Today marks Day One of a thrice-scheduled, long-awaited ancestry pilgrimage to Ireland for my husband and me. The ancestry project is his, but since I've got roots here too, we've been equally psyched for this trip. Fred's been researching his Irishness and documenting his findings with drawings for close to 15 years, never quitting in the face of countless dead ends. He finally traced the Lynches back to a quiet little corner of Kerry on the southwest coast using sources like Ancestry.com, a genealogy archive in Waltham, MA, and Catholic church records you can sometimes find on line, but often need to work a little harder at by emailing or snail-mailing churches in Ireland. Some of these folks are more responsive and helpful than others.

Enough of the background. The purposes of my blog are to help me remember my travel experiences, to take photos to accompany the posts, and to share with friends and family. 

The trip started with Henry dropping us at Logan.  Back in December I forced Fred to go with me to Windsor, CT, to begin the process of getting Global Entry Passes which will allow us to whiz through the lines AND customs. He was against it —seemed too elitist — but last month's trip to Bozeman changed his tune. Sadly, however, after we sauntered past all the poor souls in the long TSA line, we were turned away. Aer Lingus doesn't honor these passes... That was a super crappy way to start the trip, but nothing drinks at an airport bar couldn't solve. As far as I'm concerned, that drink is one of the most delicious feelings in the world—that pre-adventure feeling. I also love being in a vehicle where I cannot be expected to do anything. I'm in limbo. I could be in limbo forever. It's similar to sitting at the hair dresser with foils in my hair.  They kind of have to "cook" for a while and I'm always disappointed when she checks and they're done :( 

The flight was uneventful (thankfully) but for a bit of turbulence — more than the usual, but nobody screamed or anything. My goddess of a travel agent always books us an aisle and a window seat in the  hopes that nobody will book a middle seat between two strangers. It has worked many times! Not this time, but our seat mate took the aisle happily and I (unhappily) stuck it out in the middle.

The first great notable thing to happen was Fred noticed a guy at the Shannon airport who had gotten off our plane earlier than we had, presumably from first class because he was already through the entry and waiting for his luggage, well before us. It was his big Q-tip puff of white hair that Fred noticed, his back towards us. See if you can guess:

We never really did see his face but Fred was able to make out his name on a paper he was holding: Peter Lynch. Maybe he was doing an ancestry tour too! He was being helped by an airport guy with a special vest who got his luggage and wheeled him out—Lynch was in a wheelchair holding a crutch, so hopefully something temporary.

It was 5:30 this morning when we arrived at Shannon, a half hour early. NO FUN when your rental doesn't let you in till 3:00 and it's only 2 1/2 hours away. So we got the car, from the slowest, most talkative and soft-spoken human on the planet, which took an hour. I kept having to peer around the plexi panel in front of him and listen to him from the side, half expecting Alan Funt to appear. After coffee to go, we braved the world of left-side-of-the-road-after-no-sleep driving. Fred freaked out so hard once that the adrenaline shooting through my arms out my fingertips felt like I was struck by lightning. It seems that I let the left side of the car hug the side of the road a bit— a natural reaction to seeing cars coming at you on the wrong side of the road. 

Incidentally, it's 5 pm now and I'm sitting here as I write. People keep walking by and don't see me and if they did they would jump out of their skin I think. 

Dingle Bay 

Our place

Back to our arrival: With all this time to kill, we had breakfast in a town called Killorglin, followed by a big shop at a super market suggested by our AirBNB host. All good, but still with hours to kill, we drove down to Kell's Bay, right near where the Lynches were from. Fred got a ton of info from a guy named Brian Lynch who makes cheese here (Kell's Bay Cheese) and has been a wealth of knowledge and very helpful in terms of letting Fred know of lots where there are some old stone home foundations on land the Lynches inhabited. We plan to meet him and get a tour of the "cheese room" on Saturday. After a walk on Kell's Beach, which seemed to be inhabited by a lot of English people, Fred walked me over to this little graveyard of unmarked stones where stillborn babies were buried over the years. If a Catholic baby died before being baptized, it could not be buried with other baptized folks. And to boot, they had to be buried after dark by their fathers. So Fred was taking me around to this little hidden overgrown secret area — which he knows like the back of his hand from all his research and Google maps —where there was this one man with an electric edger whacking all the overgrown grass and weeds away from the markers. We acknowledged each other and he kept whacking and we kept walking around solemnly. Then suddenly we heard, "Fred? and Karen?" It was Brian Lynch, having recognized Fred from his Facebook profile, apparently. The two men shook hands and one said to the other, "Welcome home."

Neither Lynch man wanted to be shown too closely —one having been on an overnight flight and yet to shower or change; the other not expecting this meeting and in his weed whacking clothes.  

More photos: