an amazing vista,  but offhand I sure can’t recall it. And neither can M.

After high-fiving each other and unpacking a bit, we adjourned back to our trusty Audi A3 and set off to drive a portion of the Ring of Beara, a winding road which generally follows the shoreline of the Beara Peninsula and is one of several such ring roads that make the West of Ireland such a popular tourist destination. The guidebooks warn that these roads are quite narrow on some of their segments and that oncoming traffic can be disconcerting, especially when it consists of tourist motor coaches. We timed our exploration to begin when most of the busses would be off the roads and in that we succeeded. However, we also chose to take an optional segment that follows the shoreline most closely, and found ourselves on a one-lane, bidirectional route that was barely wide enough for our diminutive Audi, let alone for two vehicles to pass abeam one another. Coupled with the fact that the hedges come right up to the edges of the road on each side and the fact that the roads wind around quite a bit and you have the automotive equivalent of the horror- movie “pop out” scare when an oncoming vehicle suddenly presents itself perhaps 30 feet in front of you. The most amusing part is that the frequently-posted speed limit on these roads is 100kph, or 62mph; I grew uncomfortable driving at any speed above half of that value. It is refreshing to find a place which, like Texas, boasts speed limits which really are limits beyond which only the foolish would go.

Nonetheless, the scenery was spectacular when it finally opened up to reveal the vistas of shoreline and mountains that look something like a cross between the US Virgin Islands and the San Juan Islands in the Northwest of the US. Rather than drive the whole peninsula, we took a cut-across route from Ardgroom to Castletownbere that devolved into something that would have been more appropriate for our Wheel Horse garden tractor than a car. The road was not nearly as wide as the driveway at Greystone, and was laid across ground that had approximately the character of a rumpled wool blanket on an unmade bed.  But again, the elevated vistas it provided of the peninsula and the surrounding waters of Bantry Bay proved well worth the automotive gymnastics, and even the ever-cautious M agreed that the hair-raising motoring was well worth it.

We strolled around the fishing and boating hub of Castletownbere and as we did so, another of the many afternoon rain showers we had experienced began to move in. Sitting outside a small café was a local Irish family who, as the rain began, gathered up their things and began walking down the street. “You’re imagining things, dearie,” said the mother cheerfully to her young daughter. “It’s not raining. It never rains in Ireland.”

We drove the ring road back to Glengarriff and then crossed the mountain range again, this time on the road built early in this century by a WPA-style project which featured three short tunnels that were hand chiseled out of the rock. We stopped at a tourist attraction that was based in an old farmhouse once owned by a locally famous widow who raised her seven children there through hard work, farming and selling clothing and baked goods to travelers, with a little moonshining on the side. Up the hillside were the working components of the old farm, including the old barn which featured ducks, chickens and an extremely sociable pig, who came out to see if we had anything to offer him (and fortunately was not too disappointed when we did not). There was a “famine house” ruin, of which there are many in this area; these are tragic reminders of the large tenant farming families who suffered extreme hardship in the great potato famine of the 1840s which cut the population of Ireland almost in half. A fast-moving potato blight and an overreliance on the ubiquitous tubers as the source of nutrition, combined with the fact that the tenant farmers were subject to ruthless enforcement of their rent obligations and expulsion when they could not pay, led to countless deaths by starvation and about an equal number of forced emigrations, most to the United States. A traveler in this area at about that time reported he had never seen such horrifying conditions, with locals dropping to their knees in front of him, begging abjectly for any scrap of food he might spare.

Also on the property were several signs of the Bronze Age Druids — stone circles, cairns, burying grounds, and circular compounds. Little is known of the Druids beyond their monuments and ruins, since they predate written history, but their observations of astrological features and their uncanny ability to create circular structures that correlate with other markers they built on far distant terrain features to mark various astrological events are amazing. As we stood high atop one of the ridgelines looking out over the expenses of fertile green valleys and distant waters the sense of history and mystery were palpable indeed.

We drove back into Kenmare and had a delightful dinner at a local steakhouse before retiring for the evening. I made a valiant effort at starting the book that M had handed off to me with her highest recommendation, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s best-selling account of his political career which runs to almost 700 pages. I made it through about 1% before cobwebs overtook my brain and I was out for the night.

I crept out of bed about 7 AM today and pulled the curtains back to see yet another landscape and cloudscape washed together in the fine morning rainshowers that were producing layers of clouds running up the hillside. By the time we headed down to breakfast, blue skies and shafts of sunlight appeared through the gloom and promised another wonderful Irish day.

After finishing a full Irish breakfast which included the local delicacy known as black sneem, we borrowed raingear from the hotel and headed back up route N71 and the small town of Bonane, where there was a turnoff for a national park that we wanted to see.  We spent about two hours upon another ridge with spectacular vistas, braving passing rainshowers which yielded to a sunny period, exploring another network of Druid archaeological features. The level of astronomical knowledge revealed by their stone monuments is quite astonishing; one formation documents by markers a lunar phenomenon which occurs at the same point on the horizon only every 18.6 years. One wonders how many times they had to see it before they could not only figure out it was a repeating phenomenon, but determine how, when and where to mark it from a central vantage point to a distant one on a high ridge line — whose incline precisely match the angle of the moonrise at that point in time.

It was early afternoon when we finished these explorations; I headed off to town with a week’s worth of laundry to do and M returned to the Park Hotel for a little rest and relaxation (Hair Therapy was involved). I had a nice time nosing around the bustling shopping area of Kenmare and then returned for a nice nap before proposing yet another car adventure for the late afternoon.

This one involved a partial assault on the Ring of Kerry, the better-known ring road that the locals avoid because of heavy tourist traffic. Our efforts commenced at 5 PM when the tour buses were back in their barns and thus we enjoyed light traffic and spectacular shoreline vistas as we drove from Kenmare towards the memorably named town of Sneem, which means “knot” in Gaelic. From there we again left the coastline and climbed up about 1000 feet to Moll’s Gap, which afforded almost indescribable vistas of mountains, valleys and rain-fed streams gushing from the hillside. The terrain looked a little bit like Southern California if you soaked it in rain for about 1000 years.

We returned to the hotel for a walk around the park behind it and then the aforementioned three-course dinner which is a fitting climax to our time in this wonderfully indulgent facility. While we would be equally happy in a B&B, it is a lot of fun to stick our toes in the deep end enjoy luxury accommodations and the level of friendly Irish service that comes with it here.

In the morning we bid a fond farewell to Kenmare and drive two peninsulas north to the famous Dingle Peninsula, where we will spend one night and do another ring road run. From there we will head north by northwest to turn our attention back to uncovering Allen roots . I hope you come along.

This is the second installment concerning our time in Ireland to date, in case the almost-simultaneous postings have you wondering what you have walked in on.

Having arrived here in Cashel by Wednesday noon and checked into our aged and elegant hotel, we walked out the back and up the Archbishop’s Walk to the imposing fortress ruin atop Castle Rock.  It is situated at the site where St. Patrick, in about 450 A.D., converted the last pagan King of Ireland and thereby completed his Christianization of the entire island nation. Beginning in the 1200s, an ever-expanding fortress was constructed (and occasionally sacked, burned, and/or reconstructed) and was by turns and Abby, a center of political power, a refuge from invading Vikings, and to varying degrees a ruin. Presently it is the most visited historical site in Ireland and deservedly so; in fact, M and I would rank it in the top 10 sites we have ever seen. And the view from Up There is spectacular, due to its elevation above the surrounding terrain. The downside to this is the incredible wind which whips around its Heights most of the time, including the our we spent up there when it was probably blowing at 30 to 40 mi./h and in the 55° temperatures, felt downright cold. (Those sweltering in the seemingly unending furnace of this Summer from Hell in the US may be excused from dark mutterings at this complaint.)

We eventually made our way down and spent an enjoyable two hours having afternoon tea and stealing micro-naps in the sumptuous surroundings of the large parlor room of our hotel which looks out across the expanse of the walled garden and up to the Rock. At dinnertime we made our way down to the lower level, where a pleasant dining room and a freestanding fireplace (yes, in use) provided a most agreeable setting for a three course fixed-price dinner. While there we struck up a conversation with Katie from Baltimore, the only other person in the restaurant, who was in the country with two aunts on a genealogical mission of her own finding various Maloneys.  She highly commended to us a local Irish music and dance cultural performance, the Bru Boru (which means something in Gaelic), put on nightly by a collection of locally and nationally sourced Irish musicians and dancers who perform in a facility built at considerable expense by the national government. She indicated that following each evening’s performance, the attendees were urged to come down to an informal public setting where the performers, augmented by local talent and anyone who wanted to sing, dance or emote, could continue the festivities.  Since the front desk had also mentioned it was worthwhile, we decided to go.

This proved to be one of the best decisions of the trip, and perhaps the year. The performance, and a small intimate theater, was absolutely stunning in its diversity, authenticity and quality. Our friend Katie, attending for the second time, sat with us and assured us that it was better than the international Riverdance troupe and other similarly lauded performances. We adjourned afterwards to a large room with chairs arrayed around a central performance area and everyone from young kids to local adults got up and performed for their friends and us tourists. It’s probably unnecessary for me to say that I joined in as well, doing a solo performance of the Kingston Trio Irish ballad celebrating the martyr’s death of Irish revolutionary Roddy McCorley, which M captured on video and which will eventually be posted on YouTube (so consider yourselves forewarned).

We made our way home at midnight, giving up on the dark recesses of the archbishop’s path and making our way back through the quiet streets of this charming town. It was the end of it altogether satisfying day.

This one began with a hearty breakfast at the hotel restaurant, included in our tariff, and proceeded to a planned outing to Kilkenny, about 40 miles away. The expedition was markedly delayed when I discovered our trusty Audi had suffered a front-tire deflation, but soon I had energetic Irishman Bryan Fogerty at my service. In 90 minutes he had removed the tire, taken it and me to his modern shop up the road to find the leak (which we couldn’t), dismounted the tire from the rim, checked its innards, replaced the valve stem, sealed the bead, remounted the tyre, and carried it and me back to the car at the hotel parking lot where he reinstalled it.

That done, we set out for Kilkenny along a recommended than slightly circuitous route took us through a number of small towns dating to medieval times. Kilkenny proved to be a bustling tourist center and after fighting her way through the traffic and getting Park, we toured the imposing castle which dates to the 13^th century and sports a largely Victorian interior from its last renovation which features a spectacular Picture Hall festooned with portraits of the many Dukes of Ormandy and other royalty displayed in a gigantic hall that, at my present state of alertness, simply beggars description. And they wouldn’t let us take pictures of it either.

After walking through the town and seeing two other spectacular cathedrals, we noted small signs denoting a scenic route from Kilkenny back to Cashel and set out that way with our GPS on standby in case things went off the rails. Along the way we detoured about a mile off the road to a local general aviation airport and found it rich and local color and beauty. We watched a light aircraft taxi out and depart the rolling grass runway before continuing on our way down a succession of narrow, winding and staggeringly beautiful roads. We crossed a ridge of small mountains and stopped to photograph sheep and cows backed by spectacular green farmland that stretched 30 or 40 miles to the distant mountains, some still veiled in rain showers. Our journey concluded with a “road” that was narrower than Greystone’s driveway at which featured two Sudden Encounters with oncoming vehicles that just about put M into cardiac arrest.

By 6 PM we were back home at the Cashel Palace, enjoying another fireside meal marveling at the day we had had. Now the very last traces of daylight are fading from the skies at 10 PM, one of the benefits of being this far north and also on the Western end of the time zone. Cool, delicious breezes are blowing in through the open window and M is already fast asleep notwithstanding the fact that I am dictating this oeuvre using voice recognition software.

Exactly one week from this moment we will be about three hours from landing back home at Dulles. But in the meantime we have much of Ireland yet to see, and tomorrow we roll westward towards the West Coast of the Emerald Isle and another palatial hotel. The forecast promises a beautiful Friday followed by a rainy Saturday. By all reports, it will be surpassingly beautiful whatever the weather. I hope you’ll join us.

Greetings from Ireland, the Emerald Isle, to which M and I journeyed on Sunday afternoon after concluding our glorious four-week stay in London. It was a warm and sunny day when we departed, but cool and misty upon our arrival in Dublin, where a chatty cabbie delivered us to our Hilton Dublin hotel, located about a 10 min. walk south of the city center along an old and scummy canal that runs through the city east to west, paralleled by a more agreeable river on the north side of the city. The hotel was quite nice and our room looked out over an urban plaza with a modern light rail/streetcar track running just outside it, which was rather like watching an elaborate toy train go back and forth day and night. I found it quite pleasant.

We set out Sunday eve to get a basic orientation to the city but strong winds and sideways mists had us beating a hasty retreat back to the cozy hotel in short order. Monday morning, a bank holiday, also dawned gray and somewhat foreboding but we set out anyway by 7:30 AM along streets that were largely desolate and very slightly tattered; it was not a bad area, but it wasn’t warm and inviting either, with a number of shuttered businesses and gang tagging on some of the buildings.

Our initial objective was to run down a couple of street addresses that M had harvested from her extensive genealogical research on the Allens generally and Dad’s father Henry William West Allen (HWW) in particular.  Some of this info was provided by previously known sources and some was unearthed by means of her numerous hours doing online sleuthing. We knew, for example, the reported address listed by HWW’s parents when he was baptized in March, 1880; it was 76 Heytesbury Road, which a Google Earth search had indicated was within walking distance of our hotel. After a few fits and starts along the deserted streets, we soon found ourselves standing in mild amazement before an old townhouse-style building that was likely to be the very one in which my grandfather was an infant, and from which he was carried on that cold March day to his baptism in a chapel nearby. This was exciting, and we took many pictures.

Next, we set off for the heart of the tourist district, Grafton Street, now a pedestrian walkway lined by tourist y and shopping -oriented businesses on both sides. We were looking for number 37 Grafton St., the address reported as home by Henry Allen, HWW’s father, upon his arrival in Dublin. We made our way down the street which was rapidly coming alive with holiday customers and echoed with the musical tones of Irish buskers playing for loose change on the street, and there it was; number 37 was intact, empty, and available for rental. It clearly was of mid-19^th century vintage and though it was used as a combined business and warehouse most recently, one could easily envision that being a boarding house. Again, many photographs were taken and high-fives exchanged at this discovery.

From this point on, the genealogical trail became somewhat more obscure.  We knew the baptism had been recorded at a large nearby Anglican church, St. Ann’s, and easily found it just down the street and around the corner; but the records indicated that he was baptized at Mollyneux Chapel near the gigantic St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The latter was easy to locate; the former had seemingly disappeared into the mists of history. But a stop at a local tourist bureau and the help of some enterprising web-savvy guides there produced the informational gold nugget that this chapel had been located on Peter Street, but was no longer there. It had been associated with an eponymous Molyneux facility for the blind also located on that street, and across the street from St. Patrick’s. So later in the afternoon, we made our way over to Peter Street and marched up and down its length, finding nothing.

But then, looking around on the intersecting street, we noticed a seemingly modern office building with the Mollyneux name emblazoned upon it; peering through the security gate and into the car park behind it, we could see the original building  structure which was clearly that of an old church. We did not have time the following day to go to the business located there and to see if they knew  the history of the place, but we have its Internet address and will chase that rabbit down at our leisure.

With all these activities concluded, we returned to the area of the beautiful Stevens Green park and bought ourselves a couple of tickets on the hop-on, hop-off sightseeing bus that runs a 90-minute city circuit and passes by every 10 minutes. We were able to work our way to the upper deck and then forward to the first rows which were sheltered from the occasional sprinkles, and we rode the full circuit before then hopping off at St. Patrick’s and touring that impressive cathedral. With all this done, we made our way back to our hotel, stopping at the little convenience store nearby and laying in sufficient supplies for a pleasant in-room meal of sandwiches, chips, milk and dessert.

The following day, we were up early and had a nice chat with Rew as we walked briskly towards a McDonald’s where we intended to use the free wi-fi and do some further research. Upon arrival there, the wi-fi was shut down so we made do with some sausage make muffins and plotted out our assault on several government genealogical research targets for the day. We walked through the grounds of beautiful and historic Trinity College on our way to the first, which was the Irish library and its renowned genealogical research unit. From there we went to the Irish Life Center, a government complex, where M pored through one set of documents while I examined property records that, in quill pen and ink, carefully recorded each and every address in a certain area of Dublin, along with its description and the taxes assessed, down to the last shilling. From that examination I could see that HWW’s 1880 house was indeed about 30 years old at that time and confirmed that the house we saw was the one in which he had resided.

By this time it was early afternoon and we decided to split off, me heading back to tour the interior of the birthplace of George Bernard Shaw, while M did further research in the records relating to possible ancestors, looking especially for the death certificate of H Dubya Dubya’s father, who we believe died when HWW was quite young.

The Shaw house was especially interesting because it was of the same type as HWW’s and was decorated in period  furnishings, though doubtless somewhat more elaborately. It was also a sad window into the extremely dysfunctional and basically unhappy Shaw family, headed by a severely alcoholic father and a mother with dreams of a privileged, aristocratic lifestyle which she thought she was getting by marriage. Unfortunately for her, the older pensioner she married as her ticket Up turned out to be a hopeless alcoholic of limited means. Shaw the boy was largely raised by a mercilessly overworked and underpaid maid, driven like thousands of others to Dublin during the potato famine to work 15-hour days for pennies in exchange for room and board. Shaw found her harsh, and idolized his mother beyond all reason because on one occasion she personally buttered his bread – a rare occasion indeed — and, unlike the maid, did not scrape off everything above the first molecular layer of butter.  His devotion thereafter was undying and unrealistic, if not a bit unbalanced.

With my assigned tasks accomplished, I set off on foot to retrieve our rental car for the next week, which was supposed to be a new model Hertz Audi A1, a sleek Honda Civic-like sport coupe, but in the event was given a larger, more useful but somewhat more pedestrian A3 wagonback diesel.  I’m still not sure how I feel about that.

It has been about a decade and a half since I drove on the “wrong” side of the road in the UK so I made my way back to the hotel in great self-awareness without clobbering anyone or anything. I knew that with M on board the next day I would have substantial help in maintaining Positional Awareness.

For our last night in Dublin we enjoyed a dinner at The Barge, the local pub just across the street from our hotel, which turned out to be charming with surprisingly good food. The next morning we were up early, packed and out into the maw of Dublin rush-hour traffic by 8:30 AM. Both of us immediately applauded my much- debated decision earlier in the week to go ahead and buy a nice Garmin Nuvi 1440 GPS, and hearing its commands issued in a clipped, authoritative female British voice made me sit up and take notice. Our wrong-side driving got an early test when, on a semi-residential street, an oncoming car came determinedly down the middle and drove me up on the curb as I frantically reassured myself that yes,  I WAS on the correct side of the road and you, sir, are an idiot.

It was wonderful to be back behind the wheel and soon we left Dublin behind and found ourselves on a very modern motorway, the M7, with an agreeable 75 mph speed limit. The countryside was green, rolling and lovely, and after about an hour we stopped at what turned out to be a brand-new, US-style travel Plaza, complete with electric vehicle recharge stations, a car wash, extensive parking, and a nice picnic area.

There was only one thing missing, and its absence was jarring to my eye: US style big-rig motorhomes. Anything beyond a very small cab-over mini RV is unknown in Europe and the British Isles for obvious reasons; they’re just too big for all but the major roads, and with diesel fuel at almost $8 a gallon, you’d  be looking at over a dollar a mile just for fuel. Still, it made me appreciate, for the umpteenth time, the wide open spaces and roads of the USA, and the incredible distribution of disposable income that enables these road going leviathans to so heavily populate our highways at home.

The pervasive cloudiness that had characterized much of our Irish stay thickened into misty rain as we approached our first country destination, one that was a complete unknown to me prior to getting here: Cashel in County Tipperary and its world-famous landmark, the Rock of Cashel, also known as the Rock of Kings.  There it was, a huge castle fortress and ruin atop a huge rocky outcropping that hoisted it many hundreds of feet above the surrounding terrain. We pulled over to admire it and then made our way to the lodgings M had selected for us, the Cashel Palace Hotel, built in the mid-1700s to be the residence of the Archbishop once he decided that the disagreeable climatic conditions at the Abbey on the rock were simply too severe to be tolerated.  Our commodious room on the third floor looked out over the beautiful walled gardens behind the residence and, in the near distance, the edifice itself, imposing by day and beautifully lit by night. You have chosen wisely, I told him as we unpacked.

Mercifully, I will break here and hope that you will enjoy the next installment which concerns exploring The Rock and then the surrounding countryside, with a truly memorable cultural experience sandwiched between the two.