April 17, 2005 - Tralee and Muckross House in Killarney.

We had another hearty breakfast and held a council of war while eating because it was raining steadily outside and that didn't seem like great weather for seeing the sights along the Ring of Kerry loop drive on the Iveragh Peninsula. We turned our attention to indoor amusements and decided to try the "The Kerry Kingdom" at the county Kerry museum in Tralee, and then visit Muckross House down the road in Killarney. It was, so to speak, our Plan B.

The drive to Tralee through the rain was complicated by the water draining across the street in several points. My usual tactic to avoid hydroplaning is to move over to the dry side of the street, but given the narrowness of the highway and the total lack of shoulders of any kind, I didn't dare try it. So after splashing through a lot of puddles, we reached Tralee and then spent the next 10 minutes circling the downtown area and searching for the museum.

We finally found the museum on Denny Street, but it turned out to be only open on Tuesday through Saturday in April. Darn! It just goes to show that you cannot believe everything that your read in those guidebooks, because our books reassured us that this museum was already open daily in April. I suppose the word to the wise here would be to double check on the web or at the tourist information offices on the availability of the attractions you really want to see if you visit Ireland in the off season.

But the silver lining on this otherwise disappointing cloud was that the museum was situated in a large public park with floral beds and interesting bronze sculptures, A huge bed of roses were not yet in bloom, but many of the other flowers were already blossoming.

We walked there for a while and enjoyed the flowers. Judging by the sprouting of the rosebushes and the blooming of spring flowers like azaleas, the season in that section of Ireland was about a week or two ahead of our home in northern Virginia. When you consider how much farther north Ireland is than Virginia that is rather astonishing. We surmised that it was solely due to the huge influence of the temperate waters of the Gulf Stream on the island's climate.

Driving in the towns and cities of Ireland, even on a Sunday morning, was analogous to broken field running in football. That is, cars were parked in every available location and pointed in every conceivable direction, acting basically like randomly arranged obstacles. Given the extremely narrow streets, driving became a negotiation of these obstacles plus a pas de deux with the oncoming traffic as to who goes first through the chokepoints. Thank heavens the Irish were, for the most part, polite and forgiving drivers. Nevertheless, the term I coined for this was "Broken Field Driving" and it was wearing to say the least.

As we entered Killarney I saw a car on the street 90 degrees to my left drive into a roundabout going counter-clockwise rather than clockwise! Cars were coming at this guy head on, but everyone stopped, got out of his way as he careened up onto the center island of the roundabout, and tried to clear the way for him to get back out on the correct (left hand) side of the street. I was just stopped dead watching all this unfold, but when he looked over at me as if to say, "What do I do next" I gestured for him to take the next street back out of the roundabout (which after a pause to make sure everyone else had stopped, he did). But with all this automotive brouhaha not one driver honked, flashed their lights, made rude gestures, or yelled. Everyone just got out of his way and let him sort it out, which I thought was quite a testimony to the Irish temperament.

Passing through the town of Killarney we drove south into Killarney National Park. Who knew that Ireland even had national parks? And this one was a humdinger. The 35,000-acre park surrounded three large lakes and included most of the surrounding mountains. Muckross House and an adjacent open-air museum with three different traditional Irish farms are situated on one edge of the park. Muckross House itself was a large Victorian-era mansion situated on the shore of Muckross Lake, and we joined up with a guided tour that was beginning just as we entered. No pictures were allowed inside the house, so I could only photograph the magnificent exterior.

The tour was very good and the docent explained the layout of the house and its period furnishings, many of them the originals. It turned out that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had actually visited Muckross House on a royal progression through Ireland 1845. She only stayed 2 nights, but the owner made structural changes to the house to accommodate her, like converting a ground floor room to a bedroom for her and putting in a fire escape down into the sunken gardens below. The fire escape was still there, by the way, as were the bed the Queen had slept in and so forth.

The luxury of that side of the house contrasted rather starkly with the appointments and furnishings of the servant's working area in the kitchen and basement. The floors, the walls, the ceilings, the furnishings, and the appliances all shifted from being highly ornamented and ostentatiously expensive to being dull, drab, and functional. I've actually seen the same kind of shift when you go "behind the scenes" at, say, a luxury hotel or spa, but it still gives me a jolt. I'm not sure why that happens, but I seem to expect that folks living like kings (literally in this case) would at least want their servants to live comfortably and decently, and instead they just don't seem to give a fig.

After the house tour we saw a very nice slideshow cum film on the Killarney National Park, which had many beautiful slides. In fact, the film lasted 20 minutes and I counted that they were showing a new slide every 3 seconds, so I expect that there were about 400 images in the presentation, and each one a great picture. The exhibits in the visitor center adjacent to Muckross House showed a selection of the native fauna and flora, and also detailed the local iron industry and its role in denuding the surrounding area of its original cover of oak forests. Apparently copper was also successfully mined on the peninsula reaching out into the lake for many years, which again surprised me.

A rather new restaurant was located just beyond the house in a formal garden, and we stopped there for a great lunch before continuing on to an exhibit area on the other side of the parking lot that focused on typical Irish farms in the 1930s. In fact, the Muckross Traditional Farms folks had set up three farmsteads on a circular drive representing small,

medium,

and large farms.

Each farm had the central dwelling house plus outbuildings, and a docent in the house would cheerfully explain the typical activities and situation of a farmer in the 1930s. The small farm, for example, had one very small cottage with just two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen-dining-living room There we sat down for a bit and had fun chatting with the docent about the history of the old cottage.

In addition to the history of the farmhouse, she cheerfully chatted with us about the changes in Ireland as it has become generally more wealthy in the last 20 years or so. She said that over the last 15 years a large portion of the increased government revenues had been invested in both expanding the higher education system in Ireland, and in making the system more affordable for all young folks. Currently the student must qualify for a course of study by a competitive exam at the end of his or her secondary education, which was similar to the British and German systems. Once qualified and accepted into a college or university, she added, all the tuition was completely free-the student had to pay only for his or her living expenses. Information I later heard from one of our hostesses indicated that complete subsidies were only available to children whose parents earned less than 40,000 Euro per year, but that is still pretty darn generous.

In any case, it seemed clear to me that Ireland was still expanding their educational system and making opportunities more merit-based, while during the same period in the U.S. support for higher education has been dwindling and the end result has been to make higher education more elitist, effectively selecting richer students over poorer at every level. Based on what I learned about Canada's approach to higher education during Wanderung 7, I think they are following the European approach rather than the U.S. approach, and that made me wonder what will ultimately happen to higher education in the U.S., particularly if the best and brightest students start choosing to study abroad, which seems to be already occurring to some extent. Without a scientific and technological edge, the continuation of U.S. dominance in world affairs would be simply impossible, but I don't think the current Powers That Be are fully aware of that.

Another surprising thing we learned by chatting with the docent was the slow march of rural electrification in Ireland. Apparently many rural areas were still being electrified in the 1960s and 1970s, which is much later than the U.S., or at least I think it is. But since meat on the farms was preserved by salting or smoking and everything else was consumed fresh, refrigeration or the lack of it was not a problem in those days. The lack of indoor plumbing would, to my mind, have been more of a problem, but perhaps if that is how you have always done things you don't really notice that much. Still, I was rather glad we live in the "Good New Days" with modern electricity, plumbing, and medicine.

The large farmer house and barn complex was much more extensive than the small holders and all together quite impressive. On our way in we were pounced on by two of the largest, hairiest dogs I have ever seen. They didn't make a sound, so I was a bit leery at first, but they turned out to be very friendly Irish Wolfhounds.

After passing the dogs we saw the interior rooms of the house from the never-used front parlor to the great big kitchen. Instead of an open fireplace, the kitchen boasted a nice peat-burning range for cooking plus a large assortment of kitchen utensils. The dining room even had a rug on the floor as well as a nice wood dining table and matched set of chairs. All the rooms were furnished with period pieces that looked very nice despite their age (Something which I hope can be also said of myself!).

Continuing on the loop path we stopped in to chat with a harness maker, who was quite an interesting fellow. He made saddles and harnesses, really, but told us that there was more profit to be made on the saddles. He also discussed how he had to buy his raw leather from the Amish in the U.S. because the thick, high-quality leather he needed was not available in Ireland or the U.K. His story of a recent visit to his Amish suppliers in the U.S. was quite intriguing because he had a great memory for the minutiae of how the Amish adapted to modern life in some ways while clinging to a old-fashioned lifestyle in others. Our chat came to an end when other folks stopped in to see him working, so we broke off and headed for the exit, pausing for a moment at the blacksmith shop to use a grinding wheel to sharpen my pocketknife.

We all felt like we wanted to see a bit more of the National Park, so to finish up the day we drove a mile down the road and walked up to Torc Falls at the foot of Torc Mountain. The falls, really a very large cascade, were quite impressive, possibly due to the large amount of rain they had received in the area over the last week or so.

From the waterfall some steps led up to what promised to be great views, and we persuaded Lois to walk up with us. It was farther than we had expected and the stairs ended in a muddy, rutted trail that snaked its way up the hillside. Lois struggled gamely for what seemed like half an hour and then gave up. What we got for our pains were two tree-covered overlooks. I went to the top, while Lois and Monika slowly and carefully worked their way down the hill. At the top I found a parking lot, bridge, and another small cascade; it was, however, not even worth a picture and hardly worth the effort.

Back down at the foot of the falls, the rich carpet of moss and ferns that covered stones, trees, and pretty much everything else in the area impressed us all. The continuous green cover of vegetation over everything reminded me of the temperate rain forest areas in the Olympic Peninsula of the northwestern U.S. I suspect that the cool and continuously wet climate supports that ecology in Ireland as well as in the northwestern tip of the U.S.

By the time we got back to the car dusk was falling, so we drove home, ate a quick snack, had some drinks at the pub down the street, and turned in for the night.