Maddens-in-Ireland

Maddens-in-Ireland
Hello all
I too was hoping that we could have one place to have the ancestry stuff. Someone of us got the name of a person( and a phone number) who has the parish records. Can you post it here? I would like to pursue the birth record for Nanny and that is our best lead.
I saw Smithwick's in the grocery store today. In honor of all of you Phil's been buying and drinking as much Guiness as he can find.
love,
Maureen

More Ancestry 'stuff'

In case anyone ever wants or needs it, I thought it would be good to put as much info as we have about our history in this one place. Laura has a copy of Nanny & Pop's marriage certificate, as well as Uncle Marty's birth certificate, and this is what she shared with me:
Married on 8/3/1920
Pop was 28, and Nanny was 26
Pop lived @ 122 Calumet St. Roxbury
Nanny Lived @ 25 Coroperthwaite St. Cambridge
Date of Record 8/5/1920
Priest, Dennis A. O'Brien 34 Holyoke St. Cambridge Mass
Record of Marriage in the custody of the City clerk as entered in Volume 22,
Folio 954 of said record, city of Cambridge, county of Middlesex on Feb, 4
1992....weird that the date from the city is 1992?? I also have my Dad's
actual birth certificate which was also filed in Cambridge, they were living @
387 Concord Ave. in Cambridge, it says Pop was 33 and Nanny was 30, the Dr.s
name was T.F. Brassil.

Also... by reading the blog and viewing Christina's photos on www.twitfoto.com I realized that Dan and Christina spent some time in Ennistymon. That is where Pop's birth would have been recorded. Too bad we didn't realize it at the time! But it means we collectively covered a fair amount of ground in visiting Nanny's AND Pop's past.

I'd go get a Smithwicks, but it wouldn't be the same without all of you.
love, kathleen

Tynanwoods Day Twenty One

November 4, 2006
Day 21: Bog butter on toast; get thee to a nunnery

Today we planned to get an early start out of Dublin, hauling our four duffels, four backpacks, two bags of food, three satchels of dirty laundry, and four tired carcasses into the Opel Astra and head back to Ennis. And we would have if the car had started. It was dead in the underground garage six blocks away, where it had been sitting since we first arrived in Dublin a week previous. Apparently someone in our party left an interior light on; we're still awaiting forensics from the CSI team to determine who.

Xtina waited for the Irish Auto Association to show up while I stayed at the apartment wrangling the bags and the kids. After a while a guy showed up on a scooter with a portable car battery and jumped the Opel. The cost? Absolutely free.

(Xtina has come up with a nickname for me based on my extreme reluctance to drive: Dan The Car Coward. Xtina is, of course, Her Majesty, Queen Shopsalot.)

Around noon we hit the south road, N7, toward Limerick. En route we stopped in Roscrea, a charming little town entirely surrounding a Norman castle built in 1280. The Roscrea castle looks a lot like the one at Bunratty: A great room on the first floor with a fireplace big enough to cook a buffalo; kitchen, dining, and sleeping quarters are on the upper three floors and narrow winding stone staircases climb to towers in each corner.

Near the entrance is a dungeon known as an 'oublietter' (from the French for 'to forget'), a 2' by 2' hole in the floor with a grate over it, leading to a square basement maybe 20 feet deep. You got in (or out, if you were lucky) by a rope ladder. The castle guide said the Normans would put someone in there and forget about them. The castle also featured a machiolation over each entrance and a 'murder hole' in front of the portcullis through which boiling oil would be poured over unwelcome visitors (a feature that would come in quite handy today when Republican fundraisers come knocking).

In the 18th century a British family named Damer bought the castle and built a large Queen Anne style residence on its grounds. Their descendants still live there. But the bottom two floors are a museum dedicated to the relics found nearby, including a 35kg (80 pound) hunk of petrified butter dating from 988 AD. The bog butter explains a lot about the current Irish diet (strangely, ancient jars of mayonnaise were not also found nearby).

[Note: a writer for the Sunday Tribune, Helen Lucy Burke, tasted the bog butter in 1987, which at time of its discovery was thought to be cheese. She described it thusly:

Close up, the boulder smelled cheesy, ripe, even athlete's footy. An inviting piece had crumbled off and lay at the base. I palmed the fragment, and at a suitable moment popped it in my mouth, rolling it on my tastebuds. The flavour was definitely cheesy, and though unpleasing, not revolting either. The texture was oddly granular. It came closest to a Wensleydale cheese which had dried out: Wensleydales are only tolerably fresh.]

We drove through a spectacular sunset over Limerick, the horizon glowing deep orange like a pizza oven, followed by a full moon rising. We arrived in Ennis after dusk and checked into the Temple Gate Hotel, a lovely 3-star hotel in the heart of the city. In a previous life it had been a convent for the Sisters of Mercy, but 10 years ago it was converted to a hotel. Xtina's aunt Nula was educated there, and she says the Sisters showed very little Mercy. The old chapel had been turned into the hotel's bar and and is now a great room for weddings and such; the stained glass windows sport the logos of Bulmer's and Stella Artois.

We stashed the kids in the room -- they seemed ecstatic to be on their own and away from us for a few hours -- and had a pint in the library off the lobby, underneath the ubiquitous portrait of Joyce. We moved from there to the hotel pub, where more pints were consumed, dinner had, and Xtina went wild on the hotel's free Wifi hotspot -- uploading photos to the blog, chatting, calling people on Skype. It was like finding an oasis of connectivity after weeks in the Netless desert. Every so often one of the kids would come downstairs to find us and lodge a complaint about the other one, but they seemed to be having a good time.

Around 10 pm the "band" came on: An older couple who looked a little like Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow if you squinted (or had drunk three pints). He played guitar and electronic keyboard and sang backup; she sang lead and banged a tambourine. Their voices were fed through the keyboard, giving them an oddly robotic sheen.

They launched into The Carpenter's "On Top of the World" which then sequed surreally into "Help Me Make it Through the Night" without changing tempo or melody. So we went from 'on top of the world looking down on creation' to 'let the devil take tomorrow, Lord, tonight i need a friend.' In a place where nunneries become bars, it seemed like a apt metaphor. Then again, maybe it was just the Guinness.

Tynanwoods Day Twenty

November 3, 2006
Day 20: Of pens and penitentiaries.

Friday, our last full day in Dublin. Everyone is totally exhausted. We walked through St. Stephens Green, jumped back on the Dublin tour bus. The tour guides vary wildly on this bus -- our first guide was an older Irish gentleman, very dry sense of humor. Even Cole remarked on how good he was. Our second guide kind of mumbled his way through everything, made corny jokes, then looked at us expectantly, waiting for the laugh. Our guide this time was an older woman with an even dryer sense of humor and very clear ennuciation (which is important, when you're trying to compete with trucks rumbling by). She recommended the tour of the Kilmainham Gaol (jail), where 14 members of the 1916 Easter Uprising were executed, and which was also the set of the Daniel Day Lewis film, In the Name of the Father.

We hopped off at the Jail and signed up for the tour. Our guide, Sabeena, was Polish or maybe Czech. She spoke English, sort of. She recited the facts in an odd rhythm that was hard to follow and without any passion, repeating herself two or three times and using phrases like "huge big" to describe, well, large things. This was a shame, since the place was so filled with history and blood. It would have been great to hear a true patriot tell the tales. We did, however, have fun threatening to leave the kids behind in one of the cells.

From there we took the bus to the Writer's Museum on Parnell Square, north of the River Liffey. This was a bit of a disappointment as well. For one thing, there was no mention whatsoever of me or Xtina (though Katherine Tynan had her own spot on the audio tour). It was two rooms with long text displays, first editions inside glass cases, busts and paintings of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, etc., and the typewriter Brendan Behane allegedly threw through the window at McDonough's Pub. It was mildly informative but the kids were bored silly.

Then we took what has become our 'usual route' home -- over the O'Connell Street Bridge, past Trinity College, through the crowds and buskers and street performers on Grafton to the light rail station at St. Stephen's Green. I'd hoped to hit one last pub, stroll through Temple Bar on a Friday evening, but the kids were dead set against any more walking. So we stayed in and watched Irish telly.

Tynanwoods Days Eighteen & Nineteen

November 1 & 2, 2006
Days 18 & 19: Zoos & booze; sneaking into Mecca

Wednesday: most of the Gang of 20 left this day. We spent the afternoon at the Dublin Zoo inside Phoenix Park with my cousin Jeanne and her three-year-old Daniel. Jeanne flagged a cab back to the hotel while we took a bus back to the south side and drank a pint at The Duke, where we began our Literary Pub Crawl two nights earlier. We took the light rail home. I decided to not buy tickets this time, since they're expensive and nobody ever asks to see them. It's almost an honor system. And tonight we discovered the almost: after we got on, two light rail employees came onboard right next to me and started asking to see tickets. There's apparently a stiff fine for riding the rail without paying. I did my best to become invisible, and it worked -- we got off at the next stop without being thrown into the hoosegow. But when Ava took my hand as we walked home she said 'Dad, you're shaking.' The adrenaline. So much for my life of crime.

Later we had dinner with Jeanne and Daniel at O'Neills Pub, competing with soccer matches blaring on screens in every room. While we were there the (well) lit pub crawlers came in, and I chatted briefly with one of the actors.

Thursday: We caught the Dublin Tour bus, which we referred to as the 'jump on jump off', since the tickets are good for 24 hours. The bus runs along both sides of the River Liffey and comes with a live tour guide who points out the various sites -- the smallest pub in Dublin, the statue of Molly Malloy, and so on. The top side of the double decker bus is open to the air, which both makes it easier to see the buildings and also butt cold in early November.

Our first jump off: St. Patrick's Cathedral, which among other things houses the corpse and death mask of Jonathan Swift, who was dean of the cathedral for 30 years when he wasn't writing a few things on the side. We wandered about, admiring the gothic architecture and the stained glass. Ava discovered the votive candles, so we lit one for every dead relative I could come up with. (Starting with my Uncle Bill, whose generosity made this whole trip possible.)

We jumped back on the Dublin Tour bus and jumped off at Mecca, aka The Guinness Brewery at St. James Gate. Our aim was to just eat lunch in the cafe and catch the 360 degree view of the city from the 7th floor bar. When we discovered we had to pay a 30 euro fee for the tour -- whether we wanted to tour the plant or not -- that made Dan a very cranky boy. While Xtina wandered through the gift shop trying to convince me to buy some Guinness boxer shorts, Ava wandered off behind the ticket counter to check out a waterfall she heard flowing (yes, there's a waterfall inside the plant). I followed her, Cole followed me, and then Xtina showed up five minutes later PO'd that we'd abandoned her. But we were in the plant and it didn't cost us a dime, so we headed up to the Brewery Cafe and had lunch (and, it goes without saying, a pint). Xtina had Guinness and Beef Stew, I had fishcakes, the kids had chicken nuggets, and it was the best restaurant meal we had during our entire stay. Even the nuggets and chips were good.

Note: In the elevator up we met a brewery tour employee who did not ask to see our tickets but did explain why Guinness tastes better over here. One, they know how to pour it. Two, they serve it at 6 degrees Celsius, or roughly 44 degrees fahrenheit. Apparently the Brits serve it too warm (9 degrees) and the Americans too cold (3 degrees). I think possibly the warm and inviting environs has something to do with it as well.

Ancestry Search

In search of a birth certificate for Nanny, to help out all of those who might be interested in applying for an Irish passport at some point:

On Tuesday (Oct 31) Maureen & I went to the Ancestry Branch of the National Library of Ireland, at 2 Kildare Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. (Tel 353 1 6030200; email info@nli.ie; web www.nli.ie) The very helpful gentleman there showed us how to use the index to find the civil registration district for each town and village. It is in the civil registration district where births are recorded.

We were given a list of Civil Registration Districts, by County, as well as a map of all the Civil Registration Districts. I was also given the address of the main office in Roscommon to which we can write to request certified copies of birth certificates once you have located the correct one. Applications for such can be downloaded from www.groireland.ie.

We focussed our search on Nanny (Annie Dillon) because we had received verbal confirmation from locals in Williamstown that the Dillon family had lived in Derrywode, just outside Williamstown, in the county of Galway, for many years. The civil registration district for Williamstown and Derrywode is Clifden. He suggested that we visit the General Register Office (GRO), at Joyce House, 8-11 Lombard Street East, Dublin 2 to research the birth records there. The telephone there is 353 1 635 4000 and the website is www.groireland.ie.

On Wednesday November 1 I went to the GRO. You pay 2 Euro for a general search. You may request the "Index of Births" in 5 year increments according to the census. Each year's birth records are indexed in a large volume divided into quarters; thus for each year you must look in four separate quarters for all the births. Names are listed alphabetically by last name. I looked up Dillon, then looked for all Annes or Annies that were registered. Ultimately I searched all the records from 1894 through 1900. I found 19 Annes or Annies, but none in Clifden. Staying in the same geographical area as Williamstown (when I could determine that) I requested copies of 4 birth certificates. Only when you see the copy of the birth certificate can you determine the names of the father and mother and the actual town in which they lived. None of the four I requested were a match for what we know. (You can request up to 5 birth certificate copies in one day; if you want more than that, they will send them to you by mail. Each certificate copy costs 4 Euro.) If you are lucky enough to find the birth certificate of the person you are searching for, you can go downstairs to the General Register Office on the first floor and obtain a certified copy.

I will be happy to scan and send any of the documents I did collect if you want to see them; just let me know

What we know:
We know that Edmund Dillon and Mary or Margaret Nee Dillon had 7 children: Patrick, Michael, Tom, Mary, Margaret, Norah and Annie. We are not certain of Annie's year of birth; we have long assumed that it was 1896.

After striking out on all my searches the woman in the research room admitted that Nanny's birth may never have been recorded with the government. This was very common in those days. IN THAT CASE WE WOULD NEED PARISH RECORDS OF THE CHURCH HER FAMILY ATTENDED IN ORDER TO RECEIVE PROOF OF BIRTH. I do not have the information on the parish records, but I think someone else who was in Williamstown with us may have written down the name or contact info of the person who might have those........ Anyone?????

I did not have time to do the same type of search for Pop's records. What we think we know about him is that he was born to Thomas Madden and Bridget Burke Madden. His siblings were Tom and Jack. Tom had two children - Joseph and Lily. Jack had two children - John and Joe. We believe he was born in Leeds, which is in County Clare. Ennistymon (or Ennistimon) is the civil registration district for his area, and Kilfarboy is his civil parish. I do not have the years that would need to be searched, but I think we'd have to start as far back as 1888 or so.

One can also research the Census records, which we did not do. In that case we would look for the 1901 - 1911 Census for Derrywode to see who was recorded. But that would only tell us that the family lived in Derrywode, and we felt we already knew that.

After I was out of time a very nice gentleman who had overheard my requests for assistance came to me to tell me that there is an alternative to the method I was using. In the Dublin City Library & Archives, at 138-144 Pearse Street, Dublin 2, the records I was researching are on microfiche, and the search is free. That office is open from Monday - Thursday from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm and on Friday and Saturday from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm.

So..... no documents to show for our research. Now we know why people pay thousands of euros to have professionals do this for them!
love, kathleen

Tynanwoods Day Seventeen

October 31, 2006
Day 17: Tricks and treats; Wilde in the streets

Today we got a late start, so Dan could file a column and Xtina could drag Ava kicking and screaming through some of her schoolwork. We wandered up Grafton, through Temple Bar and over the Ha'penny Bridge to the commercial district just north of the Liffey. We each bought a book at a delightful used book store on Abbey Street, then sat in a cafe off O'Connell Square, drinking tea (yes, tea) and reading.

One of the surprises after we arrived in Ireland was finding Halloween costumes in shop windows. Trick or treating has migrated across the Atlantic, though it's still relatively new. We went back to the apartment so the kids could put on the costumes they'd picked out earlier in Galway. Ava was a devil with cute little horns (hair barrets), a red choker and a pitchfork. Cole was a wraith, dressed all in black with a black cape and two plastic swords. Xtina applied makeup to make them look more devilish and/or wraithlike.

We took the rail back to Ranelagh and the kids knocked on doors where it looked like somebody might be home. It was still dusk, and we were the only trick or treaters in evidence. A couple of people grumbled that we were too early and told us to come back later. But nearly everyone was friendly and warm; at one house, a sweet old lady invited the kids into her kitchen, where they disappeared for several minutes. As Xtina and I discussed whether we should go in and find out if they'd been tied up and tossed into the basement, they emerged with all kinds of odd things in their bags -- digestive biscuits, tangerines, a bag of salted french fries. I suspect the woman was unprepared for the trick or treaters and came up with whatever she could find.

At another home a woman suggested we head to Marlborough Street where more families lived. There we found more homes with Halloween decorations and a few bands of trick or treaters. Xtina and I stood at the edge of the driveways and waved to the parents, chatting briefly with one or two of them. When we expressed surprise at finding Halloween over here, one of them said in rather a resigned way, "Oh yes, we're adopting all of your customs."

It was cold and we'd already walked a good 5 or 6 miles that day, but we headed over to the Burlington to have a farewell drink with the Gang of 20, who were leaving Dublin the next day, then headed off with Phil in tow to the Literary Pub Crawl.

This is a delight, and easily one of the highlights of our trip. It's run by two very funny Irish actors whose names I never caught -- a woman in her mid 30s and a man around 50. We starting upstairs at The Duke, where they performed about 10 minutes of Waiting for Godot, then stood under bell tower at Trinity College, where she read from a letter written by Oscar Wilde about his 1890 lecture on art and aesthetics to silver miners in Colorado. From there we went to O'Neills for 20 minutes of determined drinking, and to the Irish Tourist Office (a converted cathedral) across the street, where the pair performed a hilarious scene from TK about begging in the street during Dublin's 1913 labor strike.

After another 20-minute sojourn to a bar whose current name I cannot recall (but which was formerly known as Monico's), we turned back to The Duke to listen to boozy anecdotes about Brendan Behane. The tour ended up at Davy Byrnes, where an entire chapter of Ulysses is set (though the bar has since been remodeled in a ponce way and is now the kind of place neither Joyce nor Leopold Bloom would ever have set foot in).

All the while, revelers wandered by in costume while fireworks burst over our heads. In adopting all our customs, the Irish appear to have combined Halloween with the 4th of July.

We never found time to eat dinner, so our evening meal consisted of pints for the adults and candy for the kids -- as fine an example of Irish parenting as you're likely to see.

Tynanwoods Day Sixteen

October 30, 2006
Day 16: Victorious Vikings and sweaty superheroes; Ava makes her stage debut

Today my cousin Christie ran the Dublin Marathon -- which was the original inspiration for this entire trip. We took the light rail to Ranelagh, a cute little neighborhood one stop south of our apartment that reminded me a bit of Oakland's Rockridge, and hustled down Sandford road 20 minutes until we reached the 19-Mile checkpoint.

There we found 20 of our dinner companions from the previous night, all wearing white Madden T-shirts. They had managed to catch Christie at two previous checkpoints along the race, making us the sluggards of the group. The runners varied widely in age and gait; many did not appear to be in shape to run a marathon (not that I should talk) and some did not appear to be long for the race. An ambulance zooming down the race route confirmed that suspicion. A few were dressed in costume -- Vikings, superheroes -- but not as many as I'd expected. No running priests or nuns were sited.

After about five minutes Christie came chugging along and we gave her a huge cheer. She stopped briefly to chat and then moved on, and so did we -- back up Sandford road, back onto the light rail to St. Stephens Green, and then a walk to the finish line at Trinity College. By this time the race was well into its 4th hour so the crowds had thinned. We stood by the fence cordoning off the route and listened to the announcer call out selected finishers from various countries and charitable organizations and urging us to cheer them for their efforts. Twenty minutes later Christie was one of them.

I was exhausted. I had never watched a marathon before and clearly hadn't trained sufficiently. Most everyone else felt the same way, so we headed back to the Burlington Hotel and collapsed in the lobby bar for the next four hours, eating butter-and-meat sandwiches and drinking pints until we managed to get our strength back.

That evening the Tynanwoods boarded the tour bus for the first time and headed with the gang to Taylor's Three Rock, a traditional music dinner theatre club about 30 minutes outside Dublin City Centre. And by "traditional," I mean in the same way Don Ho is traditional Hawaiian music, or Al Hirt was traditional Dixieland Jazz, or Beach Blanket Babylon is a traditional San Francisco stage show.

The show featured The Merry Ploughmen, four talented string players with passable voices and a well-rehearsed patter, and five impressively limber Irish dancers. The Ploughmen played the standards (Danny Boy, Jug of Punch, McNamara's Band), told funny stories, urged us to clap and sing along. The dancers did a lot of stomping alternating with high kicking; kind of like Riverdance meets the Rockettes. They also pulled several audience members onto the stage, including my brother-in-law Phil, niece Emma, and Ava. All of them looked like they were on the verge of wetting themselves, but they did a great job. Cole spent this portion of the show hiding under our table, and frankly I'd have been there with him if I thought we both could fit.

It was fun in a totally kitschy, staggeringly expensive kind of way. (There were no prices listed on the prix fixe menu, and now I know why.) Nonetheless I had a good time getting soaked, and that's what really counts. Right?

Tynanwoods Day Fifteen

October 29, 2006
Day 15: Butt tag on the green; goose bumps in the Temple Bar

Our first full day in Dublin. It began with the view of some streetperson on the corner of St. Stephens and Leeson on all fours with his forehead on the sidewalk and his bare ass in the air. I quickly herded the kids across the intersection to St. Stephens Green, a beautiful 22-acre park on the edge of Dublin's touristy heart.

The kids and I played 'butt tag' (fully clothed) in the park while Xtina caught up on her email in the hotel lobby. Then we bopped up and down Grafton Street, an open-air pedestrian mall filled with familiar brand names -- McDonalds, Burger King, Nine West -- and our first siting of a Starbucks in Ireland. Grafton Street bustles; people here walk with a purpose, in straight lines at high speed. It's like being in New York, only the accents are more charming. Once again the gravitational vortex sucked Xtina into shoe stores.

In the evening we met up with my 24 friends and relations at Botticelli's, an Italian joint in Temple Bar, the nightlife district along the River Liffey. But we were assigned exactly one waitress for our 28 diners, so we ended up eating in shifts. Afterward about half of our party headed back to the hotel while the rest hunted for a bar large and empty enough to accommodate us. In Temple Bar the night before a Bank Holiday this proved to be difficult -- it's a big party night in a big party town. Eight of us finally made it to a semi-empty bar on the far end of the district, where we had a pint and called it a night.

Many of the Temple Bar revelers wore Halloween costumes, including several scantily dressed girls who would have looked quite at home at San Francisco's Exotic Erotic Ball, despite an ambient temperature of around 45 degrees fahrenheit. The final score for the night: the legendary hardiness of the Irish 1, puritanical Catholicism 0.

Madden Withdrawal

It's lovely to be home! I hope by now almost everyone has made their way home safely. Jeanne, David and Daniel should be on their way shortly, the Tynan Woods in a few days, and hopefully Martin and Beth have made it without having to travel halfway around the world.

I am suffering Madden withdrawal already! I enjoyed every minute of our wonderful week in Ireland (except perhaps the length of the return trip) and am so very grateful to have had the opportunity to share such a fabulous experience with all of you. (maybe there's a little Smithwicks withdrawal in there too.) And thanks to Jennifer we each have a unique and useful memento to commemorate our trip. I don't know about you, but I'm planning to wear my t-shirt to work tomorrow (the long-sleeved one, in case we're still in a coordinating mode) to both pretend I'm still on vacation and to show all my friends how terrific it is. (Not so subtle reminder: if you haven't already given Jennifer your t-shirt money, please send $16 per person to Jennifer Garrett at 17820 Antherium Drive, Chino Hills CA 91709). THANK YOU JENNIFER for coming up with the t-shirt idea, seeing it through, and carrying them all all the way to Ireland!!!!!!

Where are we going next?
love, kathleen

Tynanwoods Day Fourteen

October 28, 2006
Day 14: The road to Dublin; telescopes and boiled cabbage

Today we headed out of Corofin en route to Dublin, some 150 miles to the east. It is amazing to realize just how tiny this island is -- the whole of it could fit into North Carolina without touching the Smoky Mountains.

Even more amazing: the fact that we fit everything including the four of us into the Opel Astra we'd rented. Coming from Shannon I had to sit wedged into the passenger seat with four bags stuffed around me; now I had to repeat the feat -- plus what Xtina had purchased on her various forays to woolen stores and the leftovers from our Corofin fridge.

This time we unpacked one of the duffels and put its contents into several trash bags, which I stuffed into any spare pockets of three dimensional space I could find. The bags of food I placed strategically around the feet of the children, along with jackets, backpacks, and assorted toys. They all fit together nicely like Legos, provided nobody moved during the four-hour drive. (Except when Xtina swerved to avoid some idiot merging blindly onto the N6 and her computer bag fell on top of Ava. That wasn't so good.)

En route we took a deliberate detour to Birr, a charming berg smack in the middle of Ireland which features a science museum and a castle belonging to the 7th Earl of Rosse, who still lives there. It seems the 3rd Earl of Rosse was something of an engineering genius; he built what was then the world's largest telescope in 1840, featuring a 72-inch mirror and a wooden barrel easily 60 feet long. He also invented a special set of hoists and counterweights to place it into position and track the movements of the stars. His telescope was used to identify spiral galaxies and map the surface of the moon.

His son, the 4th Earl, built the world's first turbine steam engine and, incidentally, a power plant that supplied the entire town with electricity in 1890. It still works. (Yet do you ever hear about these guys mentioned alongside Edison, Tesla, et al? No. Once again the Irish get screwed.) The museum was dedicated to these two fine gentlemen and the 3rd Earl's wife, Countess Mary Rosse, who was a pioneering photographer in her own right. (And that is your Irish history lesson for the day).

We slogged on to Dublin, arriving at dusk to a cacaphony of noise, light, big buildings, car horns, pedestrians, double decker buses, and traffic whizzing in every direction. After two weeks in the countryside it was like being teleported from a sensory deprivation tank to the Vegas Strip. When we found ourselves trapped in an endless loop around St. Stephen's Green we decided to park and hoof it the rest of the way.

It was a solid half mile to the office where we were to pick up the keys to our apartment -- or would have picked up, had there been any keys to be had. It seems the rental agency had lost the only set of keys to the apartment we'd reserved, and wanted to "upgrade" us to two one-bedroom units instead. We said no, we'd take the apartment and get keys in the morning. So we hauled ourselves back to Grafton Street near where we'd left the car, got some dinner (bad pizza), drove back to the rental office, drove to the apartments another half mile away, and hauled our half-disassembled luggage into our apartment.

The cottage we rented in Corofin was truly splendid. The apartment? Not so much. It's cramped, dingy, in a semi-cruddy neighborhood, and it smells like boiled cabbage. It is, in short, nothing like as it was described on the web site Apartments2book.com (which I would recommend avoiding, unless you are deeply into the Eastern European Experience). It's fine -- we're in Dublin, we didn't come here to hang around an apartment all day, and I've slept in worse places.

So, for those of you keeping score at home: Xtina gets an A for picking our cottage, while Dan earns a D for his efforts securing the Dublin apartment.

Tynanwoods Days Eleven Through Thirteen

October 25 - 27, 2006
Days 11 Through 13: Fossils of varying ages; tourists sans pants

On Wednesday we finally got our first taste of real Irish weather -- cold wet windy and utterly miserable. Twas a day not fit for man nor beast but we set out anyway, to Liscannor on the coast between Lahinch and Doolen, where there was a rock store of some repute. We spent a solid hour looking at rocks, crystals, fine Irish jewelry made from silver and amber, huge Amethyst specimens from Brazil (4000 euro apiece, two for 7000), 350-million-year-old trilobytes trapped in rock, shark teeth, quartz amulets, marble pigeon's eggs, polished rocks, Celtic runes made from wax and slate, and assorted earthy bric a brac. Amazingly we escaped for just 13 euros -- the kids each got a pendant to string round their necks.

From there we went on to Doolen, where there was a craft store of equally high repute and the inevitable Internet cafe. The craft store was closed; the cafe -- located in the reception area for the brand new B&B it was attached to -- sucked as well.

Soggy as labradors we entered Fitz's Bar in Doolens for lunch, which was also brand new. We picked the table closest to the roaring fire. While we ate, an older man just in from the Cliffs of Mohare pulled up a chair directly behind us, explained he was soaked to the bone, and inquired whether we would be terribly offended if he took off his pants? Xtina said OK, but she needed to get out her camera first. He demurred.

It was too wet to do anything else, so we came home to sip ale and sit by a peat fire.

The next day we headed back to Galway and met up with my 20 extremely jet-lagged-but-determined-to-drink-a-pint relatives, who'd flown in to Shannon that morning. We ended up at The Quays, the restaurant where we'd eaten three nights before, in the heart of Galway's shopping strip. The Quays is like a cross between the hold of an 18th century cargo ship and a church: The bar sits in the center of the restaurant, down a bending flight of stairs. The roofbeams are supported by wooden gothic arches; stained glass above and across from the bar brushes aside the darkness with dusty fingers of light. The Madden 20 took up the entire bar and spilled out onto a table upstairs, making the requisite offerings and experiencing the sacraments. Much drink was had, along with scholarly discussions on the relative merits of Guinness vs Smithwicks.

Friday, our last day in Corofin before we head to Dublin. It was another day of Irish weather, scotching any plans for a last hike among the livestock and limestone. Instead, we packed and headed toward Doolen so Xtina could see the craft store that had been closed on our first try.

En route we stopped in Lisdoonvarna to see The Burren Smokehouse, one of the few attractions with the words "Burren" attached we'd managed to miss. Like the Burren Perfumery, it's a modern establishment -- in this case, a source of terrific smoked salmon and cheese, along with an excellent gourmet shop. We took our booty to Doolen and had a picnic of smoked fish and crackers and goat cheese in our car beside by the crashing sea.

We headed back up the hill to the craft store, which was open but turned out to be a dinky thing not worthy of third-rate airport gift shop. And - yes - we spent more time at the Internet cafe, then headed home for our final night in The Burren.

Tynanwoods Day Ten

October 24, 2006
Day Ten: More dead Irishmen, and some live ones

We spent most of this morning writing and hanging about the cottage. In the afternoon we visited the Ennis Friary, an old Franciscan monastery first built in the late 1200s and later expanded, rebuilt, bricked over, partially torn down, and partially restored over the next 600 years. It was in a jumble of architectural styles, from gothic to quasi-modern. It's famous for some of the earliest medieval art in Ireland; carved figures of Jesus and St. Francis, for example, both of whom looked more than a little like space aliens.

As with every old monastery we've visited, the floor was paved with the gravemarkers of dead monks, so old and footworn as to be entirely unreadable. More bodies had been stashed in wall crypts; these appeared to be from affluent families -- McMahon and Gore were two prominent names -- and dated from the 18th and 19th century.

Then we found Christina's cousin Nora at the photography store. Sixtyish, white hair, but with a twinkling eye and a sharp sense of humor. She took us upstairs to the living quarters above the shop and showed us a wall of old photos, each accompanied by a story. It was a spontaneous meeting, and we were late for meeting up with Xtina's Great Aunt Nuala, so we had to cut our time short.

We then met up with Nuala, her husband Dick, their son Leo, his wife Jenna, and their 16-month-old son Ronan at the Old Ground Hotel on O'Connell Street. (Every major Irish city appears to have an O'Connell Street, as well as an Abbey and a Parnell.) We had tea - well, Leo and I had beer, Jenna had red wine -- and went for a stroll round Ennis, where we confirmed that yes, we had indeed found the home where Nuala and her brother Michael (Xtina's father) were raised.

We had drinks in Brogan's Pub with Leo, Jenna, and Ronan (he mostly slept), then "tea" at Nuala's -- dinner, to Americans. We sat on the couch in her tiny living room and ate cold ham and cooked rashers (like bacon, only much meatier and more flavorful) on rolls with butter, followed by tea cakes with more butter on them. The cholesterol level of the average Irishperson must be 400, at least. Nuala and Dick were very sweet and hospitable -- she gave us cakes to take home, secretly pressed money into Cole's hand on the way out the door, just like my grandmother used to do to me whenever we visited.

Tynanwoods Day Nine

October 23, 2006
Day Nine: Galway by the Bay; of rooks and rookeries


If Dublin is Ireland's New York (I'm assuming it is, we'll find out next week), Galway would be its San Francisco. Located directly across the country on a gorgeous bay, it's sophisticated and international, filled with students and the babble of unfamiliar tongues. Though the guidebook says the population is only 65,000, like Limerick it felt five times larger.

We hung out for a bit in John F. Kennedy park, an ultra-modern greenspace two city blocks square, where the kids played on the most surreal looking jungle gym I've ever encountered -- like it had been designed by Joan Miro with help from Rube Goldberg.

We ate lunch at a sandwich shop inside a food court -- Cole, finally, found a meal he enjoyed -- and wandered along Shop Street and High Street, parts of the old city turned into a open air pedestrian shopping mall replete with pubs and restaurants, buskers and street entertainers.

The gravitional rift proved especially strong here, as Xtina was sucked into every shoe and woolen shop along the strand. Even Cole as affected when we passed a toy store, where we procured a magnetic chess set for Skippy, and a store displaying Halloween costumes.

At one point both kids physically restrained Xtina from entering yet another shoe shop, leaning against her with all their might. She pretended to comply, then cleverly misdirected us all to a joke shop and ran back to the store from which she'd been barred.

Another session at an Internet cafe, where I filed some stuff that was due and Xtina did some research for a story. After a while Xtina left and took the kids back to the Joan Miro playground. When I rejoined them she was sitting on a park bench with her laptop, surfing the Net. Finally, we had discovered the land of unprotected WiFi.

We went into a pub located on the site where Nora Joyce (nee Barnacle) was born, or at least within driving distance of it. While I was up at the bar ordering our usual (Guinness for me, Smithwick's Ale for Xtina, Seven Up -- with ice -- for the kids), an elderly couple walked into the pub and made their way to a table near the bar. They appeared to be regulars.

Elderly man: Give me a tall glass a' the black, Michael.

Barkeep: Sure, sure. But would ye mind if I put a white top on it?

Earlier, enroute to Galway, we stumbled upon Kilmcduagh Monastery, a series of crumbling buildings dating from the 11th to 14th centuries, alongside a large graveyard with headstones ranging from to that era to present day. The Irish Tourism Mafia hasn't gotten to this place yet; you could simply park and walk around it, or go inside some of the buildings by asking for the key from the woman at the B&B across the street. This monastery featured a free-standing peaked tower 60 meters tall and probably 10 meters wide at the base, with an entrance roughly 12 meters from the ground. It was exactly the sort of tower they used for locking away princesses in fairy tales, though in this case it was a place for monks to take refuge when the monastery was under attack. (Now it is home to a flock of crows.) The fact the monks felt it was worth the time, expense, and difficulty of building this tower indicates just how perilous life was in those times, when a visit from the wrong band of strangers could conclude with your head on a pike.

Last minute info

Maybe you all know about this site,www.tsa.gov, it is the site from the government about airport security, check in and allowable items, but being the slow, behind, do everything at the last minute person that I am, I just checked it this morning and it also has a lot of good info for packing along with visual aids to show what you can and cannot bring in your carry on, how it should be packed, and the amounts allowed and so on. Maybe most of you are all packed! I hope to be done by today too!Not looking forward to the flights but can't wait to see you all. Thanks Dan for the continued travel journal, the way you write is wonderful and I feel like I am already there.
Love, Laura

Tynanwoods Day Eight

October 21, 2006
Day Eight: Off to Limerick; changes in the gravitational matrix and unusual labor practices

[note: xtina hasn't uploaded any pix of limerick yet, so here's a shot of the lake outside Castle Dan]

If Ennis is a small town grown up, Limerick is a big city scaled down. People here look different, dress different, even walked a different way than they do in Ennis or Corofin. The guide book says population is 51,000, but it feels more like 200,000. And just outside the bustling commercial district are some run down bits as well. The guidebook says Limerick can be a bit rough and tumble, and given its bloody history that's no surprise.

We ate scones and muffins and tea at a cafe on Bedford St., then wandered down O'Connell Street for a bit looking for a toy store. A sudden rift in the gravitational matrix pulled Xtina into every shoe store as we passed by; strangely, the rest of us were unaffected, though Ava suffered a similar effect when we passed pet stores.

(To be fair, I felt a similar pull whenever I saw a Guinness sign -- which is to say, constantly. But I battled valiantly against it.)

We found a toy store to replace a toy Ava had lost the day before, then an Internet cafe. Then on our way back to the car Ava discovered she had lost the toy we just bought her, so we retraced our steps to find it, but in vain. We did a major grocery shop at a Dunnes Store, which sells just about everything you could imagine in addition to food. I saw a sign next to the checkout that said "Child Delivery Service Now Available." Damn, these Irish are advanced, I thought. (When I re-read the sign, it said "Chilled Delivery Service Now Available." Apparently I am more jetlagged than I had thought.)

We hit King John's Castle just outside of downtown about an hour before it closed. Built in 1205 by (surprise) King John, it is one of those classic stout tower castles you see in picture books. But it was really just a fort, and not as interesting as the residential castles like Bunratty that show you how people really lived. The castle was under siege consistently for the next 500 years, from the Normans, the English, the Dutch, other Irish, etc. A bloody bloody history.

When we got home, Xtina cooked a lovely Irish roast, with gravy, potatoes, peas, corn, and bread. And I finally succumbed to gravity, adding some Guinness to wash it down with.

Tynanwoods Day Seven

October 20, 2006
Day Seven: A walk on The Burren, a walk through the woods; The Castle Dan

Today we drove up to the place where we first got lost in Ireland, high up on The Burren near the Parknabinnia burial tomb. We parked the car and walked to what we thought was possibly some kind of Celtic burial mound on a hill. We were surrounded by mile upon mile of ancient stone walls, fields, exposed limestone puzzle pieces interspersed with dense turf, and cattle. It felt like we'd landed on some alien lunar landscape populated by an race of super-intelligent cows.

When we made it to the top of the hill we discovered that the Celtic burial mound was in fact an Irish trash mound -- someone had apparently demolished an old stone house and left a large heap of rubble behind. But just beyond the mound was a valley that had been carved out by a glacier 10,000 years ago. We had a spectacular view of farmlands, Inniquin Lough, and a terraced cliff composed entirely of limestone. It would have been the perfect place for our picnic, had I remembered to bring the picnic materials. Instead we trudged back down the hill under the watchful eyes of our bovine alien overlords and picnic'd on the limestone near our car.

In the late afternoon we drove to Ruan, about 5 km from Corofin, just to see what was there. Answer: not much. Just one short street with a couple of pubs and stores and a number of recently built housing developments. So we headed east to the Dromare Nature Reserve 3 km down the road. A gorgeous wooded park surrounding a lake, a landscape 180 degrees different than The Burren not five miles away. We went for a couple of walks in the woods, on the lookout for leprechauns and bunnies (we saw neither). We found the remains of yet another castle, really just one wall left standing, but on the inside of that wall we found the letters DAN carved into the stone. (And by 'carved' I mean scratched into the surface with a sharp rock.) Finally, I had found my castle in Ireland.

That night we came home, exhausted, and turned on Irish Telly. Our choices on a friday evening: a total of four channels, two of them showing soccer matches, one was showing local news, and the 4th station featured a two-hour special report on the sinister world of unethical dentistry. No, I am not joking.

Tynanwoods Day Six

October 19, 2006
Day Six: Stone forts and cigarette butts; the princess emerges

The day dawned gray and misty, perfect for wandering out on The Burren, so we headed toward the ringed stone fort of Caherconnell, halfway between Corofin and Ballyvaughn, and built by a local chieftain sometime between 400 and 1100 AD. Unlike the castle at Bunratty this was a ruin that stayed ruined -- just the bare limestone bones of a few buildings, and less than half of the rock walls that formed the perimeter of the fort. It was smaller than I'd expected, maybe 60 feet in diameter. It didn't take long to take in all that Caherconnell had to offer.

As usual with most of these things there was a recently built information center attached, with a gift shop, a nice little cafe, and an audio visual presentation. It's become clear Ireland pumped a huge amount of money into its tourist infrastructure sometime back in the '90s, and now it's trying to get it back from folks like us.

It was in the gift shop that we came up with a nickname for Ava: Princess Naputhaback. Every shop, every store, every vendor we come across, Ava picks up approximately a third of the place's inventory and says "can I have this, pleeeeaaaase?" And we'd say, 'no, put that back.' Hence the name.

From Caherconnell we hiked half a mile up the road to Poulnabrone, a megalithic burial tomb shaped strangely like the Greek letter Pi, only in three dimensions. There was a tour bus full of French teenagers scrambling over the rocks like ants after a picnic, and an Irish Tourist Board employee who spent his whole time shouting at them to get off the rocks. Cole and Ava spent most of their time leaping from limestone rock to limestone rock, of which there were about 10,000 per square kilometer, and climbing small cliffs. The Tourist Board employee probably would have shouted at them, too, only he was too busy complaining bitterly about the French and their cigarette butts.

From there we headed to Ennis for an Internet cafe and to see if we could scare up some of Xtina's cousins. We found the photography shop where her cousin Nora works and talked to Dick Young, the proprietor (and Nora's former husband), a nice man who knew all about the family but not much about Nora's present whereabouts. Xtina left her email address, and we went to go find out what Irish pizza tastes like (answer: not as bad as you might think).

Maddens-in-Ireland

Maddens-in-Ireland
Hello everyone- I wanted to wish everyone good travel as we are about to embark on this adventure.
Dan and Christina's travel log has made it even more enticing.
Blessings and safe travel.
Maureen

Tynanwoods Day Five

October 18, 2006
Day Five: Spotted Dick is spotted; insatiable ketchup fiends

[Note: Xtina hasn't uploaded pix from Bunratty yet, so I uploaded a gorgeous shot she took of the Cliffs of Moher at sunset.]

We set out for Limerick and King John's Castle, but ended up making a detour to Bunratty instead, where there is a restored 14th century castle surrounded by a theme park. Bunratty is one of those places where tour buses disgorge their passengers so they can pay 48 Euro a head for an "authentic" medieval feast every night at 5:30. I had visions of a Disneyeque faux medieval experience with disgruntled minimum wage employees dressed in Renaissance Faire garb, but was pleasantly surprised.

Bunratty is a real castle with real period furnishings. A scary stone spiral staircase in each of its four towers leads up from the great rooms on the first and second floor and into the various bedroom chambers, kitchens, meeting halls, and the like on the third, fourth, and fifth floors.

In one of the third floor bedrooms we met a nice older gent with a feather duster who was filled with all sorts of fascinating information. For example, the incredibly narrow circular staircase that lead off the master bedroom and up to the castle keep was an escape route for the children of the castle's Lord. If the castle was under siege, the children could scamper up the staircase and then use rope ladders to climb down the walls and hide in the tall grass next to the River Shannon. The staircase was too narrow for anyone wearing armor to follow them. He offered to let our kids try it out, but they passed.

The furniture was not part of the castle (which was in ruins until fairly recently) but was donated by Lord and Lady Gort, local British nobility (after whose family name comes the nearby city of Gort, I presume). They apparently had scads of the stuff. It was all 300 to 700 years old -- poster beds and rotting dressers and huge French tapestries and such -- except for the stag's heads mounted on the walls in the great room, which were found in the bogs around the castle as it was being renovated and were 10,000 to 15,000 years old. It was surprisingly comfortable looking, given the stone walls; it seems even then the rich knew how to pamper themselves.

The castle was surrounded by thatched huts also furnished to late 17th/early 18th century period. In one of them we met an older women dressed in period garb cooking Spotted Dick over a peat fire. Turns out Spotted Dick is a raisen bread not dissimilar to classic Irish soda bread. She was quite nice and had a thick Clare accent -- which became thicker any time someone new entered the hut.

Next door was Bunratty Folk Park -- a recreation of a 17th century Irish town with actual 17th century Irish buildings. It featured a woolens store, a photo shop, and a fine pub called MacNamaras where, naturally, we stopped for a pint.

On our way home we passed briefly through Ennis and ate at a SuperMacs, the Irish equivalent of McDonalds, only they also serve fish and chips. (They are extremely stingy with the ketchup, these Irish; we had to go back and ask for more three times. I think we are now known there as 'the Americans who love ketchup.') We got back to Corofin around 9 pm and stopped at Boffey Quinn, the biggest pub in town and one that featured 'trad' music on Wednesdays. We'd yet been to listen to any music on the trip, so I was really looking forward to it.

We sat in the front room near the bar, huddled in a corner on a bench, not exactly sure what would happen next. After a few minutes a guy showed up with a drum and sat forlornly by himself for 20 minutes. Then a few more musicians showed up and filled in the spaces around him, right next to us. Then a few more musicians joined in, and a few more. There were guitars and banjos and flutes and accordians and drums and recorders and piccolos and even a woman who carried only a purse into the bar but produced from it a set of spoons, ready for action. A couple were in their 20s but most had gray hair if they had hair a'tal. By my last count there were 17 musicians, packed in all around us. If one more had joined the band we'd have been trapped in the corner for the duration.

The music itself was heavenly. Someone would start -- usually one of the flutes -- and a few more would join in, and pretty soon the whole crew was wailing on some song hundreds of years old, foreign and new to my ears but also achingly familiar. That would go for a while and gradually end, and someone else would start another song. It's hard for me to put this into words without sounding completely stupid, but I began to understand how important music is to the Irish, how indivisible it is from life itself. Between the music and the Guinness I could have stayed all night, but after an hour the kids were passing out and we needed to leave. So we did.