Tag: travel

California dreaming…

~ Meg ~ 3 Comments

This is a shot of one of the redwoods in the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park. Look at that tree, for crying out loud!   Last September, we spent a wonderful ten days in the Bay Area of California.   You know how people will say “Oh I’d love to visit, but I’d never want to live there,” when you tell them about your travels?  My mother is like that.  She was sure that the entire time we were in California, the ground would be shaking beneath our feet.  She would never dream of living somewhere like that.  But man, now that I’ve been there, I totally get it.

We stayed with friends that live about an hour outside San Fransisco and they kindly toured us all over the place.  We saw the city, we went to Monterey and Carmel, had an afternoon in Napa, and spent a couple days in Yosemite.  Can you imagine having all of that within a couple hours drive of home?  I’d be happy for one thing like that, near Philadelphia.  So, yeah, it’s pretty safe where I live.  We don’t get devastating floods or forest fires, tornadoes or earthquakes.  We might lose power during a snowstorm in the winter but that’s usually just inconvenient.  But the closest coast line is the Jersey Shore and the highest mountains on the East Coast are only around 6,000 feet so…well, meh.  So I get it, Californians, I get it.

Fairy trees

~ Meg ~ 4 Comments

I’m in Ireland this week. My husband is here for work and I tagged along. Now this is actually my third time here in the area of Galway so I’ve come to feel pretty comfortable here. I can even give people directions if it’s to one of the major sights. I’ve heard many a fairy tale in three trips and I heard a story yesterday that I just had to share.

The Irish believe in fairies and fairy trees. A fairy tree is a hawthorn tree, of which there are two varieties: white or flowering hawthorns, and black, which do not flower. To determine if a hawthorn tree is a fairy tree, you must break off a branch and strip away the bark. If there is a pink stripe along the grain of wood, then it is a fairy tree. If it is, beware! Do no harm to the tree! However, legend has it that if you are ill, you can ask the fairy tree to heal your sickness and tie a bit of your clothing to the tree. By the time the cloth has disintegrated on the tree, your illness will have disappeared. (I imagine this would be waste of time for something minor like a cold!)

The story goes like this. The Irish highway department was recently building a new motorway from Dublin to Galway and as they were digging the road bed, they came across a hawthorn tree. Every time the bulldozing machine got near to the tree, the motor would conk out. They brought in the mechanic and he could find nothing wrong. Nevertheless they did some maintenance to the machine, filled it with petrol and oil, changed the battery, and so forth. Once again they started to dig in the area of the tree and once again it conked out. This happened over and over until finally they brought in a whole new machine from a different part of the road project. What do you think happened? Yep, the machine conked out!

The next step was to cut the tree down, so they brought in a man with a chainsaw to cut the tree down but as soon as he put the saw to the tree, the chain broke. The same thing happened with a second saw. Finally, they tried using hand saws to cut down the tree but when the men got close to the tree with their saws, they were thrown back from the tree! So if you’re traveling from Galway back to Dublin, you’ll find a slight right bend in the road. And if you look to the left of the road, you’ll see the fairy tree. That’s right, they moved the whole motorway around the fairy tree! Only in Ireland!