Our Amazing 5-week Adventure Up and Down the Emerald Isle

And we counted the counties as we drove

Anne and Adrienne have been exhorting us to write about something green and Irish this month. So, I decided to round up a bunch of photos from our five-week stay in the Emerald Isle during the summer of 2002.

There are six counties in Northern Ireland. We visited five of them in 2002. And there are 26 counties in the Republic of Ireland. We hit 17 of them.

We flew from San Francisco to Dublin that year and then rode on the train to Belfast to meet my cousins Henry and Geraldine. They showed us around Counties Down and Antrim for a week.

My great-grandfather grew up in a cottage close to this windmill.

And then we rented a car at the Belfast airport and drove across Northern Ireland to County Donegal.

My mother’s McDevitt ancestors came from County Tyrone. So, we crossed the river that separates Donegal from Northern Ireland and visited Strabane, where my great-grandmother came from.

From Donegal we headed south through Counties Fermanagh and Sligo to County Roscommon.

We stayed a week in Roscommon and I met more relatives, including a couple of third cousins!

Two nights in Boyle, another three in Rooskey, County Leitrim (Roscommon was on the other side of the bridge crossing the River Shannon), and then two more nights in Strokestown. We attended the Friends of Ballykilcline Convention during our last five days in Roscommon. The convention moved from Rooskey to Strokestown and so did we.

Boyle is only a couple of miles from the Roscommon / Sligo border. One of my RootsWeb friends asked me to take a few pictures for her of her father’s hometown in County Sligo. And so I did.

After our Ballykilcline adventure, we drove through Counties Longford and Westmeath to County Offaly. I took only one photo in Tullamore — the hotel where we stayed. Sorry, it wasn’t green!

But hey there’s a strip of lawn in the lower left-hand corner!

From Tullamore it was just a hop, skip and a jump to Tipperary where we spent three days in Dundrum looking for my O’Dwyers — yeah, that was our name back in the old sod. My great-grandfather decided to drop the “O’” after a few years in the USA.

There’s a crazy law in Ireland that you can only rent a car for a maximum of two weeks. We then drove to Shannon Airport in County Clare to return our car and rent another. They washed our car and gave it back to us for two more weeks!

We then headed back to Counties Limerick and Tipperary and spent three more days in Tipperary, this time in the town of Cashel. We met a lot of Dwyers and O’Dwyers there but none that I could prove were my relatives.

After Tipperary, we drove past Limerick again and then turned south to County Kerry and the Ring of Kerry.

We then drove east to County Cork where we spent three days in Mallow. During that time we explored Boherbue, Kiskeam, Newmarket and Kanturk looking for my dad’s McAuliffe relatives but didn’t find any. We did have a nice get-together with a cousin of my brother-in-law Dan, though!

We also visited Cork City and Kinsale during our Mallow stay and we came across this statue in a garden just outside Kinsale. What? Why did I pick this photo? Well, it is mostly green!

We then drove through Counties Waterford and Wexford and finally back to Dublin for a few more days.

Our cousins from Northern Ireland came down to show us around. Here they are, relaxing on St Stephen’s Green.

We then deposited our car at the Dublin airport and flew back home.

That was our first trip to Ireland. Since then we have been back twice. In 2009 we arrived a few days after St Patrick’s Day and saw some remnants from the recent festivities, including green paraphernalia draped over many of the public statues!

Our third trip was in 2019. We brought our two daughters with us this time along with their spouses and our four grandkids. We had to wait till summer when the kids were out of school before taking off on this trip.

Anne tells us we need to tag two other Globetrotter writers in these challenges. So, I have decided to tag two who have written recently about places near and dear to me in the Bay Area.

Marianne O writes about Fremont. We lived in Fremont for three years prior to moving to Castro Valley 50 years ago this month.

B.R. Shenoy writes about Pleasanton. Pleasanton is right over the hill from us — we just take the I-580 freeway through Dublin Canyon.

Thanks for reading!