Dartmouth

We were in Dartmouth about 4 years ago, presenting a day of music workshops at an elementary school for the Dart Music Festival. The talk at the time was "must have you back to perform at the festival itself" or words to that effect. But of course we weren't going to be on this side of the ocean at the right time for it the next year, and these things soon get forgotten.

Four years later, here we are at last! We trusted the satnav to bring us in, so unexpectedly ended up taking a little ferry across the Dart to finish our journey into Dartmouth. But that was ok - we're used to ferries. This one was something different, though. It's just a floating platform that holds about 8 cars plus a few bicycles and pedestrians, and gets pushed across the river by a tug moored to the side of it. This first picture shows a ferry heading in each direction. The town rises up steeply from the waterfront; this photo was taken from the next street up from the quay.

The three people in the first picture about to disappear behind the building on the right of the photo are heading towards Bayard's Cove Fort.














We visited on our first trip here, and Mike's immediate reaction to seeing it was "this should be a music venue". So guess where our stage was at the festival...

It was an amazing place to play, with its row of archways looking out over the river, a solid wall of rock at our backs and only one entrance/exit - the one with the steps coming in from the left, with a big lamp over it. Too bad they couldn't have some seating in place. Anyone who wanted a seat had to bring their own. Our morning show - a family friendly tour of world music - was in a very nice, very modern arts center auditorium. And we had a look at another venue for some of the festival shows that we both thought was spectacular. I can't even begin to capture the elaborate detail of this ancient church with my little camera phone. The acoustics are just amazing. And there were seats! Maybe next time...

A Pattern is Detected

Having two homes of our own, neither in either of our home towns, we are often asked what time of the year we tend to be in which part of the world. I’ve always replied that there’s no real pattern. Hmm. I think I’ll have to change my answer.

We have greeted various New Years in England, in Ireland, in Alaska, in Seattle… But as more of those years pass, the draw of spending the season of winter holidays at home with family grows ever stronger, so it’s become habit to start and finish each year in Anchorage. My parents still live in the house they designed, built, and moved my siblings and me into when I was 10 years old, and it’s an easy walk from here to a huge network of ski trails in the state park nearby.

This has turned into a really nice way, each year, to get grounded before we set out on our travels once again.

After Anchorage, we usually head for the Pacific Northwest. Neither of us has any family around here – at least not that we know well – but here is probably our most extensive network of friends and fellow musicians. We also have a little bit of property here where we can park our campervan and ourselves in between gigs, so we put up with the rain and the occasional wet snow for a few months, or, sometimes, jump in the camper and head off to play some gigs down the coast. Or off across the Midwest, but honestly, in Jan/Feb, we’re more likely to go for the California option!

March is a great time to be with musical friends because of the St Patrick’s Day festivities. The long lists of Irish music we need to refresh from previous years before showing up for a 12 hour gig means a good excuse to spend a LOT of time playing diddly tunes and singing big choruses together beforehand.

Once St Pat’s is over and done with, it’s time to fly to Ireland. The house has been sitting empty all winter and there is almost always some damage control and maintenance to do when we get there. Last time it was broken pipes in the house and a hole in the barn roof. Who knows what it’ll be this time! We also have a car parked up here, so we load instruments and head for a ferry to the UK to play whatever shows our dear friend and agent over there has managed to scrape together for us. Now, of course, we’re on Mike’s home ground, and whatever open time we have between shows is spent trying to catch up with widely scattered friends and relations. Southampton to Aberdeen – no wonder we sometimes go for years without seeing some of them! We try.

Then it’s back over to Ireland. (Sometimes we make more than one journey across the Irish Sea, but the ferry fares are pricey in the summer, so we try to keep it down to one.) Whatever is left of the summer is spent working on the old farmhouse, going to sessions, learning tunes and spending time with our friends here and whichever of our friends get adventurous enough to come see us in our partially restored, nearly habitable, home.

When Autumn comes around, at least until we get some source of heat in the house in Ireland, it’s time to head back over to Seattle where, with any luck, we’ll have a bunch of holiday shows booked and a flurry of rehearsals with our favorite music partners to get ready for them. The past couple of years we’ve been building up a wonderful December pan-holiday show, which we hope to keep bringing to bigger and better venues each year. (Thanks to Stewart Hendrickson for the photo!)

Those finish before Christmas, when we want to be home again in Anchorage. And, somehow, another year has disappeared!

Home

For us, the word "home" usually just means "where we're staying tonight." But for me, nothing can restore the the old settled meaning of that word like leaning over Mom's kitchen sink so that I can look up through the window at the Chugach Mountains while I'm filling the coffeepot in the morning. And then walking through to the living room, opening up the shades and looking out across the Anchorage Bowl. During the day, the city is nearly invisible in the flatland below. In darkness, the lights twinkle below us like multi-colored stars. On a clear day, we can see all the way to Mt McKinley / Denali, more than a hundred miles away.

It warmed up quite a bit today. Must have been 10º or 15º above zero! That's -12 to -9 if you think in Celsius. Beautiful day for a ski. I always used to step into my skis on the front step and go from there, but back when I lived here the road hardly ever got gritted. Now it's a hike from the house to the trailhead, carrying the skis and poles if I want them to survive. I took the easy way out and had Mike drive me up to the Park entrance. Only had time for a short trip, but it was glorious. The sun was illuminating the mountains above me, and there were even a few bits of the trail that came out into direct sunlight. So I saw the sun "set" three times as I skied in and out of the shadows of the land around me, all the while watching the early sunset (1pm) colors reflected in the snow.

I haven't done as much skiing on this stay as I'd like to, and the first time I came out, I forgot my gloves. And it was cold! Made for a very short trip, but I discovered that it is possible to ski cross-country (I guess they call it "classic" now) with no poles when you have to keep your hands stuffed up their opposite sleeves to thaw your fingers! This time I had the gloves, and it was warm enough anyway that I needed to remove a couple of layers on the way up the hill. And warm enough to stop for many pictures. I'm putting them in a facebook album.

With a little help from my friends

You'd think it would be a fairly simple matter to get from Inistioge (County Kilkenny, Ireland) to Suquamish (Kitsap County, Washington), wouldn't you?

I research my transportation, buy air tickets... It's supposed to be the convenient way to travel. The last two times, though, for two different reasons, I'd had to get my tickets from Seattle to London instead of Seattle to Dublin, working out the London-Dublin part separately. The eastbound leg has gone ok each time, but getting back to Seattle last year starting with a commuter flight from Dublin to get me to the return half of my Seattle/London itinerary turned into a ludicrous string of hassles that left me stranded in London with no way home. Thankfully, two good friends - Kathie and Graham - lived an easy tube ride away from Heathrow. Their telephone, internet connection, printer, and fold-out sofa bed bailed me out of an impossible situation. The chocolate biscuits helped too :). The next day, a print out of my email confirmation of my re-scheduled flight failed to impress the airline's computer - no way would it issue me a boarding card - but the humans involved were able to give me a handwritten pass that got me across the ocean, as far as Minneapolis. There, what was supposed to be a short stopover turned to an hours long delay due to mechanical problems. By the time I finally reached Seattle it was past midnight, more than 24 hours after I'd been due to arrive, and too late to catch a ferry to the Kitsap Peninsula. Stranded again. Fortunately, I was just minutes away from another pair of wonderful friends - John and Lynne. And they have a couch, too! So I finished that journey two days late.

This year I was facing the same challenge of picking up the second half of a Seattle/London itinerary from Ireland. But since it had turned into such a drawn-out adventure last time, I decided to plan it that way from the start and make it fun. Couldn't just repeat last year's route, 'cause where's the adventure in that? And anyway Kathie and Graham had moved to Orkney in the meantime. But my friend Anneli had moved from Oslo to... you guessed... London!

Mike had been suggesting for a long time that we should do a day as tourists in Dublin, since we never go there except to catch flights or ferries. So to start the journey, that's what we did. We wove our way through crowded streets, past many exceptionally talented buskers (and a couple not so), admiring the public art and architecture until we were exhausted, spent the night near the airport, and in the morning Mike waved me off on the next leg of the journey.

Anneli's house in London is an easy walk from the city center, and she is an excellent tour guide. I took more photos than I know what to do with.
(Another album on Facebook may be in order.)


The next stop was, like last year, in Minneapolis. But this time I was in touch ahead of time with my cousin Jane, and spent the stopover in companionable conversation, catching up on nearly 15 years since the last time we'd seen each other.

Arriving in Seattle late in the evening, I was met by William and Felicia and whisked off to a comfy makeshift bed on a houseboat. The next day, after a good walk and some recreational tune playing, I was dropped at the ferry where I had arranged to meet Matt on his way home to the Kitsap Peninsula. Matt and Jenifer had stored some instruments for us while we were away, so I went home with him before getting a ride back out to my house. Jenifer had very thoughtfully packed up a bag of basic groceries for me - just some stuff they had to spare, she said. Which was great because I didn't have the time or energy to go out shopping with all that came next... but I don't feel like writing about that yet!

Summer of visitors. Our turn to sit still a bit.

Apart from the two small tours in the UK this summer, we had a rare opportunity to stay relatively stationary and have the world come to our door instead.

Left: Pip and Alison admire some of the very tall trees in the Woodstock estate.




Sue found a pretty tall thistle, too - about as tall as she is - on the trail up Brandon Hill.

Friends old and new came from England, Scotland, Canada and Italy, and we had a great time showing them around our corner of Ireland. Even found a few corners we didn't know about before.

Left: Reia and I took our time getting to the top of Brandon.

There were many raspberries and blueberries to be eaten on the way.

Mike and I hadn't been to Kells Priory in years. I always forget how spectacular it is.

We went twice this summer, enjoying both the ancient ruins of the priory and the not quite so ancient but still impressive mills and arched bridges nearby.

Not all of the fun was outdoors. The Phil Murphy Weekend was on down in Co Wexford while Toni and Michael were here. We caught, among other things, a set by L'Angelus - a truely charming and incredibly energetic young Cajun family band - before moving on down the road to join in a crowded session in a tiny pub well into the early hours of the morning.



We also managed, somehow, to get some work done on our little stone farmhouse, and will be adding more photos soon on our web page: opland-freeman.com/inistioge

Looking down on Edinburgh, July 10 2010

This was a new experience for us, driving across Scotland from the ferry terminal at Stranraer all the way to the far side of Edinburgh. We decided to see what way the trusty Garmin would direct us... We'll go back to double checking its choices. The views were stunning, but these were not the easiest roads for a long day of driving.

Still, we got there, and that's the important part. The next day - Friday - Steven had a day off from work, but he went in anyway just to show us around.

Back in college, my favorite places to be were the library and the physics lab. At the Royal Observatory, we got to wander through labs big and small, where everything from micro technology to huge elements of telescopes were being developed and tested. Steven was a great tour guide, showing us through educational displays and working laboratories alike.

And the library! Surrounded by the history of astronomy in books and journals going back to the 1800s, I could easily have gotten lost for days, but we had other places to be. Steven had arranged for us to see the Crawford Collection.

I'd have been thrilled just to leaf through the first editions of Copernicus, Gallileo and Newton, but what really took my breath away were a couple of amazing medieval manuscripts. Oh yes, and the view of Edinburgh from the lecture room...

The Mountains of Mourne, July 7 2010

We’re on the move again, heading back over to Scotland on our way to a couple of shows in England, and visiting some of our far-flung friends along the way. After so many years on the road, we have close friends scattered all over, and we always look for opportunities to drop in. A couple of days with Ferris and Sam, in County Down, was a relaxing, musical and scenic way to start the trip. Look at Nuada.net and myspace.com/nuadauk for some of their wonderful international and early music.

Our first glimpse of the mountains, from Rathfriland, was so unexpected I snapped a picture of them through the windshield as we drove through a junction.


I didn’t know that we’d end up walking along the beach the next day, right past a monument to Percy French from whose lyrics so many of us have first heard of these beautiful mountains.
















It's a gorgeous, long beach with a wide sandy strip across the top and rocky tide pools closer to the waves. We saw a family coming out of the water after a swim, which we wouldn't have thought the day was anywhere near warm enough for.



Beachcombers were more common; a couple of lines of hoof prints showed that some riders had been by that way; and, mostly, folks were walking like us, enjoying the fresh sea breeze.






The sand was littered with washed-up jellyfish. Most were six inches across or less, but a couple were much larger.






"Oh Mary, this London's a wonderful sight,
With people here working by day and by night.
They don't sow potatoes nor barley nor wheat
But there's gangs of them diggin' for gold in the street."



"At least, when I asked them that's what I was told
So I just took a hand at this diggin' for gold;
But for all that I've found there, I might as well be
Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea."