Gil's Adventure in Ireland

Thursday, July 11 Today was devoted to a trip to the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher.   We left the hotel after breakfast and the landscape soon changed as we arrived in the area known as the Burren.   From Wikipedia: The Burren is a region of County Clare in the southwest of Ireland. It’s a karst landscape of bedrock incorporating a vast cracked pavement of glacial-era limestone, with cliffs and caves, fossils, rock formations and archaeological sites. On the Atlantic coast, the precipitous Cliffs of Moher are home to thousands of seabirds, including puffins.  We had a talk on the geology, the contrasts between limestone and shale, and the use of the land.   It currently is mostly used as pasture for cows, and, intriguingly, the rocks hold sufficient heat that they are a preferred place which the cows enjoy in the winter.   It is a very unusual appearance: Because the use is pasture and there are multiple owners, there is need for walls...

Wednesday, July 10, 2019 We had a very full day today, after a solid night’s sleep last night.   First a note about the weather: you never can tell.   The temperatures are very mild, in the 60’s, with intermittent breezes.   But the clouds and rain are totally unpredictable.   It’s mostly cloudy.   It often rains extremely lightly as a falling mist for five or ten minutes and then stops.   Rarely it really rains for two minutes and then stops.   Many people don’t pay any attention and just continue going where they’re going, no hat, no raincoat, with the simple knowledge that they won’t get very wet and it will soon stop.   And it does. We drove to Galway after breakfast, and spent most of the day there.   With 80,000 people, Galway is Ireland’s fourth largest city, but it is small and easily walkable.       It is a tourist town and there are characters walking around:     This is ...

Tuesday, July 9, 2019 The overnight trip to Shannon, Ireland from Rochester via JFK was uneventful, if tedious.   Although Victor got some sleep, Gil and Joyce got almost none, but looked pretty good despite the tiredness. We met up with most of our Road Scholar group at the Shannon airport; two had arrived earlier.  The group is made up of five children (three boys and two girls) and six grandparents (Gil is the only one to have two grandparents with him).  Gil fell asleep in the small bus carrying us to Ennis, only about 45 minutes from the Shannon airport.  The Temple Gate Hotel is on the site of a former nunnery, and is lovely and quiet. After checking in, we went to our room and promptly fell asleep for a couple of hours; orientation was at 4:30 and after that we took a short walk out of the hotel.  There is a large courtyard just outside of the hotel:     The town is filled with beautiful flowers: ...

Our wonderful grandson, Gil Poleshuck Kinel, became a Bar Mitzvah in May, and we are so proud of his accomplishments.  He led the service beautifully and chanted his Torah portion and his Haftorah with grace and fluency.  His d'var (teaching) was very insightful.  Our gift to Gil is a trip to Ireland (his choice), and we will leave on Monday, July 8 on an overnight flight to Shannon where we'll meet up with a Road Scholar grandparent/grandchild tour of the Republic.  If all goes well, the next post will be from Ennis, next week.