Two cats, no van

So today I picked up our baggages out of our van Gigi. She is being stored with a very nice man named Dave in a tiny town called Kilanerin.

She smelled all delicious and log cabinny inside. Sigh. So sweet. It's hard to believe I've had to sell her again without ever having driven her anywhere for an adventure. I was kind of sad about it, but, well, things are as they are. Yesterday Facebook reminded me that one year ago I posted about first falling in love with her ad. So, that's kind of symmetrical and perfect and interesting, owning her for exactly a year. Now the dream has to revise.

We have tried about 25 ways to find insurance for a Canadian driving a campervan she bought in Ireland... no dice. No way, Jose. Forget it.

So, the nice man named Dave is going to sell her for us. (donedeal, the website where a person would sell such a thing, refuses to allow me to post because my gmail seems to be Canadian, I guess) says he won't even take any commission, because he figures we've had enough bad luck and he just thinks, what if the shoe was on the other foot? That's very kind of him.  A lot of Irish folks think that way. I am fascinated and delighted by how little they appear to worry about money. They certainly don't take money from other people, anyway. They always seem to believe they will have enough. And they're right. They do.

Her vehicle inspection has expired, of course, because we were supposed to be here last year. He-who-delayed-us would perhaps get some satisfaction from that? It certainly reduces her price. Shrug. It will all be fine. Money's only money. I have been offered some work this week, maybe I'll take it and then we'll have more money.

It's funny though, I haven't really thought of it as bad luck.  It's just a change. I don't regret having bought Gigi. She helped us keep the dream alive through the long hard winter of court and uncertainty and feeling kind of like we were in jail, being forced to attend school and not to be where we wanted to be. So I don't regret buying her at all. I'm glad to have had my year of loving Gigi.

It is, of course, a little sad that we'll have to discard some of the things we brought over. We can't possibly carry all that we brought. But we brought all our favourite things. They're just things after all. We'll manage.

I wonder what will happen?
Will we, indeed, get bicycles with panniers as some have suggested we should?
Will we reduce to backpacking size and hike?
Will we find a car and a way to insure one?

Anyway, our blog title is kind of off-base now. We're twocatsnovan not twocatsinavan but never mind. :) Call it humour.

And we're still having an AWESOME time. This is, indeed, the life I was hoping for. Living in a dairy, exploring castles and paths and fields and doing good hard physical work, is great. And the occasional interesting offer of work is just perfect too.

Rambly stream-of-consciousness here's-how-our-week-was post

April 21

Coolest thing of the day: there was a snail in the water barrel outside the glass house and it was all swollen up with water. I thought it was probably dead but I pulled it out and put it on a rock. And guess what? It was fine. It managed to live. I wonder how long it was in the water for? That's pretty cool. Sorry, no photo. Just the kind of thing one sees while workin' away in the walled garden (see my Facebook page for photos of that).

One sees a lot of buggy life in the garden. Lots of sow bugs, which used to make me squeamish until I worked beside this really cool  biology teacher from the Caribbean (when I worked at Lower Canada College and was teaching chemistry), and he laughed his big deep laugh (kind of like Disney's Uncle Remus I guess) and told me that  it was only a little sow bug and they're good for the soil. So now I am happy when I see them, squiggly little roly-polys that they are.

There are also an amazement of earthworms. Since I was moving huge areas of black plastic and big rocks today, I sometimes saw them all naked of dirt. One of them went amazingly fast scurrying across the plastic.

It occurred to me that I saw at least a half dozen escargots today while gardening (they make a cool sort of sound/feel when I pull them off the black plastic and stick them to a rock, say) and I have garlic in my pocket, but... well. I guess I've never cooked them up before!

Why do I have garlic in my pocket you might wonder? I think I have some kind of fungus on my thumb. It could just be dry skin too but I'm not sure, so I'm putting a slice of garlic clove under a bandaid on it just in case. Last year I had two spider bites. The first one swelled and swelled and after a couple of days the fever wouldn't go away, and I had to go to the emergency room and get antibiotics (well, I chose to). The second time it happened, I strapped garlic on the bite right away. It took away the swelling and I didn't get a fever or have to go to the hospital. However, it did eat the skin away! I am prepared  for that. Better to do that just in case it is some freaky fungus. (April 22 update: I'm betting on dry skin. I left so much cream at home when I packed! Ack.)

It could just be dry skin. But the most terrible thing I saw on someone's hands this week was chillbains. Like real chillbains in this day and age. Why on Earth wouldn't you buy yourself an electric heater or wear mittens, I ask you? Like seriously! Instead she had purple bruises all over her fingers and complained about her house being cold. I think she mentioned that they hurt (my ears might have gone fuzzy as I stared in horror).

Yesterday was lovely, lovely. After work our house-mate Alexi and I walked to the pub. It was really sunny and gorgeous. At the pub they said "there you are" like they were expecting me. When we left they told us we'd better be back tomorrow (we didn't though. Other things to do today like quizzing Yarrow on his science work so far and writing this blog and playing boules and pool and... there are so many things to do). Alexi is a francophone so he tries to understand Irish people but honestly, I had to stand really close to all of them at the pub (they mumble) and usually ask them to repeat themselves two or three times before I understood anything too. But it was fun.  (April 22 update: it's the day after tomorrow but I made sure to stop in tonight to write you this blog.)

It's nice to be welcomed and remembered and chatted about and chatted to. Canadians really ought to do it more often.  For example the electrician on site yesterday told me that the owner down the pub mentioned that I'd been in. :) It's sweet. When we went in yesterday she teased me about having a new man (ha, Alexi is 17 or 18 years younger -- I don't think so!) and the Californian guy who got enchanted when house-sitting here and just stayed forever says that he talked to some other folks about our van insurance situation and told us what he'd learned (upshot: nothing new, really, but yet another person who says "it must be possible. It can't possibly be impossible!").
(April 22 update: when I walked in with Yarrow tonight the pub owner lady (whose name is Frances, I've learned) told me that a tall dark handsome man had been in looking for me. :) Ha. Mysterious and hilarious. Maybe even possibly true. Who knows. It is Ireland, after all.)

The pub owner lady wasn't actually behind the bar when we went in yesterday, her son was. He is nearly impossible to understand, I tell you. A nice fellow though.

There are two pubs open in town (and a bunch of closed ones). There's Eily's, which has no heating whatsoever and is the drink-alot place. It's preferred by the wwoofers here it seems. Jimmy the can-do-everything main hired man and boss, his daughter works there and also goes to college. She came by the garden yesterday, showing a friend of hers around the place, because this place is really like a museum, and that's not even including inside the manor of the lord of the manor, which is a whole 'nother museum that I mostly have only peeked into.

The other pub, the Glenannar, is my preferred one. First, it has food, which we were looking for the first time we went pubbing (we started at Eily's as Jimmy dropped us there, but only had a glass and moved across the road, where we asked for soup, and got it, and tea, and free apple pie afterward, all for 10 euros for both of us). Second, it's full of friendly oldsters.  And third, and equally important, the fireplace is usually on! And now fourth, they seem to expect us to show up with some regularity, so we'd better, eh?

Yesterday Alexi and I didn't ask for soup, but I did notice a cardboard box behind the bar that said Cheese Onion so I asked the barman what that was so he gave us some potato chips. They went well with the Murphy's so they did. I had a wee taste of Guinness too just to make sure that I really do prefer Murphy's and yes I do. To me Guinness is very watery from the second taste onwards. (April 22 update: They have a Scotch whiskey behind the bar that's called Black & White, and having never heard of it I gave it a try tonight. It's very smooth, like an Irish whiskey so it is.)

While walking to down Alexi and I happened upon Lord Doneraile's house, which is a mansion much larger than the huge mansion on our property. It has a tea shop that we're resolved to try out on Saturday. See, Lord Doneraile or his family donated the estate to the public at some point so it's a public park. Since that property was joined to our 101 acres, we can get to town by walking through what is now Doneraile Park.

This is the little Zen garden I made today. The lord of the manor had assigned me to remove a lot of black plastic from beds, but when moving rocks around I decided the gravel around this fish pond was a good spot for a Zen garden. Strictly speaking (according to Wikipedia anyway) Zen gardens ought to have a wall around them... also, I wish the ripples were more visible but so far they're not).

It is amazing, like a dream come true (a dream I never even knew I had) to have such a HUGE garden to play with. There are all the beds in the walled garden, and the orchard and the berry cage and the glass house and the potatoes and the flowers and the rhubarb and the fish pond and the roses and the... it's amazing.

I twisted up the rose vines too.

Here's a picture of the blue side door and a giant magnolia tree that hugs overtop of the 12 foot wall.  Pusskins the handsome rangy cat who lives here went up on the top of the wall this morning while Conrad was showing me what to do with the black plastic and to plant an extra squash plant that he'd gotten from his brother's polytunnel and water the glasshouse and... so on. Berry cage weeding from yesterday only half done. 

Yarrow reminded me today while typing up his blog of the cool thing we did on Monday: we painted a stone wall "magnolia" colour (inside one of the upstairs converted-barn retreat rooms). This is not as easy as it may sound, but it was fascinating and fun. There were dozens of decades of dirt on it at first. Cobwebs too, and nooks and crannies in the rock and concrete and plaster, and crumbly bits too. A challenge, we might say.

Here's a photo I took on the walk to town yesterday, with the settings played with. There's so much scope for cool photo taking here.

On the way back from town, we took a wrong turn somewhere (there's a tricky bit where you have to duck through the forest) and ended up meandering back through the Lord of the Manor's childhood home (now his brother's farm).  It's also enormous, very enormous and stone and old, though it doesn't have a castle like this property does.                

We happened to bump into the brother, too, and he showed us how to get back to here from across the river. I took this neato photo of our bedroom from there. (It's the two white doors at the front there).

Megalithic architecture and County Cavan

We went to visit Brendan O'Brien in County Cavan up northwest of Dublin there and went to visit the megalithic site near his house. It's the biggest passage chamber (about 5,500 years old) that I've ever been in. It had one spider, which I discovered while I was inside one of the chambers. It had a central area and three small chambers with these carvings all around. Pretty neat.

Here it is from a distance.

There were a few other smaller stone circles and passages scattered around nearby. Here is one of them.

With Yarrow for scale, you can see they aren't that small...

And we had a lovely time visiting Brendan. I could write a lot about that trip... the slow internet has really been limiting the writing. We'll have to try to get on top of that better this week.

Creagh Castle

I see it's an entire 7 day week since I wrote, so it is (note the putting of extra words in the sentences, there, that's the Irish effect).

We are staying now at a WWOOFing place where there is a castle. As we were hanging about yesterday morning, they gave us the key to look inside. Look at the size of that key!

There's Yarrow holding the key out in the courtyard of the converted dairy where we are staying. The work boss and the lord of the manor play boules every Friday, starting in the courtyard and continuing on wherever they take the game. (When you play boules, you throw a white ball to serve as the goal post, then each person throws three balls each.) 

We went first up to the front door, but we realized our giant key didn't fit the (admittedly, also extra-large) lock. 

Then we went around to the side door, and the key worked, so we went in. 

Here's the view up from the door.

And when we went inside, we saw a great arched hall. To the left side, we saw this staircase, so we went up. 

This is the arched hall on the second floor. All three floors were almost identical, with enormous halls. The second floor also had two small rooms at the east side -- maybe the boss' bedroom? It was hard to tell. The rooms must have been beautiful once. We could see a few scraps of several thicknesses of painted plaster leftover. Really all it takes to glory up these places is lots of drywall mud, like we did with that old farmhouse we moved into and renovated back in the day.

As you can see here, it seems like there was also a balcony room above part of the hall, made of wood. There's just a closed off door now, and a ledge.

There was a giant fireplace with a bread oven in the side. I don't think that this castle had a separate kitchen, maybe they just cooked in the main hall. Maybe there was another kitchen outside the castle building? I don't have enough castle experience to know really. My photos here aren't great but with Yarrow standing in the fireplace, you get an idea of the size of it.

The back screen has a Bacchus on it, perhaps? I wasn't certain. There weren't any tourist guides around. :)

Here are some views from the top of the castle. The house below is the mansion that the boss lives in.

Leaning out a little (it was superscary up there so I did not lean as much as I needed to get a great shot) I caught the first courtyard, where our house is in, off to the left.  It's a converted dairy. There's another courtyard behind that (we're getting it ready to house 100 Buddhist monks). Then there is about a 2-acre walled garden with a ten or twelve foot wall around it beyond that, and the other worker house/kitchen.

Can't resist the spiral staircase shot on the way down. 

I wonder how many hands used this post for support on the way down too? Yarrow was marvelling that anyone could get down those in a long gown without tumbling head over heels. 

Here's a shot of the view from our accommodation. As you can see, it's very nice in the sun. 

A slightly less romantic fact about it is that it's very very cold, which is to be expected as it's an old dairy building. Of course it would have been designed to be cold, being the dairy. (Mind you almost all the buildings are cold inside around here it seems). 

In church and in the pubs, people tend to keep their coats and boots on all the time. I took my coat off in church this morning but that was just craziness. I guess the 40-minute walk up to town from the farm warmed me up. Anyway I put the coat back on so I did.

It's funny to see ladies up at the front doing the bible readings in a coat.  The organ player was a very nice man who actually never had lessons to learn how to play the organ or the piano. He played slow and people sang slow and kind of patchily but it was the old familiar sings and an organ filling up a church is a lovely thing isn't it.

We asked the lady behind us how old the church was and she said about 800 years, which we knew couldn't be right as Protestantism only came about with Henry VIII.  We later found out (Yarrow asked, and was given a paper typed up by someone) that the church dates from 1633.  We've had two people this week tell us something was "a thousand years old" when we asked when the thing in question couldn't possibly. I guess "a thousand" means "really" here. :) 

As my old landlord Clarence just told me, "sift through the blarney." :)

Anyway it was nice to go to church for the music though I like the United Church of Canada sermons, where they tie in current events and history lessons, much more than the Anglican one here that was just reciting and reading the exact same texts over and over again. 

Jumping topics again, just to be through: the other wwoofers at the place were: three Americans and a French guy. The French guy left and another French guy came. Conrad, the lord of the manor, told the new guy to meet him at an obscure little Thai ceremony in Cork, which is kind of funny. We went along to Cork for the amusement

I should be more complimentary and explanatory  about the Americans. One is a woman from North Carolina who we have enjoyed some gardening time and talk with. Her boyfriend is from Southern California and just got accepted (yesterday) into the mathematics PhD program he was hoping for. They're a neat couple. The other American is a sort of super-wwoofer named Max. He has long  clean blond hair (clean, nicely brushed, not dreadlocky). He carves wood and cooks and philosophizes and has opinions on lots of stuff. Even on bugs in ears, with experiential story (he did not actually ever have a bug in his ear, as it turned out, but he had the knowledge of how to get  rid of one by pouring water in your ear). 

The French guys both came to Ireland to work on their English. As you do. For that reason, we'll need to get back to France soon!

Update on our van situation: no update. We went and met her and put our stuff there, and have realized that really we will not be able to insure her. We have spent the week getting used to the idea of being backpackers or maybe even bikers. We'll see. Yarrow doesn't think his cat would be wild about the biking idea. We're not sure if we are either. Certainly not with Irish drivers on the road (who are worse than Italians). Maybe in France (but they're worse drivers than Italians too). 

Anyway, the trip is evolving and the trip is good.

It feels good to be on the road. 

As to the schooling, Yarrow's been doing well with doing his half hour of math a day, that's easy enough. He has been reading the chemistry book I found several years ago and saved for this year. And when we were working in the garden on Friday, he noticed a lot of botanical things. The kind of things about how plants grow and reproduce and deal with bugs that you'll never learn the same from a book.

We're eating lots of potatoes (there's toast and pasta too but we're trying to stay off the gluten a little). The lord of the manor also gets us the most delicious aged Irish cheddar, and lobster soup and fish soup and tapenade and aubergine sauce and just about everything you could want, really. 

topsls and turvls.

Now, to those of you who are efficient, you may be marvelling at the ridiculous inefficiencies of our journey.

I mean, who flies into Luxembourg to go to Ireland? And who buys a van in Ireland when they really want to be in France? I can see that it's all a bit daft, but that's how travel goes.

See, we bought the van because we fell in love with it after I'd read online that it's good to buy your campervan in the UK. Now, Ireland is NOT the UK. And it really never occurred to me that  it would be so incredibly nearly impossible to insure a van in Ireland, but I'm finding out that it may, actually, be nearly impossible. I mean, who came up with these daft plans?

Ah well, it's called following my heart, I suppose. Our hearts, since every decision has been discussed with Yarrow (don't tell Clara, but though we pretend to take her opinion into account and obey her as much as possible, actually, we didn't understand her opinion at all).

So now we have the epic experience of transporting 300 pounds of luggage including two cats from Canada to Germany to Luxembourg to Metz by plane plane bus and train within 24 hours, and then of hauling it across France as well -- without arguing. Yarrow's a dream to travel with, he really is. We've both determined that this is what we're going to do and so doing it is a proud strong happy thing to do.

And then we had lovely friendly help hauling it which was lovely lovely too. When you get to practice your French and being a traveller in a place you want to be in, everything feels really, really good. Like today I was walking back from the ferry to the hotel to return the key we forgot to give back, and some people asked me where they could buy bread, and having spent a couple of days in town, I could tell them. In French. :) Which felt nice. I think they must have sailed in on a boat and were looking for some nosh.

It's just so nice to interact with people.

And it's so nice to see people parenting WELL. Dignified little kids out in pubs or dinner, with the adults, expected to behave like adults. Just like I raised Yarrow, but which is so rare in Canada. And nicely raised dogs too, mostly.

I just loved watching the people and being in France. Loved it.

Having said we're cheerful lugging the luggage... backtracking with said ridiculous amount of luggage would be less fun. I sure hope that Yarrow's optimism pans out and we find a way to insure Gigi. Anyway, tomorrow we're renting a car to take the ridiculous luggage to the van and find out the state of her. Maybe the man who's storing her will know some insurance miracles, or the nice wwoofing man who said that he would be willing to help. I talked to an Irish dad on the way over who said his son went off to Australia for 3 years and is now having a miserable time getting insurance himself, and that one possibility would have been for the dad to own the van and name the son as a driver. So maybe some solution like that will work out. We shall see so we shall.

After renting the car, the first thing will be to get a better potty accommodation for the cats, who have gone on strike against the some-litter-on-pee-pad arrangement. This is a bit of a serious worry actually. Their poor wee bladders must hurt by now.

The second thing will be to try to get an Irish SIM card for the telephone. And the third thing is to go see Gigi and pay the man who has been storing her for us.

FOOD:
It needs to be said, eating in France was heaven really it was. I was rather incredulous at the pictorial menu when I boarded the ship, showing meat pies and synthetic-looking jellies. Just yesterday we were restraining ourselves from buying too many delicious provencal sausages and fruits confits (Because there's only so much one can eat, even when it's French food, as we have learned in the past when we bought too much food at a market.)

The ladies at the cafeteria gave Yarrow his pork chop dinner at kids' price of 7 Euros. He came back saying it was quite good but was incredulous that they ACTUALLY had mushy peas, and not by mistake but on purpose they had made the peas mushy and neon green. I told him I loved mushy peas (perhaps exaggerating) and saying he ought to have tried them, but, really, French food heaven is officially over as I've eaten the little pack of stinky cheese with baguette and rose wine.

oh -- just before we left the Ambassadeur Hotel in Cherbourg, I had some Normandie... um, something. With apples and calvados. I had asked the friendly hotel woman what the red aperitif was that I saw so many people drinking last night, she suggested maybe raspberry syrup in cider. Ick, sounded too sucre, but knowing the French it probably tastes great. Anyway, the apple stuff with Calvados, regional Normandy specialty, was splendid.

And. French food heaven officially over for now.

French delights

Yesterday I said that we had a goal of heading to the gaufres Liegeois... which we did, first thing in the late morning (we stayed up late last night and slept in like crazy this morning. I felt guilty and unvirtuous for not demonstrating to Yarrow that we could beat jet lag by adhering closer to schedule, but then I thought, hey, we just crossed France by train with all that luggage. We're tired. Why not sleep?)
Anyway then we went streight to the Bonne Liegeois. Verdict? It ain't Jean Galler.

Jean Galler is the waffles you want to have. And the chocolate you want to have. It's in Belgium. And they make waffles with chocolate inside that are To Die For wonderful. I mean maybe not worth death, but really, really, really good.

The ones here in Cherbourg were not that good. I've just been discussing this disappointment with Anne-Christine, my friend from Liege, and she said she has just stopped trying to have "Belgian waffles" outside of Belgium because people just don't get it.

Good advice. After this morning, we will know better. :) No more Jean Galler waffles unless we are actually in Liege.

Anne-Christine says she'll go take one for the team and have a Galler waffle this week so we can show you. Update forthcoming.

So anyway, the not-amazing waffle (mind you, it was still good, just not AMAZING) was the worst experience of today. Pretty good day, eh?

Big Omission here: we found a lovely, lovely bar last night, which we didn't go into until today. We went twice today. It's the kind of cafe you make home. Warm yellow walls and plaid carpet and plush red booths and a wooden bar and history all over the place... I'll try to get some photos of it in the morning.

After the waffles, we went to the Thomas Henry museum. This was awesome. This dude Thomas Henry was a painter, but when he went up to Paris to paint, he also became an art dealer. And he made a fortune, and he donated a whole whack of paintings to his home town, Cherbourg. It was only 5 Euros for me to get in, and free for the kid.

The museum is divided to educate people on Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and French painters. It was great. 

They had a nice bathroom sign. More French humour: Yarrow noticed the garbage cans in the mall were marked with dead fish. :)

Here we have a fine example of a legendary female assassin. Details below. Her method looks pretty effective, eh?

Here's another mighty girl for you. She looks sweet, doesn't she?

Don't you wish fashions were still like this? I do, sometimes. I mean, why not?

Crazy stuff men used to do because they could get away with it.

Yes, that's right. That's them, on the yard arms (or whatever you call those cross-pieces on the masts).

There are a few girls in that shot, too. 

This was my favourite girl statue in the museum. Of alabaster, I'd guess. Girl wearing clothes and reading a book. Well, she's not reading it, she's holding it. Still lovely.

And then, some other around-towning happened...

Seriously huge chunks of steaks at Carrefour. About 10 bucks each. Cheaper than home for sure.

I have a new appreciation for slate roofs after watching the water gush off them. For some reason I've really been noticing the slate in this town. Verdict on Cherbourg: I love it somehow. I just love France, et c'est ca.

This was dinner, steak and ratatouille for Yarrow, and sausages and potatoes for me, starting with escargot and ending with something called an Incroyable Merveilleux, which did not look impressive when it came, but did, indeed, taste impressive and marvellous. noisette cream covered by good chocolate, over a meringue. Yum.

And back to the hotel room for some time with cats and to write one blog.